David Lynch by Kevin Westenberg

I watched my first David Lynch film when I was 10 years old, not that knew it at the time. My mom forced my brother and I to watch The Elephant Man, a film I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch again since. John Hurt as Joseph Merrick, screaming “I am not an animal” to a baying mob at Liverpool Street Station, is a scene that brings such a tangible heaviness to my chest that I still struggle to think about it. The Elephant Man remains my most striking and harrowing memory of early movie-going, the moment I realised what film was capable of making us feel, the distillation, through the artifice of lighting and performance and prosthetics, of some deep, devastating, universal truth about the callousness and cruelty of human beings.

Some version of that experience was repeated every time I watched a Lynch film in the two decades since. When I watched Blue Velvet as a student, and I, like Kyle MacLachlan, sat mesmerised and repelled and frightened and thrilled by Dennis Hopper’s twisted violence—baby wants blue velvet. When I watched Wild at Heart, rented from a DVD store, on my small television set, and realised I was watching one of the great scenes in the history of film, as Nicolas Cage serenaded Laura Dern with Elvis’ “Love Me” in his snakeskin jacket. When I watched Mulholland Drive, and the impression it left on me was not unlike seeing a painting by Caravaggio for the first time, or the first time I read Dostoevsky. The transcendence of witnessing a true masterpiece, something that evolves beyond the composition of its parts and touches on the celestial.

Then there was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I saw at the Prince Charles Cinema in Soho. This remains my favourite Lynch film, it’s the work that most clearly displays that Lynch’s greatest gift—above the ability to distill mood, his mastery of sound, his much-discussed penchant for the surreal—was empathy. Laura Palmer could have been just another dead girl in cinema’s long list of dead girls, beautiful corpses, humiliated and defiled by machismo filmmakers with no interest in their interior lives. Instead, we were given 33 hours of loving homage, one of the deepest and most nuanced explorations of the cycles of childhood sexual abuse and family trauma, the monstrosity of male violence, ever committed to celluloid. Lynch is one of our great, empathetic filmmakers. Eraserhead is, at its core, a heartfelt portrait of the terror of fatherhood. In Wild At Heart, a couple of loved-up dropkicks get to partake in a romance as sincere and sweeping as The Wizard of Oz. The piece I was originally going to publish this week, about the Neil Gaiman exposé in New York Magazine, is called “Men Who Pretend To Love Women”. What a joy to instead write about a man who loved not only women but humanity as a whole, who saw us starkly and honestly for what we are and still earnestly believed we were capable of redemption.