RIP
David Lynch has died at 78. Looking at his obituaries reminds me that for a while his works were highly popular and widely discussed, particularly Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. I most definitely watched both, but remember little of either except a vague sense of unease.
Then there’s Bob Uecker, who has died at the age of 90:
Bob Uecker, who parlayed six laughable seasons as a light-hitting catcher into a second career in comedy highlighted by hilarious turns in the Major League movies, on The Tonight Show and in beer commercials, died Thursday. He was 90.
A member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Uecker was a popular play-by-play man for his hometown Milwaukee Brewers since 1971, and it was the team that announced his death.
RIP.
I can assure you that David Lynch still has a great many very enthusiastic fans.
I didn’t see any of his work until about twenty years ago, but Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive affected me profoundly. Others were much less impressive. I think his many fans tend to be divided about which films and tv shows were his best.
Wait, I take that back: I watched part of Blue Velvet some 30+ years ago. Bailed out partway through because it was creeping me out. I should probably try it again.
Here’s something I wrote a while back which attempts to describe one aspect of the mysterious allure of some of his work:
‘Some of David Lynch’s work has a quality which I’ve described as “bent nostalgia” and which I suspect is most powerful for people of a certain age–people who can remember the America that existed between the end of the Second World War and the revolutions of the late ’60s, and the pop culture of that time. It must be available to younger people, too, in some fashion, because some do seem to get it. It references certain visual and musical motifs of the time, but gives them an odd, dreamy, and sometimes sinister twist. The heavily reverb-ed guitar in the Twin Peaks theme is a good example: it sounds like Duane Eddy on opium.’
Most folk who imagine things, imagine such things I think I could imagine. Like dancing hippos in tutus as ballerinas. It can be fun, or even creepy like many horror movies.
Lynch thought of things, like in Eraserhead, that I can’t imagine I would ever imagine. He did that frequently.
I recall watching Twin Peaks, and having friends videotape every episode. At the end of the season, we had an all day binge watching party of seeing all the episodes. Perhaps the first really popular TV binge watching party Thing, among those who were into it, tho Star Trek marathons were already happening, years after the show stopped. The Log Lady is a character I would never have come up with, yet wasn’t at all important.
If you have Netflix, check out, “What Did Jack Do?” A brilliantly quirky movie short by Lynch – I think about 17 minutes. I thought I’d be able to find it and post it here, but can’t seem to make it happen.
I loved David Lynch’s film work. Though I couldn’t get past the first 40 min. of Inland Empire. Now I’ll be motivated to try that one again. I had been avoiding Eraserhead for decades (a creepy baby was too creepy for me), but I watched it for the first time about 8 months ago. I liked it, in spite of my expectations being too high.
I’ve seen Wild At Heart a few times. It was sufficiently “wild” cinematically that I always assumed Lynch wrote it. But no, it was adapted from a book. And if you think his films are always insanely bizarre and confusing, he also directed The Straight Story and The Elephant Man. Very conventional story telling. Though he didn’t write either one.
I think Mulholland Dr. is his masterpiece. The only film I’ve ever been slightly obsessed about. You see, it’s a puzzle. When you buy the DVD it comes with a list of ten leading questions/clues to help you decipher the meaning or reality of the unreal film.
While I think I have deciphered Mulholland, I believe that Twin Peaks also has a real world underpinning, but I haven’t quite got that one. If you want to spend a large amount of time on a wild trip, try watching all three seasons of Twin Peaks, including the one that came out in 2017, as a contiguous series. You could also watch the movie Fire Walk With Me in between season 2 and 3, but that may actually add to the confusion, rather than help. Lynch claims he was unhappy with season 2, as a variety of writers and directors filled in for him.
Twin Peaks season 3 is truly wild as Showtime gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased.
Brian DePalma has said that in the earlier part of his career, he marveled that Alfred Hitchcock has this stupendously great body of work, and really re-defined the art of filmmaking tremendously, and then… All these other good or great filmmakers came along and did their thing as though Hitchcock had never existed. So DePalma decided he was going to build on Hitchcock’s legacy.
I have a feeling NOBODY will even try to build on Lynch’s legacy.
Blue Velvet is in my top twenty. Eraserhead is the worst film I’ve ever paid to see. That’s quite a spread.
Re: Lynch / “bent nostalgia”
Mac:
I quite agree. “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” are soaked with bent nostalgia. I can feel a lot of old 40s/50s B&Ws in Lynch’s work.
For instance the bobby-soxer swing dance intro to “Mulholland Drive” is brilliant and beautiful.
–“MULHOLLAND DRIVE The First Dance”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl7Ji5aMcQg
Eraserhead was his first. He spent a huge amount of time making it on a tiny budget. Yeah, it’s interesting to me, but I wasn’t blown away by it. I’ve paid to see films that were much worse, but that’s because I was watching some dreadful student films. 😉
I have never seen anything by David Lynch, nor have I any desire to do so. But I will grieve the death of Bob Uecker.
huxley: clearly I need to see Mulholland again.
If you don’t know the Julee Cruise/David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti musical collaboration Floating Into the Night, seek it out. A lot of it is music from Twin Peaks and a strong example of the bent nostalgia thing.
I had forgotten about Eraserhead when I posted earlier. I’ve never seen it, in spite of my love of Lynch, because other people’s reactions have made me think it’s just too creepy for me. I know a woman who saw it when she was twenty or so and it made her decide quite seriously that she would never have children. She did eventually change her mind.
A David Lynch quote:
I can assure you that David Lynch still has a great many very enthusiastic fans. — Mac
Mac is correct that there are millions of Lynch fans and that they are very enthusiastic. But I think percentage wise, it’s not that big of a group.
The above Lynch quote explains things a bit. While his films made some money, they’re not really mass market films. In addition to the frequent desire by filmmakers to make a ton of money with a film there is also the strong motivation to not lose money. Either of those will generally prevent filmmakers from following in Lynch’s footsteps.
I remember watching _Twin Peaks_ first season back in the day, and being mesmerized, more or less, fascinated by the weird characters, the subtly ‘off’ setting, and the unfolding mystery of Laura Palmer. At the time I was in my early 20s, and when I saw that it had been renewed for a second season, I was excited.
The second season was a disappointment on multiple levels.
Part of the reason, looking back, was _me_ . At about that time, my attitude about TV was changing. During that period of a year or two, starting around the time TP first season ended, I found myself less and less interested in TV shows that I had formerly enjoyed, not just TP but many of them, of many genres and natures. It was not a conscious decision, not a philosophical or ideological thing, it was just that I found myself less and less interested. Shows I had formerly looked forward to I sometimes began to see as a duty or a nuisance on the night they were on.
As I said, it was partly _me_ that was changing. But at the same time, looking back now, I understand what went wrong with TP, too. Lynch had _no idea_ what it all meant. In the first season, there was an unfolding story. Lynch knew more or less who Laura Palmer was and what had happened to her, including the supernatural element. So the story was _there_ . It unfolded, the reveals made some kind of sense.
But in the second season, Lynch was making it all up as he went along. I didn’t fully recognize that at the time, but I knew something was fundamentally missing that had been present in S1.
The same thing, incidentally, eventually undercut my interest in the old X-files show, which I initially enjoyed. Looking back, it’s obvious that Chris Carter was making up the Conspiracy as he went along, and after a while that showed through and the show became pointless.
These days, ‘mystery box’ storytelling has a bad reputation, esp. because of JJ Abrams. It can be a legitimate and effective narrative device, though. The thing about it is that the _storyteller_ has to know what’s in the mystery boxes that he or she is teasing the audience/reader with. Too often they don’t, and when they don’t the result is unhappy.
I watched most of the documentary film on David Lynch wondering when the were going to get to his Talking Heads years. Wrong David. Lynch’s stuff seemed fresh and new at the time. I wonder how much of it now isn’t just going to be filed under “surrealism.”
The “solution” to “Mulholland Drive” (or maybe it was “Inland Empire”) is that there is no “solution.” Or at least that’s how I remember it. People who’d figured out what was going on in “Memento” applied their reasoning abilities to Lynch’s film and had to give up.
Bob Uecker’s career really began to take off when he left his main career field and started appearing on talk shows — similar to what happened with some novelists back then.