We will miss him: David Lynch

My first encounter with David Lynch was “Twin Peaks” in 1990, when I still lived in Graz, Austria. The allure of the mysterious, the idea of a secret everyone knew, but no one spoke about, the “said and unsaid,” and the cinematography were exciting. I remember that we waited for the new episode week after week. Starting from there, the passion became almost an obsession, leading me to discover previous creations, such as Blue Velvet with the wonderful Isabella Rossellini and the extraordinary and disturbing Dennis Hopper, The Elephant Man with John Hurt, and also the film later disavowed by Lynch, Dune, which I still love and also believe to be much closer to Frank Herbert’s novel, and its style, than Denis Villeneuve’s recent adaptation. His masterpiece would come later, the enigmatic Mulholland Drive with the perfect and multifaceted Naomi Watts.

David Lynch was a director and an artist who loved to play not only with the plots of his films or with images; he wanted to play with the viewer’s head, deceiving, diverting, and leading him on unexpected and surprising visual and conceptual paths. No other film director is comparable to him, except perhaps David Cronenberg—naturally with a taste tending towards the macabre and with a more pronounced physicality.

The void left by David Lynch in the world of cinema and art will be difficult to fill.