Last Highway!

David Lynch is dead. This moves me a lot and I wonder why. Of course, he is a great artist who accompanied me and it is logical to be touched, especially as a film-lover. Yet, it goes far beyond emotion and beyond love for movies. It has something to do with intuition. I have, we all have, lost a dear friend.

He is not only a movie director. He is a complete artist, a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a musician in his own way.
And when we go and see « Mulholland Drive », for instance, we don't go and see a movie, we go and see a David Lynch movie and this makes a whole lot of difference. Very few directors have achieved this. Watching one of his movies is like making an experiment, being caught up in a world which is both ours and totally strange, intimate and alien. And we get out of it delighted and subdued, groggy and disoriented, like waking up and not knowing if it was a nightmare or an extraordinary journey.
Every movie fan has his own list of magic or terrifying, unforgettable moments, pictures, scenes scattered in David Lynch's movies.
He is a cousin of Kafka, Picasso, of experimental musicians. Each film is a jigsaw puzzle and after every vision, a few pieces still lack and they are never the same. His movies are an enduring mystery. And they are always deeply true, deeply disturbing, deeply moving. If there is a visual persistence there is also a Lynchian persistence.

He dynamites narration and plots, shocks, searches and, in the night that we inhabit, leaves luminous and staggering comets.

Of course like millions of viewers I asked myself the wrong questions : « Why ? What does it mean ? » instead of just enjoying this total expatriation, this delicious difference, this unknown land.
Then there was : « Twin Peaks : the Return » (for, of course, David Lynch blew up the concept of series, as soon as the 90's, to heat it white-hot, an incandescendence so far never approached or rivaled).
The simple reappearence of the characters on the screen, 30 years later, moved me to tears ; How could Lynch achieve this prodigy ? It was like meeting old very close friends I didn't know I missed.
And the vision of this marvel, this monument of pure modern art suddenly lit the link I had with David Lynch. Besides the intimate resonances, I realised what essential thing David Lynch had taught me unbeknowst : He taught me not to understand ! He taught me to release the grip and let go, to trust and take the vertiginous jump into the delicious and frightening unknown which enables to avoid useless questions and savour sensations, somersaults and sheer emotions intertwined in his work,
Am I really sad then ? I don't know but I do know I have, we all have lost a friend, the existence of whom many ignored.
Farewell David ! You live forever in this « Inland Empire » where we roam endlessly and which looks like life.

I am sorry. This is not a discussion. I just want to pay a tribute to an artist dear to me.