New Delhi:
For seven years, American director David Lynch drank the same chocolate milkshake at the same time every day from the same place in Los Angeles because he believed it helped his creativity.
But given the strange images famous in his work, from a human ear in the grass to telephones ringing in empty rooms and dancing elves in red suits, his imagination hardly needed to be stimulated.
Sadomasochist intrigue blue velvet Till (1986) lesbian thriller Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch – who has died aged 78 – gained a global cult following with his unsettling portraits of American life.
He is best remembered for his network series Mesmerizing twin Peaks, which paved a way for the iconic television dramas that followed.
“It would be difficult to look at the roster of television shows in any given season without finding several shows that owe a creative debt to twin PeaksThe Atlantic praised his influence on directors ranging from Quentin Tarantino to the Coen brothers in 2016.
With four Oscar nominations, including a trio of Best Director, the filmmaker best known for his shock of gray hair took home just one honorary statuette in 2019.
monstrous attraction
Born in Montana on January 20, 1946, Lynch had a difficult childhood, but she moved around several times as one of five children with a scientist father and teacher mother.
He began painting and shooting short films at the Art College of Pennsylvania in the 1970s.
From the beginning, his work highlighted strange and marginalized characters: his first feature in 1977 eraserheadA grainy black and white film about a deformed demonic child.
Supporting himself with odd jobs, Lynch shot his creepy and now iconic classic film on a shoestring budget, taking five years as he was running out of money and his wife and daughter were forced to pay him. Was giving support.
The then 33-year-old Lynch described “a dream of dark and disturbing things”. eraserhead When it finally appeared, it was located in the gloomy industrial landscape of Philadelphia and filled with an eerie stillness that became its hallmark.
The few who saw it were fond of the experience, including another Hollywood master-in-the-making, Stanley Kubrick, who expressed admiration.
Lynch pursued his interest in bringing human deformities to the screen elephant manDrama of the tragic life of Joseph Merrick, who was born with severe physical deformities.
“Start with a romantic texture,” said Lynch about why he was drawn to the subject, “and this idea of ​​going beneath the surface was interesting to me. There’s a surface to this elephant man and a surface.” Beneath it lies the beautiful soul”.
An unknown John Hurt in the title role earned one of the film’s eight Oscar nominations, while Anthony Hopkins played the doctor who befriended Merrick before his death by suicide at the age of 27.
The international hit thrust Lynch into the Hollywood spotlight, but his star power waned after a $40 million flop adaptation of the sci-fi novel “Dune.”
Twin Peaks incident
blue velvetIt got Lynch back on track – in the same decade in which he was ritualistically quitting drinking milkshakes – and also marked the beginning of a five-year relationship with the film’s star, Isabella Rossellini.
He returned to the A-list in 1990 with arguably his most influential work: twin Peaks.
Set in the fictional town of Twin Peaks in Washington, near the Canadian border, Lynch’s story began with the simple mystery of the young and beautiful Laura Palmer found in a body bag pulled out of a lake.
But over the course of eight episodes, a strange normalcy descends and the murder is buried under layers of mystery, investigated by lovable FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Lynch’s frequent collaborator Kyle MacLachlan.
A hit when it first aired on ABC, the show was part of a stellar year for Lynch, who also took home the top prize at Cannes that year with his road movie. Strong heart.
Lynch created its second season twin Peaks and a spin-off film a year later, before returning to the world again with an acclaimed sequel series for cable network Showtime in 2017.
meditation and photography
The dark side of the American dream was a Lynchian leitmotif, but he deviated from the theme straight story To tell the true story of a man who rode his lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick brother.
In 2006, with the release of inland EmpireA bleak portrait of Tinseltown, starring Laura Dern as a depressed actress, Lynch called it a day in filmmaking.
That same year, he also married and then divorced his third wife, Mary Sweeney, a film director and producer who was among his longtime collaborators.
In 2009, he married for the fourth time, to actress Emily Stoffel, with whom he had his fourth child.
Being busy with his work, he was often absent as a father figure.
“You have to be selfish. And that’s a terrible thing,” Lynch said of her parenting skills in 2018. “I never really wanted to get married, never wanted to have kids. One thing leads to another and there it is.”
Over the past decades, the pack-a-day smoker and coffee drinker explored other mediums ranging from photography and singing to become champions of Transcendental Meditation.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
