David Lynch: A Tribute by Katie Doherty
Losing David Lynch left a huge void. He was a man that many of us didn’t get to meet yet he touched our lives, our creative practices and allowed us to feel cinema so deeply it would imprint itself on us - Lynch became part of the fabric of our being. His impact on me has been beyond anything I can put into this tribute. It has been both profound and influential.
I sunk deeper into the world of Lynch over 20 years ago and my life became illuminated. I would find myself in a toilet in some dingy goth club with its aluminium toilets, the lights flickering from the strip lighting above the mirror making my face change with each flicker and I would think “how Lynchian”. It has got me to the point that I see his work in objects, I hear him in the sounds of the London underground mechanical orchestra or see Dale Cooper in the deep red colour of a lady’s dress, a deep blue velvet cushion makes me think of Dorothy Vallens and the swirling smoke from a cigarette dancing towards a lightbulb gets me thinking of him. Some of these may not seem obvious to others but my Lynchian leanings together with poetic and symbolic obsessions? Let’s just say life is never dull but always absurd.
Lynch was a unique individual, a real one-off - never to be replaced or replicated. His ability to make me feel uncomfortable is staggering yet I go back for more - a dark dopamine hit I long to carry with me. His films became the equivalent of rubbernecking a car accident – you want to look but you don’t. His films have that quality – do I want to see this? Do I want to know about this? What does it all mean? The latter leads me to the days of my film degree studies.
During my film degree I studied his work in great depth and the words that were banded around the most were surrealism and postmodernism. I delved into these areas with quite some force (as you may have observed in my work with the arts journal) but then we started to dig up theories and meanings, looking at every little detail on an academic level. Although I love to dissect my dreams, explore symbolism and poke around in the psyche – I did conclude that Lynch’s work went beyond this – in fact it conjured a mood rather than narrative it was like you were feeling through the screen, a braille almost. I was using my senses to navigate his landscape. This landscape blends the old with the new, the light with the dark and he does it seamlessly – it creates a timelessness – a world of its own. And it is this that makes Lynch such a wonderful creative force. His music, his art, writing and carpentry all feeds into this brilliant vision, this world we see represented in his films.
A loss to all who knew him, a loss to all that call him their muse and art father. David, you will be forever missed but we will forever live in your world - always guessing and forever bathing in your blue light.
