The movie universe David Lynch “would love to live in”
While the ‘Lynchian’ style has become an aesthetic phenomenon with its lush reds and uncanny glamour, ‘Lynchian’ worlds are a whole other story. Always filled with creepy going on as dark figures and happenings infiltrate typical suburban settings, David Lynch‘s films regularly become a nightmare territory that even the biggest film fans wouldn’t want to inhabit. But as for the director himself, he’d more than happily set up shop and live inside one of his movie universes.
From how horror comes to the town of Twin Peaks to the villainous figures found in the seedy underbelly of suburbia in Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s cinematic worlds are always interested in taking scenes you feel comfortable in and making you vividly uncomfortable. These aren’t distant or disconnected settings, offering you safety in separation. But instead, Lynch has always rooted his twisted plots in common settings.
That’s a key part of the style that’s now coined ‘Lynchian’. It’s an aesthetic language that cashes in on taking small-town sights and imbuing them with confused chaos and a sort of beauty that’s always off-set with a slight edge of fear, like the luscious red room in Twin Peaks.
While there might be pockets of his projects that feel like safe or exciting spaces to live in, offering entertainment with his more friendly characters, that can’t be said of the cinematic world that Lynch would choose to inhabit. Off all his universes, he said he’d happily stay forever in the world of Eraserhead, his most confusing and off-putting tale of all.
“I love the world of Eraserhead. I would love to live in that world,” the director told Vulture. Shot in black and white with dramatic lighting and strange creators, it feels like an odd choice for a home, but it makes sense when considering just how long Lynch stayed there before.
His debut feature, Eraserhead, haunted Lynch, crafted slowly over the years as he didn’t have the pressure of expectation. He also didn’t have the big budgets he’d be handed later, so there was a lot of time spent figuring out exactly how the world would look and how they’d bring that to life. All in all, it took him over five years to create, meaning that he essentially did live in that world for quite some time.
“I designed it and built a lot of the things. You just work until you get it to feel correct,” he said of the process, describing the cinematic universe within it as something he quite literally made with his own two hands. So, just like the flatpack furniture we’ve all slaved over or the things built for our own houses, that same sense of comfort and pride exists in every corner of Eraserhead for Lynch. Maybe that allows him to see less of how unsettling it is and simply see a space that he made and feels more than happy within.
It’s also based on a city that Lynch called home for a time during the start of his career. “It was a film that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia,” he said, making the film even more homely for the director as it’s based on a place he’s already lived in.
Similar to Mulholland Drive, the street that the director lives on and the name of his 2001 film, Lynch is clearly more than happy to take his local scenes and turn them creepy, building his cinematic universes from the real life ones he exists in.
