Beyond the End

David Lynch spent his five-decade film and TV career contemplating life, death, and the indescribable realms in between.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

"NOTHING WILL DIE "

”That’s the closing line of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, about the life of the disfigured performer John Merrick (John Hurt). The film begins with nightmarish images of elephants striking down Merrick’s mother, followed by Merrick’s birth, which is represented, like so many important moments in Lynch’s work, abstractly: with a puff of white smoke. It ends with Merrick lying on a bed in his hospital room, whereupon his mother appears to him in a vision. “Nothing will die,” she tells her son.

“Nothing Will Die” is a poem by Tennyson that is worth reading in full now that Lynch has crossed over to the beyond after a lifetime of contemplating it. It’s reassuring to think of his death at the age of 78, after he was evacuated from hellfire in Los Angeles, as a moment worthy of one of his sublime, phantasmic, mysterious mise-en-scènes. In so much of his work, the Missoula, Montana, native envisioned birth, death, and the afterlife with such curiosity that you could appreciate the sheer beauty of his imagery and the feelings evoked before obsessing over the multiple meanings suggested.