David Lynch: An American Aesthete

David Lynch: An American Aesthete

By Manny Delgadillo (M.D. Magazine)


The Cuban film critic Mario Rodriguez Alemán used to call the Italian film icon Luchino Visconti the "grand aesthete of cinema.” Notwithstanding, it’s possible to borrow that eloquent epithet and associate it with David Lynch, the director and writer of such now classic films as the sensuous neo-noir Blue Velvet, the enigmatic Mulholland Drive, the surreal and avant-garde Eraserhead. Lynch can be praised, like Visconti, for his meticulous attention to detail, emphasis on sensuality, visceral imagery, and for his exploration of American ethos and sexuality, probing deep into the recesses of our naturalistic human condition, where evil and ugliness predominate. The red-blue velvet drapes, the demented woman, the split personality, time fragmented and deconstructed, the dwarf wearing a red suit, the vagabond with a charred visage: these are Lynchian symbols and motifs that run throughout his films. The mise-en-scene (the arrangement of elements within a scene) in films like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet is tautly and perfectly organized so as to reveal clues about any prefiguring mystery. In the former, a red lampshade, an ashtray, or a blue key are symbols that play a part in the unraveling of an enigma that is encircled by murder and envy. Lynch, then, is perhaps the American filmmaker after Orson Welles who deserves to be crowned with the title of auteur. Like Godard, Welles or Ford, he has created an idiosyncratic world, archetypes, and a microcosm of violence and extreme sensuality all within an exquisite aesthetic context.

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