David Lynch remains the long-reigning king of the American bizarre. Nothing needs be said to introduce the man’s work: His name is really a genre unto itself, immediately conjuring up those unhinged, paranoid, disturbingly beautiful fever-scapes so peculiar to him.
Besides the unprecedented employment of sound, the canonical images, and the sheer genius of his masterworks, Lynch’s greatest contribution to American cinema is perhaps that he finally convinced viewers of the notion that you don’t have to understand a film to appreciate its beauty – that film doesn’t have to make itself understood.
Before David Lynch, films could be weird, but they had to make sense – the “weird” had to be qualified somehow, contextualized, patted on the head. Eraserhead, Lynch’s debut feature film, completely exploded that quaint rule.
The Short Films of David Lynch arrived 20 years ago as an indispensable guide to anyone interested in experimental cinema in general – and Lynch, in particular. Starting with his film-student works, the collection follows along as the painter becomes the director, then leads into the mid-’70s shorts that would contain some of the sparks and cues destined to become central to his cinematic art. Appendixed is Lynch’s 55-second contribution to Lumiere et compagnie.
From a little boy growing his own grandma in the attic, to alphabetic nightmares and concertos of vomiting heads, a dull lady auto-dictating letters while her amputated legs retch gunk, and indescribably deeper into David Lynch’s labyrinthine trip of a mind, these shorts make most of his eventual films rate PG on the “bonkers” scale.
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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