Film director David Lynch, author of masterpieces such as 'Blue Velvet' and 'Twin Peaks', dies
David Lynch, one of the most important and influential film directors of recent decades as Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet either Twin Peaks He has died at the age of 78, as reported by the author's family on his official Facebook page. “It is with deep sadness that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and artist David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There is a big hole in the world now that he is no longer with us. But, as he said, 'Keep your eyes on the donut and not the hole. It is a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way,'” the brief statement says.
Last year, Lynch had publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema, a chronic lung disease that causes shortness of breath and that he had to rest, although he quickly took it upon himself to ensure that he would never retire. Ironically, the news of his illness came after many rumors that he had secretly filmed a film that was going to be presented at the 2022 Cannes festival and which was proven to be just an internet hoax validated by US media such as Variety.
In addition to several videos and his viral weather predictions on social networks, Lynch had not been in the director's chair since 2017, when he returned to one of his most legendary creations, Twin Peaksto film a final season that once again blew the minds of all viewers like the first in 1990 – the same year that he would win the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Corazón Salvaje -, whose promotional phrase, “Who murdered Laura Palmer? ” and the strains of Angelo Badalamenti's music soon permeated the audience.
Lynch revolutionized television with a series that was ahead of its time and where he mixed all the elements of an imaginary that had already been developed in a masterpiece like Blue Velvetone of the most influential in recent cinema, whose opening scene and several of its images have remained in the retina and nightmare of viewers ever since. Lynch was one of those directors who become adjectives and whose mix of surrealism, film noir and horror coined a term like Lynchian and made his work one of the most influential for auteur cinema around the world.
After learning of his death, many filmmakers have published their messages of remembrance to David Lynch. James Gunn, Steven Soderbergh, Harmoni Korine… among all of them, Steven Spielberg has stood out, who gave him the role of John Ford in The Fablemans, his last appearance in a film. “I loved David's films. Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and The Elephant Man They defined him as a singular and visionary dreamer who directed films that seemed made by hand. I met David when he played John Ford in The Fabelmans (2022). There was one of my heroes, David Lynch playing one of my heroes. It was surreal and looked like a scene from one of David's own movies. The world will miss such an original and unique voice. “His films have already stood the test of time and always will,” he said in a statement to Variety.
Many paired his work with that of the other master of surrealism, the Spanish Luis Buñuel, but Lynch was in charge of denying it. In 2013, at a meeting with students in Madrid, the director was asked about it and he assured that he had never seen any Spanish film and that his main influence was in his roots and was called Philadelphia, the city where he studied art in the 70s. “”It was ugly, dirty, dangerous, unpleasant, dark. So terrible that I ended up liking it a lot, with an architecture, some spaces and a way of being, a tone, that still intrigues me,” he said then. Who knows if he was lying, if it was a joke, or if perhaps it was true and simply the universe for both geniuses was, in some way, shared without them knowing it.
Despite this, Lynch showed that he was also an impeccable and unbeatable filmmaker when he strayed from 'his style'. His second film after Eraser Head (1977) was The elephant man (1980), with Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt and Anne Bancroft, and which showed another more sober but equally superb Lynch. Something that was demonstrated again decades later in the exciting A true story (1999), directed just two years after lost road and in which Lynch showed exemplary sensitivity, austerity and classicism to tell the story of an old man (Richard Farnsworth), who travels 500 kilometers to visit his brother who has suffered a heart attack and with whom he has not spoken for a decade .
Despite a career full of brilliant and unforgettable titles, David Lynch never won the Oscar for one of his films, and had to wait until 2020 to receive the Hollywood Academy Award honorably. It is not surprising, since his cinema was more linked to European authors and far from the academic cinema that the Oscars have awarded almost continuously and which is the opposite of a director whose films acted like Buñuel's razor, cutting the eye of the beholder An Andalusian dog.
Yes, he was quickly loved and desired by the Cannes Festival and all the author competitions. At La Croisette he not only won a Palme d'Or, but also won the Best Director award for Mulholland Drive (2002), the last time he also competed for the Oscar for Best Director. Mulholland Drive once again managed to position itself as one of the films that become part of the history of cinema, and it has done so in just two decades. In the latest survey carried out by the prestigious magazine Sight & Sound, published by the British Film Institute, Mulholland Drive (2001) was ranked eighth among the best films in the history of cinema, and was also the most recent in the top ten. Lynch was also one of the few directors with two titles on the list, as he ranked 85th. Blue Velvet.
Not all were successes, but even in his failures he made history. There is his bombastic and golden adaptation of Dune in 1985. Long before Denis Villeneuve reached the top with his adaptation of Fank Herbert's novel, Lynch was receiving what have been the worst reviews of his career. After the success of his first two films, Lynch agreed to adapt one of those novels that many described as unadaptable. The filmmaker experienced firsthand the dictatorship of the big producers, and his confrontation with Dino de Laurentiis ended up resulting in a film that, despite its visual brilliance, feels like an incomplete film. It was impossible to adapt Herbert's novel in such a short time, and Lynch had one of those fiascos that remains to be remembered.
His films often polarized critics, and yet no one could get them out of their memories. Their scenes have populated our nightmares, they have fed our fears and they have opened horizons in a cinema almost always made with square and bevel. Now, as one of his characters said in one of the most powerful scenes of Mulholland Drive You can only do one thing, remain silent: “Silence, silence, silence: there is no band, there is no orchestra. Silence, silence, silence: everything is recorded. Silence”.
