Lynch

I was in film school when I saw Eraserhead for the first time. There was a screening at the old Cinéma Outremont—I think it was a double-bill with The Elephant Man, but I'm not sure. What I do remember is leaving the theatre slightly stunned, and smiling.

But it was Blue Velvet that knocked me out. I was in a band by that time, three of us living together in a cramped apartment that served as the main revolving door for everyone we knew. And you do know a lot of people when you're twenty, and a musician, and living on your own. We saw Blue Velvet at the Impérial, an old art deco theatre, and the movie likely changed the course of our lives. This was a license to explode and scratch at any surface, build monuments to gas masks and insects. We started incorporating props and projections in our live shows. My friend Bernard and I both painted/sketched so we paired a couple of gigs with art shows, haphazardly thumbtacking our work to the walls. The lines, the limits, all gone. Art existed in any territory we cared to visit, on any medium, screeching or dripping.

The power of Lynch's work lies in its unsettling familiarity, pushing boundaries but rarely straying from the world we already know, and accept. Even his strangest tableaux show roots, tendrils sprouting from the edge of daylight. It's the cinema of closed doors and hushed secrets, of stifled conversations betraying pathology, and excess; the quiet violence of a chokehold in a small town church. A cinema of dreams, but as we all truly dream: lost, unsure, and close to fear. The ground too often slipping as we walk. Just enough.

David Lynch embraced digital early, but always smelled like analog—cigarettes and turpentine and strings and oil. He punched pinpricks in black cardboard that looked like stars.

So, so many stars.