David Lynch, American filmmaker, 1946-2025

{"text":[[{"start":10.92,"text":"David Lynch, the American filmmaker who created an unnerving vision of the world and plumbed the fears and desires in his country’s unconscious, has died at 78. "},{"start":19.686999999999998,"text":"His death was announced by his family on social media, with no cause given; Lynch had been diagnosed with emphysema in 2020 and last year spoke publicly of being effectively housebound. "}],[{"start":30.490000000000002,"text":"Lynch belongs to the pantheon of artists whose name defines not just a style but a worldview. "},{"start":35.532000000000004,"text":"The enveloping images and sounds of his work — especially Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001) and the TV series Twin Peaks (1990) — breathe with the odd, the unseemly, the freakish and the savage, all lurking on the flipside of daily life. "},{"start":54.087,"text":"Here was a beaming devotee of both Bob’s Big Boy milkshakes and Francis Bacon. "}],[{"start":59.010000000000005,"text":"He was born on January 20 1946 in Missoula, Montana, to a research scientist for the US Department of Agriculture and an English teacher. "},{"start":67.51400000000001,"text":"His upbringing has the glow of cosy Americana: a high-ranking member of the Boy Scouts of America, he watched his father troop out to work wearing a grey-green 10-gallon hat. "},{"start":76.744,"text":"After some years in Spokane, Washington, the family resettled in the east, where Lynch embraced painting after meeting a friend’s father, a full-time artist. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":86.33000000000001,"text":"Lynch’s beginnings in the visual arts nurtured his later tendencies towards textured, vivid cinema that gets under your skin. "},{"start":93.034,"text":"He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and — as he would with other places he lived — later channelled the urban decay of Philadelphia into the shadowy postindustrial demimonde of Eraserhead. "},{"start":104.17700000000002,"text":"Moving images drew him in next; his early short film Six Men Getting Sick (1967) was an animated painting. "}],[{"start":112.35000000000001,"text":"He developed Eraserhead at the American Film Institute, where he was part of the directing class of 1970. "},{"start":118.492,"text":"Shooting the story of a stricken-looking loner who fathers a birdlike baby took four years, with Lynch sometimes sleeping on set. "},{"start":125.159,"text":"An outlier alongside modish 1970s New Hollywood, his fully formed vision was surreal and grotesque, an extreme close-up of the surfaces and moods in an angst-ridden postwar home. "},{"start":135.252,"text":"Opening in downtown Manhattan in 1977, it became a midnight-movie hit. "}],[{"start":141.11,"text":"A Hollywood producer caught a screening and, improbably, connected Lynch with a project and a backer: The Elephant Man, its unlikely executive producer comedy legend Mel Brooks, who compared Lynch’s work to Beckett and Ionesco. "},{"start":153.377,"text":"Starring John Hurt as John Merrick, the 1980 film earned Lynch an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. "},{"start":159.644,"text":"Dune, starring little-known Kyle MacLachlan, followed in 1984, thoroughly disappointing the director creatively. "},{"start":166.58700000000002,"text":"As Lynch said of its producer, Dino De Laurentiis: “When Dino and I first talked, he had not seen Eraserhead, so there were a lot of things in my head that he didn’t know about. "},{"start":175.767,"text":"When he finally saw the film, in fact, he hated it. ”"}],[{"start":180.21,"text":"In short order Lynch poured his mind into what became his defining work for many years. "},{"start":185.014,"text":"Blue Velvet depicted picket-fence Reagan-era suburbia as home to kitschy songbirds and a nitrous-huffing sadist (Dennis Hopper) who torments a nightclub chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini). "},{"start":195.244,"text":"MacLachlan stars as a young man who plays detective, opposite Laura Dern. "},{"start":199.74900000000002,"text":"Four years later, in Twin Peaks, Lynch cast him as an FBI agent investigating the murder of Laura Palmer. "},{"start":206.017,"text":"The show became a phenomenon, challenging the homogeneity of TV with new depths of the weird and inexplicable. "}],[{"start":212.95000000000002,"text":"“It’s all about seeing that underside,” Frederick Elmes, Lynch’s cinematographer on Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, said about Lynch’s interests, in an interview last year. "},{"start":222.104,"text":"That view continued with the split-personality fugue of Lost Highway (1997), a warm-up for the Los Angeles phantasmagoria of Mulholland Drive (2001). "},{"start":231.93400000000003,"text":"Originally developed for TV, the latter is widely regarded as Lynch’s masterpiece, launching another little-known actor, Naomi Watts, as an ingénue falling down a Hollywood rabbit hole. "},{"start":242.32700000000003,"text":"In a social media post yesterday, Watts wrote: “Every moment together felt charged with a presence I’ve rarely seen or known. "},{"start":249.23200000000003,"text":"Probably because, yes, he seemed to live in an altered world. ”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":254.02,"text":"Lynch also directed a sweet sunset idyll, The Straight Story (1999), and a torturous trip through the digital looking-glass, Inland Empire (2006), along with one-off TV and music projects. "},{"start":266.29900000000004,"text":"Meanwhile he adhered to and stumped for a regular transcendental meditation practice and returned to his roots in painting. "},{"start":272.229,"text":"But the director achieved one more moving-image pinnacle with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a darkly gorgeous, cracked meditation on an American atomic-era legacy of dread and death. "}],[{"start":283.79,"text":"He continued to attract new generations of fans though his gee-whiz persona, oddball integrity and deadpan humour. "},{"start":290.194,"text":"But his genuineness was the real thing, as was his incongruously twisted art, peering into the darkness and light in the American soul. "},{"start":297.124,"text":"He was married four times and is survived by four children. "}],[{"start":300.41,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftmailbox.cn/album/189080-1737181373.mp3"}