In passing away, David Lynch [1946-2025], like Federico Fellini and Jacques Tati, two filmmakers he greatly admired, has left us not only a body of work but, above all, a world. This means that a whole range of images, signs and affects has been imprinted on the brains of countless cinephiles and ordinary film buffs, who have at one time or another been touched by the grace of this highly coherent yet totally proliferating universe.

When it comes to Lynch's world, everyone more or less has an idea of what we're talking about. But this idea is most often reduced to a few figures of mystery and strangeness, which, if not carefully approached, can quickly become cliché. In this vein, the filmmaker is often likened to an all-powerful artist, a kind of eccentric demiurge who accumulated oddities and more or less incomprehensible visions. From this point of view, Lynch was the ideal filmmaker, who always left viewers to interpret his work on their own, never offering his own explanations.

Given the enormous hermeneutic literature generated by Mulholland Drive [2001], Lost Highway [1997] or the three seasons of the Twin Peaks series [1990-1991, then 2017], it's fair to say that he was on a par with Stanley Kubrick, the most fantasized filmmaker in the history of cinema. Additionally, Lynch was often seen as an artist of pure sensation dismissing all forms of meaning. Some have even gone so far as to claim that the seduction of this highly sensorial cinema conceals a staggering emptiness, a total absence of meaning. In other words, this work is perceived as either over-significant or, conversely, insignificant – in other words, literally meaningless. It has been referred to as surrealism, a superficial way of designating an autonomous world that escapes all comprehension.

Broadening the notion of reality

Even though I have also been moved by the sensoriality of this universe and its enigmatic character, this vision of a cinema cut off from our reality has always bothered me a little. First of all, it seems to me that for Lynch, this sensory dimension was first and foremost a means of establishing a connection with his viewers. The filmmaker's visual, sonic and musical means were a way of conditioning the viewer to excite perception, making it finer, more acute, mobilizing more subtle perceptual flows and awakening certain somewhat anesthetized areas of our brain.

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