ybvdadminuser(RNS) — In a 2007 BAFTA interview, David Lynch said that “Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual film.”
“Elaborate on that,” prompted his interviewer.
“No.”
I wish he had. I’ve sifted through “Eraserhead” and have found about as much spiritual content there as in any of Lynch’s other work, which is to say: quite a bit.
Lynch, who died on Thursday (Jan. 16) at the age of 78, was creatively fearless when it came to exploring the world beyond our physical senses. His towering body of work has a logic all to its own, one that is not material or even necessarily legible, but is always comprehensible in some distant, undefinable location in our souls.
He was born to a Presbyterian family in Montana and got his start in animation and painting. That “most spiritual film” would be his debut feature, a dark and uncomfortable slice of black comedy that spread like wildfire in the midnight movie circuit. From there he went to the far more conventionally appealing “Elephant Man,” which earned the sort of box office success and Oscar attention that affords a blank check for future projects. He passed on George Lucas’ offer to helm “Return of the Jedi” and opted instead to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” for the screen. That would be a famous disaster and also, in my opinion, the best thing that could have happened to his career.
Having gotten a taste of blockbuster cinema and thoroughly hated it, Lynch returned to the surreal, uncompromising style of filmmaking he’d cut his teeth on, and never left. He churned out “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” honing the dream logic, psychological undertones and oft-imitated but never duplicated idiosyncratic artistry that would come to define his style for four decades. And then came “Twin Peaks.”
The lazy analysis of “Twin Peaks” is that every small American town, no matter how quaint and idyllic on the outside, has evil lurking under the facade. Laura Palmer is simply the unflinching autopsy of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and Lynch is a cynic who wanted to air out the rot at the heart of the American dream. This is what many Lynch-obsessed filmmakers took from “Twin Peaks” in their own inferior pastiches. It’s far too simple a read.
Lynch was, at his core, a deeply moral artist. He saw good and evil as stark, clearly demarcated things. What fascinated him was not that good things could be secretly bad, but that good and bad could coexist in the same person, the same place. In “Twin Peaks,” good and evil are both cosmic entities we can scarcely understand and twin forces working within us. The secret of Laura Palmer is not that she seemed like a good person but was actually a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. It’s that she is both a good person and a very damaged victim of unspeakable wickedness. The secret of Albert Rosenfield is not that he seems like a rude guy who is actually a very noble guy, but that he is both very rude and heartrendingly noble. And the secret of Twin Peaks at large is not that it seemed like a good town but that it is a good town — and also a bad one. The same is true of so many places; so many of us.
Those of us who’ve spent any amount of time in almost any religious institution will find the questions Lynch spent his career asking very, very familiar.
And Lynch approached all this with almost childlike naiveté, using his television and films to interrogate the very open question of where the lines between good and evil lie. His boundless imagination gave him the freedom to go places where few would dare, utilizing his dreamy aesthetic to chart the strangest corners of the human experience.
“We think we understand the rules when we’re adults,” he would say in the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life.” “But what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” Lynch refused to understand the rules and that gave his work an unmatched sincerity.
This sincerity fortified him, even when his work would stare into the perverse, the appalling and the mortifying. Lynch’s work could be terrifying, salacious and often transgressive, but it was never malicious. His moral compass was on straight no matter how ugly his subject. “Fire Walk With Me,” the “Twin Peaks” cinematic sequel that premiered to boos but has since enjoyed a well deserved critical reappraisal, is as horrifying a descent into hell as I’ve ever seen in a movie, but at no point does it lose its way in the darkness. Throughout its formidable run time and daunting subject matter, Lynch leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to redemption for victims, their victimizers and viewers as well.
So, spiritually, Lynch was often doing long algebra on screen and, like long algebra, the whole thing could look like gibberish. But to watch a Lynch movie is to feel the truth of it in your guts, to recognize the melodies if not the exact lyrics. He created from the truest part of himself and, in that creation, found something universal.
As he got older, he got more confident that some of his questions had answers. In “The Return,” his “Twin Peaks” finale, which now stands as his final creative work, Lynch himself plays FBI Director Gordon Cole, who sits down with Denise Bryson, his chief of staff who is transgender (played by David Duchovny). Bryson has experienced some transphobia at the hands of her FBI co-workers, and Lynch savors the knowledge of letting her know that he’d put them in their place.
“When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” Cole says. You have to say it out loud to get the impact of that sentence, but hearing Lynch deliver it is the only way to really savor its poetry, its rhythm and its moral force.
“Fix your hearts or die” is the sort of thing you want to scream at any number of politicians, billionaires and public figures, but if you don’t want to scream it at yourself first, you’ve missed the point.
And if that’s not spiritual, what is?
(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
