Recommends
Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
07 Mar 25
We're celebrating the late, great auteur of the surreal all year long with David Lynch's Dream Theatre: a chronological retrospective of each of his feature masterpieces.
At select cinemas, these monthly screenings will be paired with one key inspiration – a film that Lynch himself cited as a favourite that shares a common thread, somewhere in a dream, with one of his own.
From the very first vision of Jack Nance's disembodied head in space accompanied by a heavy industrial drone, Lynch's idiosyncratic vision that would continue to permeate his work reveals itself immediately to anyone looking for it.
The closest Lynch has come to demystifying his debut is citing growing up in various troubled neighbourhoods across America as his one and only influence. "I saw a grown woman grab her breasts and speak like a baby, complaining her nipples hurt," he explained with complete conviction when questioned about the film's tone. "That kind of thing will set you back."
It's this nebulous sense of unease and mystery that makes a film like Eraserhead difficult to compare to anything that came before, or indeed after it. Despite not sharing the stylistic overtones that Eraserhead is notorious for, we're pairing it with Lynch's favourite film by New German Cinema pioneer Werner Herzog, Stroszek. Both examine the notion of the American dream from an outsider's perspective with a healthy dose of cynicism, centered around their male protagonists' attempts to conform to a society that shuns them. Whilst one ends up resigned to oblivion in a pencil factory and the other up a ski lift leaving an exploding truck and a dancing chicken in his wake, both offer up a scathing indictment of American culture with a distinct, auteurial fingerprint.
There's a compelling argument for lots of Lynch's films being in a roundabout way about disability, but The Elephant Man is certainly the one that tackles it the most head-on. The sincere, empathetic approach to a subject matter that throughout history has been resigned to spectacle and horror is influenced directly by Tod Browning's Freaks, a film that, like many of Lynch's, found a home on the alternative cinema circuits, embraced by those who found resonance in all the credence it gives to marginalised people. Both subvert sound, vision and genre to place their subjects not on a pedestal but to meet them at eye level – like any good story about another person, no matter who they are, should.
As mentioned, Lynch's version was met with disappointment on release in 1984, to nobody more than himself. Starring serial self-insert Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, it's a film concerned primarily with preserving the whimsy and weirdness of the novels, standing starkly against Villenueve's more cleanly finessed vision of Arrakis. Despite all the negative favour, Lynch's Dune has garnered a huge cult following (us included!) amongst his own admirers and Herbert fans alike, for all its pugs, codpieces, and ingenious deployment of an original Toto score. "Father, the sleeper has awakened!"
Lynch complimented the "brilliant way in which Alfred Hitchcock manages to create – or rather, re-create – a whole world within confined parameters," particularly in the "great people coming in and out of this place, and then the characters around the apartment building… and then a mystery starts." This too harkens the beginning of Blue Velvet's central mystery, a perfect example of Lynch's fascination with the absurd that lurks just beneath the surface of the profane and everyday.
Whilst Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini more than embody Blue Velvet's respective Hitchcock blonde and brunette, MacLachlan stars again here as the Jimmy Stewart character, providing the blinkered eyes through which we observe a rapidly unfolding mystery. In the same way that in Rear Window the titular aperture is a glimpse into the private lives of others, a disembodied ear signals an open wound that takes us straight into somebody else's mind - a decidedly Lynchian take on a classic tale of intrigue.
His controversial Palme d'Or winner makes plenty of overt references to Ozian imagery: Sheryl Lee floating down in a bubble as Glinda the Good Witch, Diane Ladd's matriarch haunting the story like the Wicked Witch of the West, even the love scenes are hued with the colours of the rainbow. More presciently, Wild at Heart offers the clearest embodiment of both Fleming and Lynch's greatest central thesis: that it takes looking all the world's fear directly in the eye to recognise that love and goodness persevere. As Lee's Glinda declares, "If you're truly wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams. Don't turn away from love, Sailor. Don't turn away from love." There really is no place like home, especially if that home is the snakeskin-jacketed arms of Nicolas Cage.
Fire Walk With Me directly reckons with the profound, disturbing reality that lies beneath the mythology of Twin Peaks, something that the show only does so much as hint at, leaving to the imagination what here we see blazing like an open fire. It's Lynch's truest experiment in terror, which is aptly also the title of the '60s neo-noir that we're screening alongside it. Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror not only bears a jazz-like score that could well be a Badalamenti B-side, and an asthmatic killer named – get this – Garland "Red" Lynch, but weaves a horror story around the perversion of innocence with plenty of parallels to that between Laura Palmer and her father Leland. Both tell this story from the perspective of their female victims, doing away with gratuitous violence in favour of getting to the real, human heart of what it is to suffer in a world that ultimately fails to protect you.
Time and identity fracture in Lost Highway in a way that feels most reminiscent of Hitchcock's Vertigo, his own most experimental foray into filmmaking. Both films disrupt linearity by repeating events and fragmenting identities of multiple characters - including our protagonists - mimicking the way the brain tends to obfuscate around trauma. Traversing a long, winding road in pursuit of one man's ideal, whilst both endings might feel fruitless in that regard, both have a great deal more to say about all the things we do to cope with tragedy and the unknown. "It's been a pleasure talking to you…"
Farnsworth's Alvin Straight eventually finds a kindred soul in Harry Dean Stanton's film-stealing cameo as his brother Lyle, and these are precisely the words Lynch himself used to describe his relationship to French comic auteur, Jacques Tati. "When you watch his films, you realise how much he knew about - and loved - human nature, and it can only be an inspiration to do the same." It's safe to say that he certainly achieved this in The Straight Story (and beyond!), which most closely mirrors Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, following the capers of a well-meaning man who, much to the bemusement of those around him, is just trying to have a pleasant vacation. Whilst one certainly contains more slapstick and hijinks than the other - no prizes for guessing which - both are quietly marvellous ruminations on humanity whose impact is felt long after leaving the cinema.
Mulholland Drive and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard share a far greater deal in common than just their neighbouring Los Angeles road namesakes. Both seek to understand the Angeleno lives lived in parallel to the Hollywood glitterati, and what comes to the surface when dreams of the silver screen turn sour. Whilst coming in from different ends of the spectrum, Wilder with fading silent movie star Norma Desmond and Lynch with the fractured dreams of desperate Hollywood hopeful Diane Selwyn, both understand the radioactive effects of desire and the spotlight, and both indeed have a short half-life.
"It catches a Hollywood story that connects the golden age of Hollywood with the present day," Lynch said of Sunset in an interview. "But it's a truthful movie, and so it carries through to today. It has a lot of sadness in it, and beauty. And mystery. And dreams. Beauty, beauty, beauty and more dreams." If that in itself isn't a testament to a perfect double bill, we really don't know what is.
It's in films like Inland Empire that comparisons between Lynch and the great Italian experimentalist Federico Fellini are most aptly drawn. In his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch names Fellini's 8 1/2 as one of four perfect examples of filmmaking. "Fellini manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do — namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner, without ever explaining anything, just by a sort of sheer magic."
This too is the magic of Inland Empire, presenting a series of sounds and images that by themselves could be taken as innocuous, but together create something all-consuming, and something that's felt before it's understood. Both staged around a movie set, and both retreating into a world of total fantasy: a better double bill concerning film's power to channel the unintelligible could scarcely be imagined.
David Lynch's Dream Theatre: Our year-long tribute to an artist from another place.
From beloved classics to unearthed gems, reintroduce yourself to the best films of yesterday with reDiscover — be that last decade, or last century.
