“The biggest inspiration of my life”: How David Lynch’s time in Philadelphia informed his career
There’s a sharp contrast that runs through the work of David Lynch.
The darkness of abuse and corruption sits alongside humour, tenderness, and real love, where dreams and nightmares merge, creating a world that is as murky as it is ultimately beautiful and real.
From Eraserhead to Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch’s work was so utterly singular and identifiable, flirting with the horrors of life’s deepest, most painful corners while revelling in the surreal, but this might not have been possible if not for the influence that living in Philadelphia had on the young artist.
Born in Missoula, he eventually settled in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, where he married his first wife, Peggy Reavey, and fathered one child with her, Jennifer. He met her while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which he moved to based on the recommendation of his pal Jack Fisk, who would come to work with Lynch as a production designer later down the line (and Lynch would later go on to marry Fisk’s sister, Mary).
Yet, while he was trying to enjoy family life as a new parent with Reavey, the anxiety of becoming a father, paired with the crime-ridden area of Philadelphia they resided, came to affect Lynch. He channelled his feelings into his first feature, Eraserhead, which took him several years to finish, with the project eventually emerging in 1977. Defined by its industrial backdrop, shadowy and dark, shots where the primary character, Henry, walks down the street feel almost claustrophobic; it’s utterly grim and depressing.
Despite Philadelphia being, at least according to Lynch, a dirty place full of bizarre people and run-down industrial wastelands, the filmmaker was strangely inspired, and he used this world of darkness and oddity to inform his work. “The biggest inspiration of my life was the city of Philadelphia,” he once claimed.
In the book Lynch on Lynch, the filmmaker revealed that his surroundings were concerned with “violence, hate and filth”, reflecting on an incident in which “a kid was shot to death down the street”, while they themselves “were robbed twice, had windows shot out, and had a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in. The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense”.
For the first time, he came to realise there was beauty also to be found in these bleak moments on grimy street corners and amongst decrepit buildings, as they stood as signs of human life, and the city itself inspired his artistic awakening. He discovered his desire to make films while studying alongside like-minded artists, which resulted in his first short film, Six Figures Getting Sick and sparked his interest in making longer-form moving image projects, wherein more shorts followed, like The Alphabet and The Grandmother, helping the filmmaker to discover his surreal style, Bacon-esque in their compelling grotesqueness.
Following Eraserhead, Lynch would go on to experiment with acclaimed works like The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and, of course, Twin Peaks, changing TV forever in the process, and whether he was making masterpieces like Mulholland Drive or crazy avant-garde fever dreams such as Inland Empire, both informed by the darkness of Hollywood, the influence of Philadelphia was still apparent in the contrast between beauty and suffering. It was somewhere that had opened the young artist’s mind for the first time, and he was never the same again.
