It has been a week since David Lynch passed away, and many great tributes have already been written about him. I’m tempted to say that I needed a week to process his passing and figure out what I wanted to say about him, but the truth is I was just too damned busy to write anything. In fact, I knew instantly what I wanted to say—simply, that Lynch was a very important person in my life, and in the lives of many of my friends.
I was a college English major in 1986 when Blue Velvet came out, and it hit me and my circle of arty friends like an atomic blast. I already knew of Lynch’s work (I was one of the few kids to see The Elephant Man, and in an actual movie theater, no less), and I knew that he was a director of enormous visual and thematic power. But even I was unprepared for Blue Velvet. On the one hand, it’s a murder mystery, an homage to the noir films of the 1950s in which an unsuspecting suburban kid discovers a hidden world of violence, evil, and, (of course) depraved sexuality. On the other hand, it’s a surrealist vision of the inner world of a modern young man (and, probably, many young women). I was roughly the same age as the main character, Jeffrey Beaumont, in 1986, and so the film had special resonance. I felt like the landscape of my own imagination was a strange blend of the beautiful and the grotesque—often in the same image. And that’s exactly what the film captures, somehow.
Continue reading “R.I.P. David Lynch”
Ash Clifton, Writer 