Why the dreams of David Lynch will never die | Canada Voices

“In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you. In dreams, you’re mine, all of the time.”

It might be strange to open an appreciation of the filmmaker David Lynch, whose death at the age of 78 was announced Thursday, with lyrics from a Roy Orbison song. But “strange” was the first and final watchword when it came to Lynch. And there may be no more strange and sensibility-defining a moment in the director’s canon than the sequence, deep into his 1986 psychosexual thriller Blue Velvet, in which Dean Stockwell, playing a criminal-cum-lounge lizard, pantomimes the lyrics to Orbison’s song In Dreams, as Dennis Hopper’s abominable gangster Frank Booth looks on, tears streaking down his face. This was the nexus of David Lynch – dreams that leave you haunted, dreams that leave you scared, dreams that leave you possessed. But, most of all, dreams that will never leave you.

Across film and television – as well as in galleries, and on the page – Lynch invited audiences to step with him into the dangerous darkness of the American dreamscape, where there was a good chance you might be swallowed whole, never to emerge. His labyrinthine worlds were filled with countless trap doors, escape hatches, and M.C. Escher-esque staircases that doubled and then tripled back onto themselves. These were not just realms to get lost inside, but semi-secret spaces that, Lynch seemed to believe, we all possessed skeleton keys to unlock for ourselves. All he asked of us was to open our minds, and step inside.

This invitation was not always so eagerly accepted. Every time that the wider culture miraculously latched onto a Lynch vision (the runaway success of his and Mark Frost’s beguiling ABC series Twin Peaks, the Oscar-endorsed evisceration of suburbia in Blue Velvet), there were times when the director’s mind cut too close to both the bone and the eye, repelling even his most hardened acolytes (the second season of Twin Peaks, the demanding mythmaking of Inland Empire). Yet not even Lynch’s see-sawing detractors could claim to know where exactly he was going wrong, or what should be done about it. To question a Lynch work felt like questioning yourself – what are you going to do about it? He was charting his own journey, and if you had the courage and sincerity to join him, then the mysteries were deep and the pleasures vast.

While the primordial ooze of Lynch’s mindset contained equal parts Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Lynch arrived to the cinema with a vision so startling and searing that it felt almost completely removed from any notion of “influence.” There was before David, and after David.

Glancing at his filmography, it is shocking to realize just how few movies Lynch made. Can the man whom The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once called “the first populist surrealist” only have helmed just 10 feature films? Even adding in one giant, landscape-altering work of television – not to mention his dozens of short films – the thumbprint that Lynch stamped upon the American pop-cultural psyche feels so immensely large, so weighted with legacy and influence, to necessitate a more Steven Spielberg-like level of productivity. And yet Lynch didn’t need 30-plus movies to worm his way into the cultural firmament. The adjective “Lynchian” has seeped into everyday language as if the director has simply always been part of the way we come to understand the world. He is generation-less.

Even Lynch’s misfires are more fascinating than the quote-unquote acclaimed output of countless contemporaries. His struggle to get Dune onto the screen is a wonderfully engrossing mess, its mangled but beguiling vision as vast as the sands of Arrakis. His 1997 neo-noir Lost Highway is a brutal gut-punch of a thing – at points too cruel to even choke down – but just try to escape its pungent scent, it’s impossible. And as disappointing as his 1992 Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me might have been upon its initial arrival, the experiment’s grand, loopy sense of self-indulgence is something of a feature rather than a bug. It was easy to get frustrated with Lynch – even mystified or enraged – but it was impossible to forget him.

Ultimately and perhaps perversely, Lynch’s longest-lasting gift to us all might be his romanticism. A Lynch film could be overwhelming and confounding – a collection of jagged puzzle pieces meant to wound the hands of those brazen enough to believe they could make it all fit. But beneath every work was a gushy, blood-red ode to the pure power of the heart: the “nothing will die” aches and pains of The Elephant Man, the incendiary passions of Mulholland Drive, and of course the bent but unbroken familial bonds of The Straight Story, the filmmaker’s most accessible yet also devastating film.

David Lynch might be dead. But we will all be dreaming of him tonight.