David Lynch: a cult figure with something for everyone

Los Angeles. When a land lacks its legends, it seeks them amongst the recently deceased. David Lynch was already a cult figure – by definition, ‘the object of religious veneration’ – before he died, almost two years ago. What distinguishes a cult director from a merely mainstream one, that is, Lynch from a Spielberg or a Ron Howard? Undoubtedly a certain artistic attitude, namely versatility. He was a creator of worlds, of unexpected imaginaries, of works to be interpreted, as well as of popcorn films. Like Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Hitler, Lynch was also a painter. He had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, producing surrealist and neo-expressionist canvases and drawings, Baconian distortions, macabre dystopias and art brut nightmares. His photographs spanned close-ups of lips and thighs, portraits of nude women amid smoke with an Impressionist effect, and snapshots of LA’s history taken in the 1970s when the city already bore a patina of age: details of cinemas from the golden age, billiard halls, and Art Deco buildings in downtown.

These photographs are on display now and until December at the Pace Gallery in Los Angeles. In a small room, more reminiscent of his paintings, there are photographs featuring animal parts arranged on a table, with bloody streaks in black and white, to create a ‘kit’ for assembling a fish, a chicken or a duck. In one, the two eyes are separated in the centre, with the caption: “The duck’s eye is a jewel. Even though it is the smallest part, it is the most detailed and brilliant.” Lynch the butcher, yet always with that broad grin of a lad from Montana who started smoking at the age of eight, who perhaps enjoys tearing a bird to pieces, but who also practises transcendental meditation and plays with dreams. Twin Peaks shook up television – a ‘non-true’ crime series before the true crime genre arrived – yet it has an eternal, fanatical following thanks to its fantastical, surrealist side and its exploration of what evil is, with its silences, its setting as a character in its own right, and Badalamenti’s soundtracks. Today, one of its leading actors, Kyle MacLachlan—Agent Cooper—is touring to promote his memoir and speaks of Lynch with messianic reverence.

In Paris, at the new Fondation Cartier designed by Jean Nouvel, a wall resembled a reliquary, featuring pages from the director’s notebook and hotel notepads transformed into works of art: doodles, sketches of houses, doors or trees reflected in water, calculations and pencil jottings.

No one is making a pilgrimage to Lynch’s house, but rather to his favourite diner in Burbank, where fans have laid flowers. This is partly because the master’s home in the Hollywood Hills, in accordance with his will, was sold for 13 million dollars, six months after it was put on the market. More than just a small villa, it was a compound – a village of seven buildings surrounding the main house, the 1963 Beverly Johnson House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, whilst the swimming pool and annexe were designed by his grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, featuring triangles and pink façades defined by the county’s historic buildings register as ‘mid-century modern/organic’. Then there is the furniture designed by Lynch, who had his own joinery workshop there, along with the swimming pool flanked by palm trees, green Formica kitchens, and the screening room and editing suites where he worked on Mulholland Drive. In California, however, amid the ongoing real-estate frenzy, no one has proposed turning it into a house museum—an institution that does not exist in the city, not even for Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart; on the contrary, houses are torn down, just like Shinto shrines—and so the memory of the interiors remains on Zillow or in Elle Decor.