This week David Lynch died and the world shrank a little more. There will be no more eraser heads, no more blue velvets or more motionless curtains like doors to the unknown. As a consolation we will have to remember one of his phrases: «Keep your eyes … in the donut, not in the hole. The donut is his films, his paintings. With him no half measures were possible. Idolized or vilified. A genius or a scammer, no matter how much his detractors recognized his talent in films of dazzling classicism. ‘The Elephant Man’ or ‘A True Story’. The other thing, Lynch outside the codes, was the subject of controversy. The fire of the inquisition or the laurel of the gods. The product of a mind that was not resigned to seeing only one side of reality.
This is what he did from the beginning, since he had a paintbrush in his hands and discovered that the streets of Philadelphia, the cradle of the American dream, could be a branch of hell. And not because that beautiful city housed the usual suburbs with a proliferation of weapons, drugs and violence. Lynch’s hell encompassed the entire metropolitan area. It had branches throughout the country. All over the planet. In every house there was, there is, a camouflaged door – inside a closet, behind a curtain – that leads to the other side of the world. Where dreams live, where reality trembles and others – and ourselves – stop being who they are, who we are.
A brush in his hands because Lynch, before anything else, was a painter. A painter who began to give movement to his paintings. And from there, as if he were working with a magic lamp, his first short films were born. Then, his disturbing and disturbing ‘Eraserhead’. And everything that would come after. Inside Hollywood but outside of Hollywood. What are your movies about? an intrepid journalist asked him. The answer was simple: “They are about the absurd mystery of the forces of existence.” The mystery locked in those paintings of burned houses in the middle of a wasteland, in the middle of nowhere. The subconscious, the splitting of personality. ‘Mulholland drive’, ‘Lost highway’. The dreamlike and the sensual. Freud, surrealism? Simply Lynch. An explorer of the mind, sometimes ironic, sometimes enigmatic and sometimes absolutely immersed in the absurd, but always delving into the mystery, creating unease and even terror without the need for a drop of blood or Gothic chandeliers. In the light of day, showing the facade of a house, a window that suddenly becomes a mirror that we had never dared to look into.
