Ask any time from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and David Lynch would’ve been my answer to, Who’s your favorite filmmaker?

His first feature film was Eraserhead, in 1977, and it exploded everything about the movies for me. It follows no formula, defies any expectations, varies from astounding to incomprehensible, tells only sort of a story, comes to no happy ending, and it’s fantastic. I’d never seen anything like it, so of course, I came back to the same cinema and saw it again the next day. I saw Eraserhead again and again, at the Neptune, the Roxie, the Castro, the Red Vic…

Lynch followed it with The Elephant Man, and Blue Velvet, even Dune — which critics said was a disaster, but I enjoyed it. His movies were so different and daring, Lynch and TV seemed like an impossible combination, but he made Twin Peaks, widely hailed as the most brilliant television ever seen on American commercial TV.

That’s where Lynch started to lose me, though. Twin Peaks started strong and strange, then grew stranger and stranger, until it was stranger than I was willing to put up with in the early 1990s. I drifted away after a dozen episodes, and “Weird for weird’s sake” became my opinion of Twin Peaks, and much of Lynch’s subsequent work.

Mulholland Drive seems to be almost unanimously viewed as his masterpiece, but it’s bewildered and frustrated me every time I’ve tried to watch it. Some other of his late-career movies, I’ve never seen at all.

When he died a few weeks ago, though, it felt like one of the best things not right with the world went with him. It has me wondering, maybe the problem wasn’t David Lynch being too strange. Maybe it was me, being not strange enough.

The biggest part of why I love movies came from David Lynch, by way of Eraserhead, but me being an idiot, that thought didn’t gel in my brain until after he was dead.

I don’t think I appreciated him as much as he deserved. To apologize, I’m going to give the films of David Lynch a closer look, which will make the Neverending Film Festival very Lynch-heavy, until I’ve seen or re-seen everything he made.

♦ ♦ ♦

Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

While a siren sounds in the distance, six men vomit. It’s not John Waters vomit; it’s animated like a cartoon, albeit without the pleasantness of Loony Tunes. It’s four minutes, running the same loop six times, and it’s maybe not something to display at MOMA, but it’s interesting.

We can’t see Six Men Getting Sick the way Lynch intended, though, as part of a mixed-media display where the six faces were projected onto six statues, all arranged in the proper positions.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Absurd Encounter with Fear (1967)

This is a two-minute short I don’t understand: A guy walks across a prairie, stands behind a seated woman, looks like he’s unzipping his pants to pee on her, but I don’t think he does. The imagery is so dark I’m not sure what actually happens while he’s standing behind her.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

“The Pink Room” (1992)

Most of the best music from Lynch’s movies was written by Angelo Badalamenti, but this piece, “The Pink Room,” was written by Lynch himself, for the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which I’ve not yet seen). The music mesmerizes me, and at a low volume on a luscious loop, it’s exactly the soundtrack for triggering wild dreams overnight.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fictitious Anacin Commercial (1967)

It’s what the title promises. At about a minute, it has all the elements I like about Lynch — absurdity, faux horror, surreality, mockery, and a laugh.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ .

16mm (1968)

This is a collection of several untitled Lynch shorts, too varied to be considered as a single piece. Some of it’s a dang achievement, some of it’s not, but that’s the nature of trying something new.

Thank cripes nobody will ever review my earliest writing.

♦ ♦ ♦

The essence of a nightmare — slippery horror, almost akin to the real world but never quite — has never been captured better than this.

Describing the plot seems moot, since it’s not really about what it’s about. What it’s really about is, it’s about the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.

On the surface, it’s about Henry, a socially maladjusted young man with a preposterous pompadour. His girlfriend Mary invites Henry to dinner with her family, where artificial chicken is on the menu, and Mary’s mother surmises that Henry’s the father of Mary’s newborn baby.

“Mother,” cries Mary, “they’re still not sure it is a baby.”

Which is one of the greatest lines in cinema.

Before and after that nearly-lucid moment, every element is vividly but indescribably uncomfortable, leading to laughs not from humor so much as to break the tension.

It’s beyond putting it into words. You have to see it for yourself.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

With “The Pink Room” still playing in my head, it became an invitation to skip ahead to Twin Peaks. Thought I’d watch an episode or two every few days until I’d seen it all, but after every episode, I’m hitting ‘play’ for the next episode, and with the movie it’s going to add up to 50+ hours.

So I’ll end this entry here, and save my assessment of Twin Peaks for next time. But here’s a slight preview: I’m midway through the second season, several episodes past the point where I gave up on the show in the ’90s, and it keeps on amazing me…

1/28/2025

Neverending Film Festival

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