David Lynch has passed. His films will live on for many years to come. From the short films of the late sixties and early seventies, including The Grandmother and The Amputee, to his breakout feature Eraserhead in 1977. From The Elephant Man, the brilliant Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, to Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive to the TV version of Twin Peaks.
He brought the weird and unnatural to life onscreen. From the start, Lynch’s artistry was evident. His films are not shoddy freak shows, although it must be stated that some may be deemed beautifully conceived colossal freak shows. He showed viewers parts of life that really did not happen, but made us feel that they certainly could happen… sometimes in the most wholesome and peaceful of communities and sometimes in worlds barely recognizable yet somehow relatable.
I never found a human ear in a field, but who knows, maybe I will someday!
David Lynch was a genius-level artist and filmmaker.
Before there was a David Lynch there were a handful of filmmakers who also succeeded in transforming reality into the strange, the unknown, the shocking.
More than one hundred years ago, each on his own and sometimes as a team, Lon Chaney and Tod Browning made audiences gasp. In 1925 they teamed to make The Unholy Three in which Professor Echo, a ventriloquist, and his dummy, a “twenty inch man,” and a guy called Hercules, bring about a crime wave. Chaney startled audiences in The Penalty in 1920. It’s the strange story of a legless criminal mastermind whose evil deeds include plotting revenge on the doctor who unnecessarily amputated his legs when he was a child.
Tod Browning’s best-known films include The Unknown, 1927, in which Chaney plays a circus performer who fakes being armless and throws knives with his toes. He blackmails a doctor into chopping off his arms for real to impress the gal he loves—played by a young Joan Crawford, who cannot stand a man putting his arms around her. It’s scary, freakish.
Speaking of freakish, it was Browning who made Freaks in 1932. The cast is made up of what then were harshly termed and looked at with no empathy as midgets, pinheads, human worms, and the bearded lady. When a “normal” woman looks to marry one of the deformed for his money, the circus “freaks” gang up on her and mold her into a horrific half human monster. Don’t ask me about details of this film. It’s so aberrant, so weird and scary, that I closed my eyes shortly after it started and didn’t open them again till it ended.
Another filmmaker with a great sense of the unnatural was producer Val Lewton. Take a look at some of his best work, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Body Snatchers, and Bedlam, from RKO in the 1940s. My favorite is Cat People where a superstitious Serbian woman thinks she might be turning into a cat! All these titles center on the atypical members of society, some in startling ways that can only be fantasy – or not!
I don’t mean to imply that David Lynch was borrowing from any of these earlier filmmakers of unnatural topics. Lynch was one of a kind. His artistry was unique and astonishing.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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