The movies David Lynch called his most emotional: “I cried so much”
To the unassuming eye, David Lynch was the guy who made surreal movies that take several watches to make mere sense of.
Almost 25 years later and fans are still baffled trying to extract the meaning of every scene in Mulholland Drive, with its tiny old people running across the screen and the random men who discuss a dream before seeing a terrifying figure outside of the diner. Of course, there is an explanation for each of Lynch’s confusing decisions if you allow yourself the time to analyse them in the context of the wider narrative, but it’s his desire to keep audiences on their toes, such that you can’t be a passive spectator of his films, that made him such a cinematic pioneer.
When we think of Lynch’s idiosyncratic body of work, iconic moments like Laura Palmer screaming into the camera, Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth huffing gas and turning into a deranged baby-man, or Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley singing Elvis in his snakeskin jacket (a symbol of his individuality) at a metal show come to mind.
Yet, alongside these twisted or, quite frankly, insane moments that Lynch managed to conjure was deep emotion. It can be easy to get swept up in the bizarre world of Twin Peaks, with its cast of strange and colourful folk who make the picturesque town far from a desirable holiday destination, but at its core, Laura’s story is truly devastating, and that final sequence in Fire Walk with Me is an exercise in emotional torture; it’s unforgettably sad.
Even when Lynch is at his funniest—I’d argue this is most evident in Wild at Heart—his films are still jam-packed with harsh emotional truths about life. Sure, Sailor and Lula talk like characters from a cheesy old B-movie, but the film is incredibly dark, with memories of sexual abuse threatening to bubble to the surface and destroy Lula’s happiness.
But which movies did Lynch consider his most emotional? Which were the ones that affected him the most? The filmmaker found himself moved by all of his movies, but in an interview with i-D, he once revealed that he “cried so much during The Straight Story and The Elephant Man”.
Can you blame him? The Elephant Man came first, a few years after the release of his 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead. This wasn’t a super surreal journey into parental and sexual anxieties; however, this was based on a true story of human cruelty.
Taking a cue from the story of Joseph Merrick, named John in the film, The Elephant Man explores his rescue from a Victorian freak-show by a surgeon, who subsequently treats him as an object of fascination for the upper classes, as would be the case for many such victims of these road shows, thrown into the proverbial ditch of the undersiable due to their fated appearance. Merrick just wants to be seen as the human being he is, a kind and inquisitive soul, but his life ends in tragedy. I challenge you to watch the film and not cry at the end.
Meanwhile, The Straight Story, which came around in 1999, marked an unexpected collaboration between Lynch and Disney, a pairing none of us could have predicted. The surprisingly wholesome journey into brotherhood and mortality is arguably one of the filmmaker’s sweetest and most accomplished films, showing he could do a fair bit more than just erotically-charged surreal slices of life’s darker corners. The Straight Story is often brushed aside because of its odd-one-out status in Lynch’s filmography, but it’s still an undeniably moving piece of work, and one the director was chuffed to bits with.
Lynch continued in the interview, expounding as only he could, on the nature of feeling, “Some of my reviews made me cry as well. My editor will tell you I sit sometimes in the edit room and weep. Emotion is a thing that cinema can really communicate, but it’s tricky. Here, the balancing of elements once again is critical. A little too much of something and you kill the emotion, too little of something else and it just doesn’t happen. In The Straight Story, the challenge was all about trying to find that tender balancing point.”
As unexpected as The Straight Story was for many fans, who were expecting more psychosexual nightmares like his previous film, Lost Highway, it encapsulated Lynch’s innate desire to dig into the heart of humanity and find a slightly different side, a quieter, more meditative one. He loved people in all of their vastness, with all of their problems and strangeness and idiosyncrasies, and The Straight Story and The Elephant Man are the ultimate celebration of someone who saw beauty in every dark corner.
