David Lynch ((January 20, 1946 – January 15, 2025) changed the lives and minds of the entire generation at the turn of the millennium with the Twin Peaks series, which awakened admiration and curiosity for his. other works.
I remember being very attentive to his thriller Inland Empire, which went astray very quickly in the cinema, but then I watched it again and again and again and went through all the details in the belief that it was possible to unpick it. I will have to publish that text, because it is very interesting. The main intertextual reference of the thriller was to another Hollywood classic, Sunset Boulevard, which in turn referred to another classic of silent cinema, Queen Kelly, and the three films were interconnected, like a clue to each other, where not only the plots, but also the actors, in both fictional and real life, echoed.
But now, and as fate would have it, the real Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood burned down, and David Lynch, according to the Guardian, suffered from a chronic lung disease, emphysema, caused by smoking, towards the end of his life (and what the heck, but there was a lot of smoke and fog in his films), and he died at 78, surrounded by family. "Fire walk with me".
The Inland Empire I mentioned above echoed other features of Lynch's cinematic language that will remain unforgettable, such as:
- Dark, dimly lit corridors, howling (e.g. in Eraserhead, Twin Peaks). The corridors in the film's plot have no "object" logical explanation, even their arrangement defies the architectural topology of the edves, so that the corridor motif in the films can be understood as a pathway to another world/life or another perception of it, and the characters cannot get to another world or spacetime without changing themselves (in Nikki Becomes Sue, and vice versa).
- The camera 'enters' the frame - the film shows the filming (Blue Velvet)
- Red curtains, a return to a past painted in dark colours (both figuratively and morally) (like the Twin Peaks series and the film Fire Walk With Me). Incidentally, as a joke reminiscent of Twin Peaks, there is also a log sawed in a room full of dancers at the very end, during the credits.
- Sexual abuse, horrific, twisted imagery. (Lost Highway)
- Flashing light - indicates a shift between worlds or a change in perception (love scene, corridors, "lost girl" on TV)
- Repetition and flashbacks, giving a ritualistic aspect to the narrative.
The list could go on and on, and it will only reveal that Lynch made films like a map or a network, each time making new interconnections. Interestingly, Lynch himself later commented on Inland Empire with another intertext, leading to the Indian scriptures, the Upanishads, and suggesting an even more distant approach reminiscent of meditation:
"We are like spider.
We weave our life and then move along it.
We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.
This is true for the entire universe." (Lynch, 2006)
Rest in peace, breathe fresh eternity, and we will continue to dig into the webs that your creativity has created, which have become our reality.