The Cinema of David Lynch
How a painter became a genius of the medium
David Lynch throughout his career has ventured into various professions related to the artistic sphere. He was born as a painter, but he is also a photographer, editor, actor, screenwriter, and writer. It is precisely this eclecticism that has allowed him to become an extremely original and unpredictable film director.
Being able to fully understand David Lynch’s cinema, placing it in a single category is a work doomed to failure. The greatness of this American director is precisely that of escaping any kind of classification. Certainly, however, there are characteristics that can generally be associated with David Lynch, but which sometimes the director himself enjoys subverting.
What Lynch does in his direction is not so much to directly destroy the canons of American society, but to show its holes and deep imperfections. David Lynch’s study, therefore, concerns those submerged parts of man, the obscurities present in everyone’s banal daily life. The director himself stated:
It’s like when you see an iceberg. We know that what appears out of the water is only a very small part of everything else. I am interested in hidden things. As a psychiatrist, I suppose…
