David Lynch: The Quiet Bad Boy of Surrealist Cinema

Creative rebellion doesn’t always need to be loud.

Photo by Sarkel

“When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it,” filmmaker, artist, and musician David Lynch once said in an interview with The Guardian. “And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting — each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language — it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”

Much has been said about Lynch’s reluctance to reveal what his films are about, but not enough has been said about the courage behind this reluctance.

He wasn’t afraid to be misunderstood. Instead, he bravely gave the audience the freedom to experience his creations and come to their own conclusions about what he was really trying to say. Other than the occasional hint, his movies and TV shows didn’t come with instructions. You had to put in the work.

And man, the bastard didn’t make it easy.

Plenty of filmmakers have flirted with ambiguity, but Lynch made love to it. His movies rarely made logical sense, but they always made intuitive sense. Lynch committed fully and finally to the Abstraction; he let…