Few directors have made their mark on cinema like David Lynch. The venerated filmmaker, who passed away on January 16, 2025, was so prolific in his work and so singular in its vision that he joined the ranks of those whose name is used as shorthand to mark a particular aesthetic sensibility. Kubrickian. Herzogian. Lynchian. A Lynch project was always marked by his obsessions with themes such as the dark underbelly of Americana, dual personalities, and the corruption of naive idealism as explored through the uncanny. Towering topics, to be sure, but ones the artist refrained from using as a cudgel, rather allowing them to exist through a sublimation to the visual element of his work. Therefore, the computer generated imagery he adopted into his later filmography was critically polarizing.
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CGI is commonly viewed as a shortcut. “We’ll fix it in post,” goes the phrase. But for Lynch, the technology was not so blunt an instrument. Instead, he may have seen within it the potential to enhance his unmistakable cinematic language. Beginning with the 2017 TV revival, “Twin Peaks: The Return,” CGI began to appear prominently in Lynch’s filmography. He had dealt with controversy his whole career — make your artistic project the disassembly of the American dream and you’re bound to attract ire from some corners — but critics prickled more sharply than usual after “The Return,” claiming the CGI work was done poorly. However, it has since been argued in scholarly media that what occurred in the criticism of “The Return” was an assumption on the part of critics that CGI is always and only a tool aimed at a photorealistic target, whereas Lynch had characteristically deployed it in the service of enhancing the surrealist elements of his scenes.
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