Beyond the End

“Nothing will die.”

That’s the closing line of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, about the life of the disfigured performer David Merrick (John Hurt). The film begins with nightmarish images of elephants striking down Merrick’s mother, followed by Merrick’s birth, which is represented, like so many important moments in Lynch’s work, abstractly: a puff of white smoke. The film ends with Merrick finishing a sculpture of a cathedral and lying on a bed in his hospital room, his posture echoing a painting of a sleeping child on the wall, whereupon his mother reappears to him. “Nothing will die,” she tells her son.

“Nothing Will Die” is the title of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which is worth reading in full on the day Lynch crossed over to the beyond after a lifetime of contemplating it. Throughout his career, the Missoula, Montana native envisioned birth, death and the afterlife and imagined other realms and other states of being with such curiosity that you could appreciate the sheer beauty of his imagery and the feelings it evoked before obsessing over the multiple meanings it suggested. It is reassuring to think of his passing in Los Angeles at the age of 78 as sublime a moment as one of his phantasmic, if not somewhat incomprehensible mise en scènes.

Lynch’s first feature, 1977’s black-and-white Eraserhead, begins with the film’s protagonist, the soon-to-be-a-father Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), expelling a transparent, ectoplasmic tadpole-spermatozoa from his mouth. The image has been interpreted as an expression of Henry’s anxiety about parenthood, but it could also stand in for whatever anxiety (if any) Lynch felt at what could be the birth of his directorial career, depending on the reception. (Eraserhead became a cult sensation immediately.) A larger version of this ghostly wriggler appears in the eighth episode of his last major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a collaboration with writer Mark Frost that recreates the detonation of the first atom bomb and implies (among other things) that the event caused a rupture in the universe and admitted evil forces into our world. Evil’s entry is likewise pictured here as a monstrous birth, with a creature Lynch dubbed a “frog-moth” hatching from irradiated soil and climbing into a sleeping girl’s mouth.

That series’ progenitor, Twin Peaks (1990-92) — also co-written with Frost — was the first network series to be organized around one character’s death and a community’s response to it. The first act of the pilot is all about the shock of losing troubled prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose corpse is found wrapped in plastic; the section, which almost feels like a hyperextended prologue, continues with the notification of the family and the examination of the corpse, presided over by the protagonist, FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who doesn’t appear for over half an hour. The rawness of the townspeoples’ responses to this atrocity — including primordial weeping and screaming and various forms of acting-out — went far beyond what was typically permitted on broadcast TV, a medium in which unpleasantness tended to get omitted or at least tamped down, so as not to upset viewers to the point where they couldn’t process the ads. The killing and desecration of Laura continues resonating throughout the original show’s 30 episode run, even as Agent Cooper and the local police branch away from it and begin dealing with local corruption and assorted personal melodramas.

So much of Lynch’s work amounts to individual entries in a decades-spanning meditation on mortality and what comes after life. And yet somehow the works are so rich in other concerns that it never seemed like Lynch was an artist myopically preoccupied by death. It loomed into the foreground of his work — most strikingly in his collaboration with screenwriter and editor Mary Sweeney, The Straight Story (1999). It’s about an elderly Iowan and lifelong smoker named Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) who collapses on his kitchen floor and is advised by his doctor to stop smoking, then learns that his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) is terminally ill and makes a 240-mile journey by tractor to try to heal the rift before one of them dies.

But more often death erupted through the surface of the fiction’s other preoccupations, injecting a jarring but welcome note of harsh reality in what was otherwise a dark fantasy. The Return is filled with such moments. Some are extra-dramatic, and pack a punch only if you know details of the production: for instance, Lynch and Frost made a point of writing parts for original Twin Peaks cast members Miguel Ferrer and Catherine Coulson even though they were both nearing the final stages of cancer, as well as Stanton, a lifelong smoker who died of heart failure at 91 a few months after the series premiered. All look frail in their scenes — including Stanton, whose character Carl Rod, manager of the Fat Trout Trailer Park, sees what might be the most upsetting death in the entire bloody series, a hit-and-run that kills a young boy not long after Carl witnessed the boy and his mother innocently playing in a park.

The certainty of death and the mystery of what happens next is woven into everything Lynch directed, even when individual works are theoretically focused on other things. His 1984 Dune adapts Frank Herbert’s book about a messiah from another world whose family is decimated and who is thought lost and dead but is reborn as the leader of a guerilla insurgency on a desert planet after ingesting spice that activates mind-expanding, reality-flouting superpowers. Lynch’s career-realigning Blue Velvet, which introduced MacLachlan to audiences as amateur detective and voyeur Jeffrey Beaumont, starts with the hero’s father collapsing of a stroke while watering his lawn, the kink in the hose visualizing what happened in the man’s circulatory system. The prospect of the father’s demise hangs over the entire story, and activates Jeffrey’s impulse to push ever-deeper into evil and depravity of which he was once only dimly aware.

Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) in Wild at Heart (1990) are runaway lovers evading assassins dispatched by Lula’s mother (Diane Ladd), who is styled as a sort of real-world Wicked Witch of the West (Lynch referenced The Wizard of Oz so often in his filmography that somebody made a whole documentary about it). So many characters in the film are running from death, the threat of death, or the psychological aftermath of events that murdered their spirits. Though driven by sex, love and youthful rebellion, terror of the end hovers over the story, and lands in a scene where the duo encounters a car wreck. Film Comment’s Kathleen Murphy wrote: “Lula and Sailor happen upon Death’s roadwork in a sequence that is Lynch at his hallucinatory best. Ghostly clothes drift along a night highway. A bloodied figure staggers in and out of the headlights of an overturned car. A girl, scalp awry and dead on her feet, whines that her mother will kill her for losing her purse. Death bares its face, its mouth filling with blood.”

Lynch’s own raging against the dying of the light took the form of ever-increasing modes of narrative experimentation. It started in 1992 with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, an R-rated theatrical prequel to the original series. Concentrating entirely on an investigation into the last days of Laura Palmer, who was raped and tortured before she was murdered, the film was narratively fragmented and at times daringly naive, more violent and sexual and, frankly, stranger than the already boundary-pushing series ever dared to be. Contrary to legend, it was not booed at its official Cannes premiere, though there may have been boos at the screening for press and critics. But it it was so off-putting to people who apparently expected an early version of what’s now called “fan service,” and so mystifying and upsetting to those who hadn’t watched the show, that it bombed at the box office and effectively toppled Lynch from the pedestal that Time magazine placed him on 18 months earlier.

Fire Walk with Me was subsequently reclaimed by the next generation of viewers and critics as not only arguably Lynch’s most aesthetically daring film since Eraserhead but the inaugural salvo in a new phase of his career—one in which each subsequent feature seemed more of a concentrated assault on the very idea that linear narrative could make sense of life. At times it seemed as if Lynch was trying to do with cinema what he would recommend that aspiring artists do with transcendental meditation and other kinds of mind-expansion: realize that you don’t know what you think you know, and that the guiding principles and systematized rules that were reinforced throughout your existence, in life itself as well as art, are meaningless lies. Something greater and more powerful can be accessed by abandoning or shattering them.

Lost Highway (1997) is a Mobius-strip narrative that begins and ends (and, it is implied) begins again with one man (Bill Pullman) transforming into another man (Balthazar Getty) and falling into obsessive love with the same woman in different incarnations (Patricia Arquette). There is no life or death here for Lynch’s protagonists, only an endless purgatorial loop. 2001’s Mullholland Drive, derived from a rejected ABC pilot, and was superficially described as Lynch’s revenge on Hollywood and his dismantling of its supposed dream factory, but the movie is more haunting for its penetration of the veil of received wisdom about what constitutes the real. Dreams become other dreams, and there are dreams within dreams, and life itself as depicted is a series or collection of dream situations. The Straight Story (1999), a gentle, slow drama free of perversity, brutality, sensuality, psychedelia, and abstraction, feels in retrospect like Lynch’s final farewell to modes of storytelling that had dominated American cinema since its inception. His 2006 film Inland Empire revisits Hollywood via the imploding mind of a film actress (Dern again, possibly his greatest muse), and is a film in which nothing is fixed and everything transforms. The story, such as it is, seems to implode as the movie goes along, like Cooper getting pulled from one state of being to another in The Return.

Lynch’s presentation of expiration and a fear of the end go far, far beyond the norms of American commercial films — which might, say, interrupt a romantic comedy to have the characters attend a minor character’s funeral, or treat the violent demise of a beloved friend or relative as a plot-driver for an action picture. Lynch pays death a more respectful, lyrical sort of attention, treating it as a shocking disruption of unconsciously enacted patterns that we rarely otherwise consider, and making each incident into a kind of audiovisual poem. Lift every Lynch scene about birth, death, and transformation and string them end-to-end and you’d have a chapbook of elegies.

But the films themselves are so rich, so filled with humor, eccentricity, music, color, and uncategorizable side-trips that one can never reduce them to the sum total of their sicknesses, injuries and curtain calls. Lynch’s own family framed it that way on his official Facebook account: “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’” Lynch loved donuts. They were all over the original Twin Peaks, along with coffee and pie, three of the four basic food groups in Lynch’s life. The fourth, of course, was cigarettes, which he looked cooler smoking than any director who ever lived, and which, by his own admission, caused the emphysema he was diagnosed with in 2020, forcing him to quit smoking before announcing four years later that he was housebound due to supplemental oxygen requirements and mobility issues. He could no longer direct movies on location. He prepared fans for the possibility that The Return might be his final directorial credit. But not his final project.