The pᴀssing of David Lynch has rightly brought renewed attention to the storied filmmaker’s work as a director. It’s difficult to sum up Lynch’s legacy, but perhaps his final contribution to the silver screen does it best. Strangely enough, this contribution was not a directing job, but an acting role, which saw Lynch cameo as legendary director John Ford in The Fabelmans, an autobiographical movie about the childhood of Steven Spielberg.
Asked about the cameo when his movie was released in 2023, Spielberg described Lynch as “so right” to play Ford in The Fabelmans. On the face of it, this ᴀssertion seems to make little sense. Leaving aside Lynch’s uncanny physical resemblance in the scene to the prolific auteur of Hollywood’s Golden Age, donning an eye-patch and a baseball cap while shrouded in cigar smoke, the two directors appear to have little in common. Ford was a master of the classic cinematic Western, whereas Lynch was an arthouse filmmaker who leaned heavily into surrealism. Yet the comparison somehow rings true.
David Lynch Was An Artist First And Foremost
He Saw Filmmaking As An Extension Of Other Art Forms
Lynch’s appearance as Ford in The Fabelmans focuses on the idea of cinema as an art form. “So, what do you know about art, kid?” he barks at Sammy Fabelman after a heavy puff on his cigar. When Sammy begins to profess his love for Ford’s films, the director cuts him off. “No, art!” he scolds. He then has Sammy observe the difference between two paintings hanging on the wall of his office.
“If the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring…”
This is the first reason why Spielberg was “so right” to cast Lynch in the role. He was an artist who placed his work as a filmmaker right alongside his pᴀssion for painting and music. David Lynch’s best movies and TV shows rank among the most highly regarded works of art of the past half century. They’re made with the same aesthetic appreciation that an impressionist painter or a classical composer might have for their work. It’s not for nothing that he and Spielberg are the only movie directors of modern times to have an adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary named after them.
What John Ford Tells Sammy Fabelman Reflects Lynch’s Own View of Filmmaking
Ford Tells Sammy To Focus Primarily On Visual Perspective
Watching the best scenes from David Lynch’s movies, whether it’s the eerie opening sequence of Blue Velvet or the surreal ending of Elephant Man, it’s clear to see that Lynch was speaking from the heart when he was playing Ford in The Fabelmans. Ford’s apparent obsession with finding the “goddamn horizon” in painting on the wall is actually a lesson in camera placement and perspective for aspiring young filmmaker Sammy.
Lynch’s own filmmaking takes Ford’s principle – “If the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as sнιт.” – a step further. He’s not only concerned with the horizon’s position in panoramic vistas, but the unusual positioning of characters in their settings, and the juxtaposition of unusual colors, textures and shapes, either in the same sH๏τ or in consecutive sH๏τs. Take, for instance, the juxtaposing of primary-colored flower beds and manicured lawns with a close-up of shiny black beetles crawling through the grᴀss in Blue Velvet. Then there’s Lynch’s best-known visual trademark as a director, his sudden focus on a seemingly unrelated moving object.
The Fabelmans Shows How Lynch And Ford Were Unlikely Kindred Spirits
They Had The Same Approach To Shooting A Picture From Opposite Ends Of The Hollywood Spectrum
While he wrote most of the screenplays for projects he directed, Lynch was primarily a visual filmmaker. On the subject of visual art, he once said, “Nature can teach us a lot of things.” (via BBC Archive) He was discussing the different “speeds” at which objects or settings appear in an image, depending on how busy or bold they appear relative to the other things around them. This observation on the importance of contrast in an image could just as easily have been made by John Ford, who was a master of visual framing with nature as his guide.
Incidentally, Spielberg has described nature as “a character in [Ford’s] pictures” (via AFI), something which is best demonstrated in the director’s 1956 masterpiece The Searchers. Ford used the spatial and temporal dimensions of the film camera to determine what would appear in a scene, just as Lynch pushed the boundaries of what a camera could show to generate an emotional response.
It’s true that Ford was a director of big-budget Westerns, with a record-breaking run of Oscar wins as director, while David Lynch was an outsider whose movies struggled to break even. But although they appeared to stand at opposite ends of the Hollywood cinematic spectrum, the two directors had the same first principles when it came to shooting a movie. Essentially, they agreed that it was about pointing the camera at something interesting, and trying to make a work of art.
