Guy Maddin names his favourite David Lynch movie: “A real eye-opener”
You may have a favourite David Lynch film. Or maybe you just have a least favourite one (perhaps all of them); however, if you’re remotely active on social media, you probably know who he is and have heard of his passing on January 15th, 2025. But if you’re even deeper in the moss and mud of art films that actively resist interpretation, you may probably not be surprised to know that an even more eccentric director, Guy Maddin, was inspired by Lynch.
In an interview with Maddin and Cate Blanchett, the director spoke about David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature Eraserhead: “Eraserhead was a real eye opener — rest in peace, David. I couldn’t sleep after seeing it, not just because of the incredible vibrations I took home with me from the sound design and the shocking images, but I couldn’t believe that David Lynch had made a movie about me ten years earlier”.
Eraserhead is an interesting movie to pick as your personal autobiography, although Lynch has gone on record saying that the film was his as well. The film follows David Spencer, the titular Eraserhead (probably…?) and what it’s about, what it means or just what happens, is a subject of visceral debate. The closest thing to a consensus among Lynch’s acolytes is that the film is about sexuality and fatherhood, encoded with trauma. Whatever Maddin saw in it, he declined to say.
Maddin’s own career is strewn with films that everyone who cares to watch them calls ‘dreamlike’ in chorus, but they have battery acid in their veins. If he’s known for anything at all, it’s probably 2006’s Brand Upon the Brain and 2007’s My Winnipeg, which have both been acknowledged by The Criterion Collection, who sell overpriced DVDs and Blu-rays. Other noteworthy inclusions are 2002’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, 2018’s The Green Fog and most recently, 2023’s Rumors, all of which won or were nominated for awards at festivals almost as obscure as his films themselves.
There’s no record of David Lynch having claimed to watch any of these films. Lynch himself left a staggeringly profuse body of work before his aforementioned death. You might know him from Twin Peaks, or maybe you have seen 1986’s Blue Velvet. You might be angry at him for 1984’s Dune. Whatever the case, his influence lives on to this day.
Maddin claimed to start out as a writer, had “misadventures” in acting and failed at both by his own estimation, but “discovered these kind of primitively human movies that really moved [him]”. David Lynch stood out to him, and while their films have a certain tonality of spirit, which is recognisable when watching them side by side, they both have a unique voice that is functionally inimitable.
