Decoding David Lynch’s ‘familiar yet strange’ cinematic language

Last month, news of legendary filmmaker and artist David Lynch’s death rocked the film world. Lynch’s enigmatic feature films, such as “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” and his television epic “Twin Peaks” challenged viewers during their initial releases and continue to inspire critics, writers, and artists.

This weekend, the Harvard Film Archive will commemorate Lynch’s legacy with a series of three films spanning his career. Sabrina Sutherland, a producer who had worked with Lynch since the 1990s, will present the screenings and participate in a conversation about “Twin Peaks” and its controversial prequel.

Ahead of the series, we asked Film Archive Director Haden Guest to speak to Lynch’s effect on moviemaking, and why we keep returning to his strange, yet familiar, world. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Most of Lynch’s work is unexpected and even unnerving, but audiences keep coming back for more. Why do you think that is?

Lynch’s films have remarkable cross-generational appeal; younger audience members are equally as invested as older audience members. Our calendar was already printed, and we’d already announced the screenings before his sudden death in January. What’s remarkable is our screenings were immediately sold out, and they would have been at any time in the past years. His films are so incredibly entertaining, aesthetically rich, absolutely beautiful, and yet at the same time, dark, gripping and even frightening. In Lynch’s films we find a rare, unmatched mixture of polar qualities; of naivete and terror, beauty and abhorrent violence, that we encounter in the art of such figures as Francis Bacon, Kōno Taeko, or Sylvia Plath. This makes Lynch one of the great American filmmakers of the late 20th and early 21st century, without a doubt.

Lynch is able to unleash and to embrace cinema’s potential to explore the uncanny, that thing Freud defined as both familiar and strange. In “Blue Velvet,” for example, the setting is a small town that seems to be this white-picket-fenced, small-town America that is revealed to be shaped by dark, sinister forces lying not just in its shadows, but in full daylight. I remember seeing “Blue Velvet” in a multiplex theater when I was 16 years old, too young for sure, and people were just shocked. They did not know what they were seeing. I remember people being quite upset, others laughing hilariously. And at that time, I was also confused. It’s quite a dark, violent, and psychosexually intense film. But it shaped my imagination and is one of the reasons I am where I am now, teaching film history and curating the HFA cinematheque. I just screened “Blue Velvet” in a course I am teaching, “The Art of Film,” the introduction to cinema for my department, Art, Film and Visual Studies.

Lynch is comparable to another legendary filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, whose films also still retain the power to shock, surprise and delight audiences because of their audacity, and singular approach to image and narrative and sound. There are few filmmakers whose work retains such energy and ability to speak directly to the viewers, to grab them by the shoulders and look right into their eyes. Like Buñuel, I don’t think that Lynch’s power has diminished at all. If anything, it’s grown stronger.

We can’t forget that Lynch is equally important for television. “Twin Peaks” is perhaps one of the most influential television shows of all time. There have been so many attempts made, rarely successful, to make television more cinematic. Lynch is one who understood how to do that, because of his understanding of the limits and possibilities of television, and his deep understanding of and fascination with Americana which came, partially, from his childhood in rural 1950s America. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that, with “Twin Peaks,” he brought to the mainstream a kind of narrative complexity and mystery that had never been done before.

Why screen “Eraserhead,” “Fire Walk With Me,” and “Wild at Heart,” out of all of Lynch’s films?

We have beautiful vintage 35 mm prints of all three titles — plus a number of other Lynch films — in the HFA collection. Seeing these films on 35 mm is a rare, I would even say revelatory, experience that our audience understands and appreciates. The black and white in “Eraserhead” is incredibly sensual. It’s richly textured, it makes expressive use of shadows and smoke and dark, dank places. These are films that need to be seen on the big screen and with an audience.

I also like the idea of having films from different periods of Lynch’s career. It’s fascinating to see elements from “Twin Peaks” already vivid in “Eraserhead.” The iconic patterned “waiting room” floor, for example, comes from that early film. The films screening this weekend share a dreamlike quality that makes them incredibly captivating and allows them to follow a logic entirely of their own. It allows the audience to let go, perhaps, of expectations they have about what a film should be.

What does it mean to have lost someone like David Lynch?

Lynch is of the same, rarely attained stature of a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, or Ozu Yasujirō in the sense that he is recognized and celebrated not only as a filmmaker, but as a persona whose visionary art is understood to be a direct expression of his world view. “Lynchian” became a term unto itself — like how you would say something is “Hitchcockian.” There are few filmmakers whose sensibility was so recognizable and influential that it was understood that they’d invented a language of cinema that was entirely their own. That’s a pretty high bar, right? There are very few filmmakers who’ve done that in uncompromising ways without just recycling old tricks; they’re actually doing something new.

Lynch started as a painter and as a sculptor, and I feel like it was that sensibility, the idea of creating a world of one’s own — starting on a canvas of the size and shape that you choose — that was the same with his cinema. His films created this world that was so uniquely his own. He invented and inhabited it through his uniquely dedicated practice. Which came first, I don’t know. All those special elements came together to forge his unique cinematic imagination.