The passing of David Lynch has made the world of art, film, and entertainment stand still. It had no choice but to. The man is synonymous with the medium, and his departure is as monumental an event as the deaths of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Akira Kurosawa. The loss is felt, especially for fans of the weird and the surreal who found a great deal of understanding and comfort in his movies.
Reactions are pouring in from social media. Many have taken to signaling out just how deeply Lynch’s influences run in their work, or how formative his movies were as they developed their tastes in film. But it’s Criterion’s response that carries that extra something special, largely because of Lynch’s place in it.
If you go to Criterion.com directly on your desktop, you’ll see the site’s homepage is a full-screen banner of David Lynch in black and white. It’s a touching gesture that doesn’t just honor the legendary director but also tips its hat to him for being one of the main reasons why so many film enthusiasts and budding movie fans flock to Criterion in search of his work.
Criterion is home to Lynch’s oeuvre, and it’s proven to be a very welcoming one at that. In fact, it’s the only place you can get some of his movies in America. What stands out, though, is the care that goes into making each release carry a level of quality and recognition worthy of them. Their edition of Eraserhead, for instance, features digital restorations of six Lynch short films, including one of his most terrifying called The Alphabet (1968). That’s on top of all the bonus content (such as documentaries and commentary) that accompany it. It’s an expertly curated look at the process behind the signature weirdness that put Lynch’s movies in a category of their own (encapsulated in an original adjective: lynchian).
Visiting the Criterion site now will also direct you to a Lynch retrospective playing on their streaming channel that features his most popular movies and some of his shorts. Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Inland Empire are joined by shorts Six Men Getting Sick, The Grandmother, and Premonitions Following an Evil Deed. Also included is the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life that you can access without a subscription to the Criterion Channel.
The best way to honor a creator of any kind is by enjoying their work. It’s where they leave bits of their souls behind, securing immortality. David Lynch is an inescapable force in cinema. Like Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and Orson Welles, there’s just no way you won’t end up watching and being completely absorbed by one of his films at one point or another. His gravitational pull is too potent. And once that happens, you’ll realize just how many things in pop culture have his fingerprints all over them. So start up on your first Lynch films or revisit that one movie of his you haven’t seen in a while, and let him show why cinema will never be the same without him.
