David Lynch and Los Angeles: The City That Shaped His Surreal Vision
“I love the light so much. Los Angeles is spread out, I don’t know what is about it, but I have a feeling of freedom. It’s the light and freedom, and it’s a great feeling there, for me.” - David Lynch
This week, still reeling from the devastating impact of wildfires, Los Angeles took another hit: the death of Hollywood anti-hero David Lynch, the great chronicler of a city as dark as it is glorious. Sick from smoking-induced emphysema, Lynch had been house-bound since last year. His death was reportedly linked to relocating from his home as the Sunset Fire spread closer.
For a director so drawn to the absurd and the surreal, it seems somewhat Lynchian that the fate of a city he loved deeply would be so intrinsically tied to his own life.
Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, he moved to Philadelphia to study filmmaking in the 60s. Yet it was in Los Angeles that he finally found his home, arriving in the City of Angels in the 1970s.
He was drawn to the city’s everyday quirks: from the springtime scent of night-blossoming jasmine to the chocolate milkshake of Burbank’s Bob Big Boy Diner. It was at people-watching at the latter he found inspiration for the villainous Frank Booth of the 1986 thriller Blue Velvet, Lynch’s feature film debut.
Lynch went onto shoot in the rural pine-laden town of Snoqualmie for the seminal 1990s series Twin Peaks, but Los Angeles soon returned to the fore of his work. In the aptly titled Los Angeles trilogy, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), the city became the perfect backdrop for Lynch to explore the themes of identity, consciousness and reality.
“When you fly into LA at night, it’s all lit up, miles and miles of lights – so beautiful. It’s a very fast image. But within it there are these places that talk about memory.” -David Lynch
Lost Highway’s main character, Fred, repudiates the presence of cameras (“I like to remember things in my own way” he says). This quote reveals much about why Lynch liked to film the city in his own way—part dream, part memory, part nightmare, but somehow, still very real.
“When you fly into LA at night, it’s all lit up, miles and miles of lights – so beautiful. It’s a very fast image. But within it there are these places that talk about memory,” Lynch gushed in a 2014 interview. “ The golden age of Hollywood is still living in some moods here, in the DNA of the city. There are different textures within LA.”
“I love Hollywood. When you're there in LA, this night jasmine smell comes, and you can feel the golden age of Hollywood in the air. It’s all part of this dream. Theres a lot wrong with it but that part is a big lure to people” - David Lynch
Lynch’s beloved LA diners similarly serve importance scenic functions: where waitresses swap name tags, clients become waitresses and waitresses become actors. Over the quaint US aesthetic of pancakes and cherry pies, Lynch casually chucks entire notions of reality into the milkshake blender.
The director found nothing more inspiring than his home city—a place where storytelling is interwoven into its very being, an obscuring of the norm, where glamour is darkly juxtaposed with horror.
In Los Angeles, Lynch found the perfect metaphor for the human mind—agonising yet at once astonishingly beautiful.