What lay beneath David Lynch’s unique approach to cinema? Premium

David Lynch's avant-garde legacy, from surreal imagery to empathetic storytelling, reshaped Hollywood and defined the "Lynchian" style.

A moldy, severed ear on a patch of suburban grass, filled with crawling ants. The head of an adult human sheared off and replaced by the visage of a grotesque baby alien. An extra-dimensional room fully curtained in red, inhabited by a giant, a dwarf, a cluster of nerves, and a dead girl.

David Lynch’s filmography revelled in the evocative strangeness of images like this. The avant-garde director, actor, composer, and painter passed away last week at the age of 78 due to emphysema from years of smoking.

His trademark deviation from Hollywood storytelling, via surreal imagery that disrupted the spatial and temporal universe of a film or television series, proved to be so uniquely influential that this style garnered the title of “Lynchian”.

The flavour of his craft came from his belief in putting forth an uncompromised vision that he, very famously, would not explain. “People have a yearning to make an intellectual sense of (cinema). And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating, but they can come up with an explanation from within if they just allow it... What something is and what something isn’t, and they might agree with their friends or argue with their friends. But how could they agree or argue if they don’t already know it?” he wrote in his autobiography, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.

His work demanded from his audience the process of feeling, rather than understanding. His use of silence, words, sound design, and colour came together with the intention of evoking an experience specific to each member of his audience. In worlds of incomprehension, with few rational, linear, or coherent conclusions to be drawn, empathy was the most easily accessible component of Lynch’s art.

Lynch pioneered surrealist cinema in Hollywood, an art movement that has, since its inception in the 1920s, deified the female and reduced her to a mysterious object of desire, a canvas to project ideas and thought-provoking visuals onto (see: Hans Bellmer’s The Doll), rather than beings with inner complexities that deserve to be explored in their own right.

Lynch does not necessarily fall into this category. Mulholland Drive, widely regarded as his magnum opus, is at its surface a neo-noir about an amnesiac woman, Rita (played by Laura Harring), falling in love with Betty (played by Naomi Watts), another woman who is helping her solve the mystery of who she is. An hour into the runtime, and perhaps two hours into mulling over the film’s ending, leads to a general conclusion that the film portrays the fractured psyche of a woman traumatised by the structural inner workings of Hollywood and the effects of sexual abuse via the casting couch.