At the height of my teenage cinephilia I became hell-bent on bludgeoning everyone else's way of seeing into a manner similar to my own and figured that contemporary English-language films were the best way to do this. To that end, I once forced all my uni housemates to endure a screening of Mulholland Drive in our front room. It concluded with me sat on the sofa sobbing hysterically while the rest of them looked on aghast at both the perceived nonsense they'd just witnessed as well as my overly-impassioned reaction to it.
I guess I wanted them to understand the pain of existing; the gossamer line that separates utopian fantasies from the nightmare that is reality; that tragedy is something that's always ready to consume us wholly dare we make a misstep. Shoulda got them all high beforehand, eh.
Blue Velvet was another revelation for me. I grew up in a bourgeois haven that looked cute on postcards - yet my experience of it was that the worst kind of cruelties and grotesqueries lurked within its hidden caverns. Hidden only because people were too wilfully-myopic to see what was around them. I guess many have similar experiences based on how beloved the film is, but I was so young and impressionable when I first saw it and it kinda tore my world apart and put it back together again and I loved it for doing that.
Lynch's best work made me feel very, very seen. Barmy old eccentrics are my kinda people regardless, but rarely do they convey the many intangibles of this fucked up life as kaleidoscopically and intensely as he did. I love art that defies logic, that demands a complete surrender to all that's visceral, that forces us to feel instead of rationalise. If that doesn't exemplify how to live then I don't know what does.
I'm so grateful that he existed.