Put a Fish in the Percolator: What David Lynch Taught Me About Creativity
Five things I learned from the work of David Lynch
Like most of mainstream America, my first exposure to the work of David Lynch came with the release of The Elephant Man, his first big time Hollywood production. Bankrolled by Mel Brooks, the film was striking and, except for the strange elephant-noise collage sequences, pretty straightforward in a narrative sense. It provoked a lot of discussion with my fellow high schoolers and I, for one, loved the use of black and white.
Next up was Dune, a film that came with a crib sheet handed out at the box office. I again enjoyed a lot of the visuals in the film and really dug the atypical soundtrack music by the (unfamiliar to me then, because I am a nerd) rock band Toto. I’d tried to read the novel Dune several times in high school and never made it past, oh, 1/3 of the way through the book. I was therefore startled when nearly the entire film consisted of ideas and scenes that I’d read in the novel. I guess that’s why the SciFi Channel ended up doing a miniseries version years later.
Then came Blue Velvet. So disturbing. So strange. So wonderful. I loved it. And when I read (in Rolling Stone, trying to temper my nerdosity) a couple years later that Lynch was developing a TV series, I…
