Writer David Foster Wallace defines the term “Lynchian” as follows: “[it] refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” If Lynch’s name has become an adjective, it’s because he was able to create an original language in his films that was unusual to the point of becoming a kind of genre. A woman in a radiator, a deformed baby with a reptilian appearance, a young man wandering on depressing wastelands… the sets and characters of his first film, Eraserhead (1977), introduced the filmmaker’s strange, nightmarish and surrealist world.

Shot in 1986, Blue Velvet plunges the spectator into the sordid secrets of a suburban neighbourhood through the eyes of a teenager who discovers violence and sexual perversions. The same stylistic language and fantastical framework is used in Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), in which Lynch frees himself further still from the constraints of narrative logic. His latest film, Inland Empire (2006) takes the spectator to the limits of the comprehensible.

His more traditional productions include The Elephant Man (1980), a biography of Joseph Merrick, the British sideshow phenomenon of the 19^th century, Dune (1984), a commissioned science-fiction film that did not meet expectations at the box-office, or Wild at Heart (1990), a road-movie tribute to Elvis Presley. He also directed the cult television series Twin Peaks. He has won many prizes, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, for Wild at Heart, and the Golden Lion in Venice in 2006 for his overall achievement.

 

http://davidlynch.com/