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David Lynch (1946-2025), Mexico and a Lynchian Anecdote

Rafael Aviña

In September 1980, while I was waiting for the results for the admission to UAM X [Autonomous Metropolitan University campus Xochimilco], I had the great fortune to be part of the Department of Film Program at the Cineteca Nacional, which was back then located on the corner of Calzada de Tlalpan and Río Churubusco, where there was also the CCC Film Training Center and the large facilities of the Estudios Churubusco. Nevertheless, when the Cineteca burned down in March 1982, its various areas had to move to different locations, and we were sheltered by the CCC for over a year..

As our space was small and I didn't have a specific place, I had some spare time to go out and explore all those factories of illusions that surrounded me. Back then, several American productions arrived at our country, especially in 1983, with a particular emphasis on the filming of: Romancing the Stone by Robert Zemeckis, with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and the super-production Dune, directed by David Lynch after the success of The Elephant Man (1980). Dune was a project that became excessively complicated and led its director to stay intermittently in Mexico for a year.

At that time, glucose and cholesterol were not of any concern to me and, some days, I would wander through the studios to buy a soda and candies from a small Conasupo store [a parastatal supermarket] that was found in the inside of the Estudios Churubusco. On one of those walks, I saw in the distance a very tall guy with a futuristic outfit that was walking towards my location along with two other people. At that moment, I didn’t care about them, except for that blond man with platform boots who was no other than the British singer and actor Sting. As they approached me, I realized that the other two men were Kyle MacLachlan and David Lynch. I suppose they saw my shocked face as I bumped into them: Sting didn’t turn to look at me, however, MacLachlan and Lynch held up their hands to me with the “peace” sign and I, happy and surprised, returned the gesture and they walked away in the opposite direction.

With that conflictive production by Dino de Laurentiis, Dune, filmed in Samalayuca, Chihuahua, Pinacate, Puerto Peñasco and the Gran Desierto de Altar in Sonora, as well as in the eight forums of the Estudios Churubusco, Lynch tried to turn around the concepts of sci-fi films, using the homonym novel by Frank Herbert as a basis. Mutilated in its final editing, Dune moved away from the conventions of the Star Wars saga and its surrogates. It was an adult sci-fi tale with a perversity out of the ordinary that years before Alejandro Jodorowsky had almost made; a dark nightmare closer to Sade than to Herbert, whose lack of concessions, complexity and gallery of grotesque characters doomed it to a commercial failure, and which included the participation of Mexicans such as: Angélica Aragón, Julieta Rosen, Margarita Sanz, Claudia Ramírez, Jorge Humberto Elizondo, Eduardo Cassab, Ernesto Laguardia, Ramón Menendez, Honorato Magaloni, Miguel Cane, Anuar Badin and many others.

In that year of 1983, I never imagined that that thirty-year-old who walked half a meter away from me would soon become an outstanding original filmmaker capable of giving coherence to chaos and providing embodiment to Evil, in the most philosophical and physical sense possible. This is because the alternation between the daily and the unforeseen, the reality and the dream, which tends towards horror and the forbidden, emerge in his work. In Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1989-1991/2017), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001), he translates the faces of a nightmare that underlie the normal world into mind-blowing images with an almost scientific rigor.

Lynch’s profound America is located in an imaginary nation without borders, such as the idyllic suburb of Lumberstone in Blue Velvet, or in the wooded lumber region of Twin Peaks, the post-industrial landscape of Eraserhead, the suffocating desert of Dune, the small town of Big Tuna in Wild at Heart, which the filmmaker reaches by distorting the classic story of The Wizard of Oz. And at the same time, in the same hills of Los Angeles, very close to that imposing sign erected around 1923 whose thirteen letters read: “Hollywoodland”, as a cruel and merciless metaphor of one of the most powerful industries in the world, where dreams, fantasies, crimes and unspeakable horrors converge. A whole abstraction of the dark side of Los Angeles and of cinema itself and its personalities as portrayed by Lynch in Mulholland Drive or in Inland Empire (2006).

And David Lynch practically conceived his entire filmography beginning with the phrase: “There is another world...but it is in this one”. Parallel and bizarre universes that are revealed by picking up severed ears from the grass or in the interior of a closet (Blue Velvet); locating inscriptions written in blood or letters buried in the fingernails of corpses, or in electrical power connectors (Twin Peaks); in heads that bounce to become pencils (Eraserhead). And also, inside glass spheres or snakeskin jackets (Wild at Heart); in clandestine videos and porn films (Lost Highway); in a small blue box or an enigmatic theater (Mulholland Drive) or in filmic forums and hotel rooms (Inland Empire).

After the commercial failure that represented Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lynch recovered his original fury in Lost Highway to immerse himself again from that point, in the deepest and most sinister of a lost road with no return, where there is room for brutality, psychogenic escape or multiple personality, horror, crime, amorality, desire or decadence, and in whose work explanations and overunderstandings are not worthy. For Lynch, Mexico City was a magical, mysterious and romantic city; with his death, cinephiles are left orphaned and with a deep sadness, even more in this current context where cinema has lost meaning, emotion and abstraction, and is ruled to a large extent by the agendas of political correctness. David Lynch (1946-2025) was, is and will be one of the greatest of the greats.

Translated by Adrik Díaz