David Lynch, the visionary artist who made films no one else could

"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."

"Of course, that has never stopped people from trying to find the right phraseology. It was only partway through his career that the term "Lynchian" was coined - a word many deploy, and far fewer are able to aptly define. It may be that Lynch's work is just too hard to pin down: it brought together melodrama and noir, soul-shaking horror and head-scratching surrealism, increasingly casting aside conventional notions of narrative in favour of something foreign and elliptical."

"In his seminal article on Lynch, written around the production of Lost Highway (1997), the late David Foster Wallace wrote that the term "Lynchian" might be academically defined as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter", but that it was "ultimately definable only ostensively - ie, we know it when we see it"."

David Lynch died aged 78, months after announcing an emphysema diagnosis. He operated in a realm beyond articulation, from Eraserhead (1977) through Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Twin Peaks (1991-92; 2016). Nouns, verbs and adjectives can only skirt the edge of his strange, disorienting shadowplay; veer too close and everything gets lost in a great dark maw. The term "Lynchian" emerged midcareer to name his work's blend of melodrama, noir, visceral horror and surrealism and its tendency to cast aside conventional narrative in favour of the foreign and elliptical. One definition frames "Lynchian" as an irony where the macabre and the mundane combine so that the former's perpetual containment lies within the latter, yet the quality remains ultimately recognisable only by example. Blue Velvet most overtly realised this symbiosis by layering pleasant American suburbia atop an underworld of violence.

Read at The Independent