Whatever happened to David Lynch? It's more than five years now since the film-maker who was once memorably described as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" released his last film. With his new offering, Lost Highway, due for release in two weeks' time, the Lynch season currently running at the IFC provides an opportunity to look afresh at the work of one of the most provocative and important of contemporary film-makers.
The 1990s haven't been kind to Lynch, who began the decade on the cover of Time magazine, but has found it difficult to make a feature film since the debacle of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The son of a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture, whose job took him around the north-west United States, Lynch attended art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia before he began making short films. In 1971 he started work on his debut feature, Eraserhead, which was to take him five years to complete
A deeply disturbing vision of alienated, nightmarish parenthood, it's a truly original and rewarding experience - for those who can bear to stick with it. Like later Lynch films, it seemed perfectly attuned to the times in its portrayal of sexual disgust against a decaying, post-industrial backdrop. Eraserhead gradually developed a cult following on the late-night and film club circuits, but his second film, The Elephant Man, showed that Lynch could also handle a more conventional melodrama to very good effect.
The science fiction epic Dune, which he directed for Dino De Laurentiis, was a critical and commercial failure, but like all Lynch films, contained moments of startling beauty. More importantly, the unlikely partnership with De Laurentis was to lead to the film which still stands as Lynch's masterpiece, Blue Velvet. This unique amalgam of Hardy Boys' mystery, off-beat comedy and sado-masochism is one of the key films of the 1980s. The success of Blue Velvet inevitably led to a wave of inferior imitations - the nightmare behind the white picket fence became one of the most over-used cliches of the late 1980s - but most of them missed the point entirely. What's truly disturbing about Lynch's vision is not the corruption beneath the All-American surface, but the strangeness that underpins everything; the nameless dread that accompanies the most seemingly harmless objects.
In the forthcoming book Lynch On Lynch, the director remembers how, as a child, "My younger sister, Margaret, was afraid of green peas. I think it was something to do with the consistency and strength of the outer surface, and then what was inside when you broke that membrane. It was a big thing in our family. She used to hide them." It is this preoccupation with what lies behind every surface which underpins the best of Lynch's work.
The seemingly unaffected public persona - the electric-shock haircut, buttoned up shirts and grey suits, have helped contribute to the Lynch myth, as have the stories of his working methods. For many years his creative process involved a daily trip to a Bob's Big Boy at 2.30 p.m., where he would down a chocolate shake and six or seven cups of very sweet coffee, and write down ideas fuelled by the ensuing sugar rush. The affection for the small-town American way of life - all cherry pie and damn fine coffee - sits side by side with an imagination which has been accused of misogyny and pornography. But Blue Velvet's exploration of sadomasochism recalls movies like Rear Window and Peeping Tom in the way it interrogates the audience's own voyeurism. With Lynch the moving image itself, and the soundtrack which accompanies it, are continually re-examined like a wriggling insect on a pin.
More than a decade on, Blue Velvet now seems the pinnacle of Lynch's work, the moment when his sensibility found a narrative thread capable of sustaining an entire feature film. It didn't seem that way in 1990, when his next feature Wild At Heart scooped the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and when Twin Peaks appeared to be redefining the boundaries of what could be done with mainstream network television. Despite its moments of brilliance, though, Wild At Heart was a far less satisfying film than Blue Velvet, and showed how easily Lynch could descend into self-parody and self-consciously "gothic" excess.
The same was true of Twin Peaks, which began superbly but rapidly declined as Lynch lessened his involvement. The nadir was reached with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature film "prequel" to the television series released to widespread (and justified) derision in 1992. By 1995, Tom Di Cillo's spoof on the making of an independent American film in Living In Oblivion could use a dwarf as amusing shorthand for the kind of cut-price surrealism which merited the undesirable tag of "Lynchian".
It's no accident that the new film will be showing in the IFC, rather than in the commercial multiplexes. Lynch appears to have retreated - wisely perhaps - from his enthusiastic engagement with mainstream American popular culture. The new film. financed by the French company CIBY 2000, is more of an "art film" than anything he has done since Eraserhead. The perennial problem of narrative is adroitly dealt with - the film's storyline is circular, ending where it begins. Many of the Lynch signatures are in evidence; wide-eyed ingenues and mysterious, irresistible vamps (in this case both played by Patricia Arquette), voyeurism, pornography and drugs, but there's much less of the quirky humour which leavened the earlier films.
Lynch's work has infected our psyches in so many ways that it's hard to imagine the world without him. His influence can be seen in work ranging from the television programmes of Chris Carter to the plays of Martin McDonagh. In a sense, he's another victim of the pitfalls of celebrity which have always afflicted American artists (and which threaten to engulf Quentin Tarantino). But his fall from grace was so rapid, and his absence from film-making has been so lengthy, that his return with Lost Highway is one of the most interesting cinematic events of the year, and the opportunity to see the earlier films on the big screen again is well worth taking.
Lost Highway opens at the IFC on August 29th. Dune, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart and Fire Walk With Me will all be screened at the IFC over the next three weeks. Call the box office at 01 679 3477 for details. Lynch On Lynch by Chris Rodley is published by Faber on August 16th.
