Burning Brightly Into The Night: Farewell David Lynch

A tribute to David Lynch: Arguably THE most galvanic force for an uncanny modernism of deeply charged emotion/melodrama, haunted glamour, and voyeuristic violence/eroticism that ceaselessly resonated with seismic impact well beyond the modernist era.
A seemingly improbable yet colossal figure whose combined television and cinematic output penetrated the popular consciousness almost entirely without compromise and (thus) against all odds…

“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni”
– Virgil

At some point during the turbulently formative virgin forest years of early adolescence, my brother acquired an illicit VHS copy of David Lynch’s 1977 film ‘Eraserhead’, dubbed from a Japanese LaserDisc. He invited his friends over to watch the film and indulge in further illicit activities in the secluded confines of our parents’ basement. As usual, I snuck down to partake in the sacred bacchanalian home video ritual.

A Japanese LaserDisk version of ‘Eraserhead’.
Released in 1994 by ComStock.

As was often the case, no information about the movie was provided or discussed beforehand aside from the curious title and corresponding cover image.
No degree of overselling hype or hyperbole could have prepared me anyway.

Like legions of others, never before had I experienced something in conscious reality that so explicitly captured the irrational shadow realm of the unconscious mind – A fully articulated and painstakingly detailed cinematic dream / nightmare yanked with full force from the deepest darkest depths of the subconscious. Now flickering before my tender retinas.
WAS I dreaming?

‘Eraserhead’ is a rare late Modernist work that goes beyond mere representation, impressionism, or even surrealism and into the realm of the alchemical.
“Did you guys fucking SEE that?!” – My bewildered shout at the conclusion of the movie was met with a haunting silence, quickly discovering that my elder sibling and his cohorts had drunkenly dozed off mid-viewing. Leaving me alone to reckon with the bonafide phenomenon that I had just experienced.

During my high school years, I would frequent the infamous block on 13th and Wood Street in Philadelphia where Lynch lived and drew inspiration for ‘Eraserhead.’ At the time, it still very much resembled the exterior shots that appear early on in the film.
The stone tunnels beneath the elevated railroad line towards the East end of the block had a strange and fantastic echo. The block, like many parts of the city, was no doubt cursed and it was not at all difficult to imagine the horrors Lynch observed and subsequent terror experienced as a young / sensitive new father thrust into a violent, hostile, chaotic, and unfamiliar industrial urban landscape.
In fact, the film should probably be mandatory viewing for any man existing in alienated modernity taking on (or even considering) the role of fatherhood.

‘Eraserhead’ lives on as one of those precious few consciousness-challenging enigmas that can only be brought about through the glory and wonder of traumatic experience, entirely free from the pressures and constraints of artistic career.
I recently discovered that ‘Eraserhead’ was Stanley Kubrick’s all-time favourite film and he would sometimes screen it for friends and collaborators. Asking them, “would you like to come up and see my favourite film?”

Like Nathanael West before him, Lynch went on to become one of the great oracles, dark seers, and psychic voyeurs of Tinseltown (as well as the post-war American psyche at large). Doing so in an intensely seductive and evocative manner as a refined, sophisticated, and broadly appealing stylist (‘Mulholland Drive’ from 2001 especially comes to mind here). He possessed that ‘The Day of the Locust’ style ambivalence and an understanding of the city’s psychological need for periodic self-immolation / annihilation.

He also had a seemingly obsessive fascination with the destructive / purifying, untameable, and primordially elemental force of fire. As well as the natural material of wood that both fuels and sustains it. A lyrical refrain from Lynch’s song “Good Day Today” from his 2011 solo album ‘Crazy Clown Time’ being one of many examples:
“So tired of fire, so tired of smoke / Send me an angel, save me”

A 2010 mixed media work by David Lynch titled ‘Boy Lights Fire.’

It is often especially difficult to see the naturally brilliant and innocent types go. Those uncynically capable of phenomenologically experiencing and perceiving things beyond childhood without any concern for classification or interpretation – What the infinite game of free playing sets out to do. Seemingly in contact with hidden or divine forces.
Perhaps it borders on being overly obvious or even self-evident to point out, but there is a profound poeticism about his departure from the scene amidst the current inferno. To the degree of feeling almost prophetic.

Here’s to loving the world always (“amor fati”) and to a long life that burned ever brightly from being well-lived…