Film directors would sign because one of their films would go down in history, because it would be part of the popular imagination, because some of its scenes would be remembered forever. When one observes the filmography of David Lynch, who died this Thursday at the age of 78, one realizes that most of his films are an indelible part of the history of cinema. All of them contain at least one scene, a sequence that sticks, that feeds the viewer’s nightmares, that returns to their memory constantly.
It is difficult to choose the best films to remember a genius like him. Perhaps all of them should be recommended, because even the failed ones like Dune either inland empire They have flashes of genius, outbursts of indescribable madness in times of academic and stuffy cinema. Here the best films of an unforgettable and indescribable filmmaker.
‘Eraserhead’ (1977)
Few debuts are so captivating. In eraser head There is already much of the Lynchian universe that would later become popular. With a very low budget, the filmmaker used suffocating black and white to tell the mental degradation of a protagonist in charge of caring for a strange baby that has little to do with the angelic image that cinema showed of newborns. Lynch already showed many of the stylistic and thematic signs that would populate his stories, such as his taste for surrealism and what is normally noted as strange.
‘The Elephant Man’ (1980)
Of the mutant baby eraser head to the man with a malformation that turns him into a monster in the eyes of others in the moving The elephant man. One of his most emotional films and also one of the most conventional on a formal level. It is incredible that a director who had been praised, mainly, for the dreamlike aspect of his first work, changes register in such a radical way with a second work. It was his first nomination for the Oscar for Best Director and the only time that one of his films was up for the Academy Award for Best Film of the Year, which he lost to Ordinary people.
‘Blue Velvet’ (1986)
Can a movie destroy the idyllic image of the American dream in just one scene? Yes, David Lynch did it at the beginning of blue velvet, another of his incontestable masterpieces. A beginning that is cinema history. with the song blue velvet, performed by Bobby Vinton, shows the dream images of the typical US housing complex. Some red roses, some children crossing the street, a man watering… but soon something stops working. The man who waters falls dead, causing a kind of sinister version of one of the founding images of cinema, The Watered Irrigator. The camera enters the earth and shows insects to cut and present the character of Kyle MacLachlan – one of his fetish actors – before finding the mutilated ear full of ants that begins an unforgettable film.
‘A True Story’ (1999)
Behind his sinister imagery, David Lynch hid a tenderness that made him a director who aroused sympathy even among his detractors. Always kind, always ironic. That tenderness also appeared from time to time in one of his films, and it was in those that even the critics who had destroyed him with his most surreal bets surrendered at his feet. It happened with A true storyhis most austere film, which draws on classicism to offer an emotional and intelligent film that manages to penetrate without anyone putting their finger in its eye. Its protagonist, Richard Farnsworth, who plays a man who travels 500 kilometers on a lawnmower to visit his sick brother, was nominated for an Oscar, but not even with his most ‘conventional’ film did Lynch achieve the blessings of the Academy.
‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)
Yes in Blue Velvet Lynch destroyed the American dream, in Mulholland Drive He carried out the same operation with Hollywood, the industry that somehow invented him. Mulholland Drive It is many things. An indecipherable mystery, a game of masks and identities, a portrait of a city… but also a merciless look at an industry that does not believe in art and only in profit. A masterpiece that has managed to enter in a short time on all the lists of the best films in history (it is in eighth place in the last one made by Sight & Sound) and that left moments like the one at the Silencio club, a product of the imagination of a wonderful and unmatched mind.
‘Twin Peaks’
It is not a movie (although it was also in that film that expanded the universe of the series, Fire walks with me (1992), but perhaps Twin Peaks It is the work for which many will remember David Lynch. The series he created with Mark Frost revolutionized television, showed that filmmakers could offer a lot to the audiovisual world from any format before the platform boom, and created a mystery to remember, that of who murdered Laura Palmer. But if anyone thought Lynch would make a whodunit to use to think again. There was Bob, the lady with the log, and a series of characters that could only come out of his mind. A nightmarish and unique series that returned with a tremendous season in 2017. The chords that Angelo Badalamenti composed will always accompany us.
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