RIP David Lynch

Well, here we are: another one down in the pantheon of our creative heroes. David Lynch is no more of this earth. Requiescat in pace. My first exposure to his canon was The Elephant Man of 1980, which I watched with my late friend John Kyte on an early visit back to Birmingham some forty-odd years ago. He had one of the early VCRs - a Sony Betamax - and had managed to get a copy of the film, somehow. In those days, legal release copies of feature films cost a small fortune, hence the proliferation of video hire shops that began in that era. Anyhow, we watched the film in silence and we both ended up in tears over the plot - go look it up if you don't know the story - but the main takeaway for me was the cinematography/direction/foley axis: particularly the sound direction; never mind the wonderful performances of the principal actors of the piece: the surreality of the mix - a glorious spectacle in itself - lent the narrative poignancy and fixed its historical placement for me. A year so after this, I watched Lynch's much earlier Eraserhead for the first time, which I never revisited for around twenty years as I found it so deeply disturbing on first viewing. I still haven't gotten around to a third watch in all these forty years, but I think I might give it a bash in tribute to the great man. Just maybe not tonight, eh?...