Words feel inadequate when it comes to David Lynch. They feel particularly so now, in the wake of his death at the age of 78, months after the visionary American filmmaker announced he had been diagnosed with emphysema.
How do you articulate such a loss – to cinema, to art, to the world? It feels like we cannot. But the truth is, Lynch has always seemed to operate in a realm beyond articulation – from his very first feature-length film, Eraserhead (1977), through to later masterpieces Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), or Twin Peaks (1991-92; 2016), the show that revolutionised television two times over. Nouns, verbs and adjectives can only skirt the edge of Lynch’s strange, disorienting shadowplay, as if around the perimeter of a black hole. Veer too close, and everything gets lost in the great dark maw of it.
