Ailing Von Trier is one of the last of a vanishing breed

As the controversial director goes into care for Parkinson’s weeks after the death of David Lynch, Xan Brooks fears for the long-term future of uncompromising left-field cinema

- Xan Brooks

A few years ago I attended a John Lydon concert inside a Somerset covered market. The music was good and the mood was cheerful, with the crowd liberally studded with infirm, ageing punks. There were punks clutching walking frames and punks in wheelchairs. There was even a dead punk in an urn who had requested that the ex-Pistol scatter his ashes on stage. Lydon obliged and pretended to gag. He said, “No offence, mate, but you taste like Gauloises.”

Forget the tired adage about policemen getting young. It’s punks getting old that’s the real measure of age, at least for those of us who were raised in the afterglow of new wave music and grindhouse cinema. It’s seeing the upstarts and berserkers who once electrified the Eighties and Nighties being quietly steered into retirement homes or laid to rest and memorialised. In life these people embodied something wild, dark and delicious. In death they are reduced to a set of smiling memes and inspirational quotes. I’m not sure which is more alarming.

Anyone reading the recent tributes to David Lynch, for instance, would be forgiven for thinking of him as America’s eccentric, benign uncle, beaming out on his flock with a mug of warm coffee and his daily meditation advice. That was certainly one aspect of the man, although it rather risks glossing over the actual work he produced. Lynch’s art wasn’t sweet. The Straight Story aside, it was chaotic and savage – meant to chill us to the bone. “There goes the Willy Wonka of filmmaking,” gushed Lara Flynn Boyle the day after his death, as though he’d just exited stage-left after singing “Pure Imagination” to a group of starstruck children.