MARKED MOVIES

Just five days before his 79th birthday, cinema lost one of its true artistic visionaries when David Lynch sadly passed away on January 15th, 2025. A true cult icon that encouraged an engagement and surrendering to his work in order to experience more. That in itself is a true expression of art that few filmmakers are capable of and his death will leave an incredible loss for cinema and creativity in and of itself.

Lynch’s talents were not just for creating movies, though; he created worlds, atmospheres and voids. He created a wonder of life itself; the nightmares, the dreamscapes, the beautiful and dark parallel worlds in which we can co-exist with doppelgängers and psychogenic fugues. How he even managed to convey this in film form was just a miraculous achievement and one that I genuinely do not think we will ever see again in our lifetimes. Lynch was a singular visionary, a genuine artist who managed to project his art, his abstraction, his surrealism and his knowledge of dream interpretation and theoretical cosmic illusions onto the screen for all of us to rejoice in and explore and be confused or confounded by. David Lynch was quite simply the most abstractly intelligent filmmaker I have ever experienced and his visionary approach even managed to become an adjective in the dictionary with anything strange or surreal now being described as “Lynchian”.

He was a master on the combination of sight and sound and his groundbreaking Twin Peaks in 1989 changed pop culture and reinvented television. Without it we might never have the format of the TV shows that we take for granted today. Lynch was the pioneer and coupled with his uncompromising artistic vision he has left his body of work of both film and television a timeless contribution to entertainment that simply refuses to age due to their enigmatic nature and refusal to be pigeonholed or pander to commercial or constructive narratives. He’s the epitome of a true artist who managed to express himself through the cinematic medium and showed what was possible when you push the boundaries of expression.

He never worked on a conscious level and was very suggestive and rejoiced in exploring intuition and the inter-dimensions between the dark and the light and finding the beauty in the macabre. For many, his movies didn’t make sense but that was entirely his intention. He refused to make corporate or commercial films and that’s the very reason that Hollywood refused to accept him. It wasn’t about money for Lynch, it was simply about art. His passing has left the cinematic world a more bereft environment but thankfully we’ll always have his infinitely rewatchable catalogue of absolute genius and his indelible mark on cinema overall. When I watch his films sometimes my arms bend back, the gum I like comes back into style and I hear the birds sing a pretty song. RIP Maestro.

Reviews of his films:

Blue Velvet (1986)

Wild At Heart (1990)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

Lost Highway (1996)

The Straight Story (1999)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Inland Empire (2006)

Memorable Scenes:

This entry was posted on January 27, 2025 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags 2025. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.