David Lynch: The Director Who Dreamed

Speaking in the novel Lynch on Lynch, director David Lynch explains his approach to explaining his films, ‘I think people know what Mulholland Drive is to them, but they don’t trust it. They want to have someone else tell him. I love people analysing it, but they don’t need me to help them out.’ The famous director, who died this year at 78, is renounced for crafting complex and unexplained media, films and television that are meant to be conveyed more as a waking dream than a straightforward narrative. Where the director finds meaning is through characterisation and a genuine sense of humanity is his pictures, coming from a background in painting and the arts, Lynch’s film showcases a lot of visuals that are not beholden by a meaning he handholds the viewer through. Starting his career with short films known as Six Men Getting Sick (1967) and The Alphabet (1968), the Alphabet is synonymous with his future work.

The short film follows a girl who chants the alphabet to a collection of images of horses before eventually dying in her bed, dream-like logic perpetuates over the film, as the alphabet appears on the screen in text as the girl overlays audio with her distorted cries. Describing the idea that formulated the short film in Lynch on Lynch, Lynch states, ‘Peggy’s niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way.’ Lynch had always been interested in the concept of dreams, tackling the concept across his 10 feature films, ranging from his first feature Eraserhead (1977) to his final feature Inland Empire (2006), and continuing its use in his famous television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991), and its’ follow-up Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).