Across the entire spectrum of great American icons, there is no one quite like David Lynch. He was a walking enigma: an artist’s artist who was also somehow mainstream, an unapologetic esotericist whose work still managed to be immediately though ineffably understood, a well-known and highly regarded director who was nevertheless completely underrated. He’s arguably the most influential filmmaker of the last 50 years, and though many have tried, no one has been able to walk down the lane he invented with 1977’s Eraserhead.
Lynch died on Thursday at the age of 78. He had recently been suffering from emphysema due to complications from COVID, which kept him homebound. It’s another blow for Los Angeles in a grim month, since, along with being one of our great filmmakers, he was one of those luminary chroniclers of LA, on par with Joan Didion, Mike Davis, John Singleton, and Tupac. From his trilogy of LA films (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire), to his WKCR weather reports, to the apocryphal stories of his daily Bob’s Big Boy routine, and stunts like his FYC Oscar campaign for Laura Dern, he was a rich LA character, without whom the city seems that much dimmer.
Lynch was born in Missoula, Mont. in 1946, but ended up moving all around the country: Sandpoint, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; Durham, N.C.; Alexandria, Va. I think this firsthand sense of the large sprawl of America is what imbues his movies with such national specificity, such Americanness. Just about everyone has a mental image of the David Lynch persona, and much like with his movies, they’re all probably just as true as they are false, maybe even at the same time. His history and background are well-trodden territory but he remains an elusive, inscrutable figure.
He is the rare artist whose work was so singular as to become adjectival. As David Foster Wallace said, in his piece from the set of Lost Highway, “Lynchian” could best be defined as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Wallace gives a helpful example: “Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims’ various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughly Lynchian.” The typical combines with the bleak, and makes for something bizarrely humorous or funnily horrifying. The way he juxtaposed the light with the dark, the absurd and oblique with the melodramatic, the humorous with the terrifying, resulted in a wholly unique style that was weird, wild, and mysterious, while at the same time deeply sincere, personal, and, most of all, affecting. Lynch’s work was always something you felt. Tangible, yet completely out of grasp. With that in mind, rather than any kind of misguided exegesis seeking to decipher the mysteries of Lynch’s movies, it feels most fitting to speak to my personal, emotional relationship with his work.
The first David Lynch thing I remember seeing was Mulholland Drive. At something like 3:00 a.m., having just returned home from a night out, I flipped to HBO and caught the movie right before the Winkie’s Diner scene. If you know the movie, you might imagine what kind of impression this immediately left on me, watching for the first time during that time of night when it feels like you’re the only person awake in the world. That scene and the movie itself made a lasting impact—the dreamy mixed with the nightmarish, the strange, stilted performances, the provocative score and convoluted storyline. I was not a very sophisticated film watcher then, though, and it bothered me how confusing I found it. It did not make me want to seek out more of his work.
My transition into becoming a Lynch fan happened a year later when I finally got around to watching Twin Peaks. The monumental series, which he co-created with Mark Frost, presaged the so-called prestige television era nearly a decade before The Sopranos. Before watching it, I’d already known of Twin Peaks as the show that inspired all of my (and your) favorite shows, but I feared it might feel dated, in the way many influential and imitated things tend to feel dated. But what becomes obvious from the very beginning—like from the literal opening credits—is that there has still never been a show quite like it. There’s a stillness to it that’s hypnotizing. The camera seems as in love with the swaying Douglas firs and the swinging stoplight as it is with all the inexplicably beautiful women who inhabit this fictional town.
Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper is as close a stand-in for Lynch himself as any of his other protagonists. The earnest, grown-up boy scout who is adorably good-natured, kind, and incredibly horny, a consummate if unorthodox professional who relies more on intuition and dreams to solve crimes than strict investigative work. Angelo Badalamenti’s score is elegiac at one moment and bluesy the next. Tonally, Twin Peaks veers wildly from Douglas Sirk melodrama to police procedural to 1950s rebellious youth film to harrowing and abstract psychological horror. That was part of what made Lynch so special: the way he could translate the avant-garde for a wide audience without watering any of it down. Even now it feels impossible to explain how big the show was in its day and why its popularity persists today, its fanbase spanning every possible generation. But I can tell you the moment when I knew the show had me fully in its thrall: It was the third episode of Season 2, when FBI agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), after spending the episode pissing off the entire Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, is on his way out and maybe on his way to getting beaten up by Sheriff Harry Truman, when he completely upends your expectations of who he is in one brief moment. I can’t think of a scene that better exemplifies the magic of this show.
But that was the magic in all of his work. Every movie, every scene, every character felt like nothing you’d ever seen before and yet exactly right.
His depictions of Leave It To Beaver–style 1950s suburban American fantasy, as the blanket over a sadomasochistic culture that routinely deploys violence on the most vulnerable, was born to inspire think pieces and deep critical readings. To this day, people are not always able to entwine the peculiar aw-shucks folksiness of Lynch with the nihilism and sexual violence on display. They make the mistake of thinking the earnestness and camp are purely ironic, and the gnarly violence purely cheap shock value. In actuality, it’s always a little bit of both; it’s all sincere while also being postmodern. It’s shocking while also being necessary. That contradiction is inherent in its magic. The movies are almost uniformly rough and unsettling at times, which makes the moments of beauty, connection, and the endurance of the human spirit all the more touching.
I have said this before, but while Lynch’s movies may not have been logically or structurally coherent, they always made perfect emotional sense. Is Bob real, or is he a metaphorical manifestation of the evil that men do? Is Sarah Palmer literally haunted by Bob, or is she haunted by her own blindness to what was happening under her nose? Is the Mystery Man in Lost Highway the devil, or is he just the truth that a character is denying himself? Are the events of Mulholland Drive all one big dream? What does that ear in Blue Velvet really mean? The questions Lynch’s work generates are endless, but their answers are largely beside the point. What the movies may lack in literal, explicable coherence, they more than make up for by conveying deep emotional truths with the power to leave you unnerved, invigorated, and moved.
Even the movies of his that people hated at the time have all been reappraised over the years. Fire Walk With Me, the Twin Peaks prequel film about Laura Palmer’s last days, was lambasted on arrival for not answering plot threads left by the cancelled series but has since been hailed as a masterpiece. Lost Highway, which people found bonkers even for Lynch, is now considered a classic. Even Lynch’s Dune has its warriors. Thus goes the life cycle of a great filmmaker loyal to their vision above all else. He always knew where he was going; it was on the rest of us to catch up.
And that might be what I’ll miss the most. What I love about Lynch is how he really lived the art life. He was constantly chasing the creative dragon: painting, sculpting, drawing, building furniture, making music, acting, meditating. His musings on life and art and spirituality have been a great guide for how to better live in the moment and follow your own personal artistry, regardless of how it might be received or whether or not the marketplace makes room for it. He was a living testament to the idea that dedication to your own sense of self can be its own reward. Listening to him talk about the things art can do if you give yourself over to it is much more fulfilling than getting some answer to what exactly Mulholland Drive is about.
In 2017, when Twin Peaks: The Return premiered, it felt like my own personal Game of Thrones–level event. The collective thrill and confusion of watching the show from week to week felt like television’s last hurrah. A show so inscrutable that it made the critical job of recapping it each week completely laughable. It ended up being Lynch’s swan song, which is more an indictment of the industry as a whole than any planned final word on Lynch’s part. Nevertheless, the show’s jovial, getting-the-band-back-together-for-one-last-job energy was palpable on screen. Many people would give their final or close-to-final performance on it: Lynch, Badalamenti, Ferrer, Harry Dean Stanton, Catherine Coulson, Peggy Lipton, Al Strobel, Robert Forster. Others who had already passed—Jack Nance, Frank Silva, Don Davis, David Bowie—had episodes dedicated to them. These were all actors on a beloved old show, yes, but more than that they were Lynch’s friends and longtime collaborators, the people who helped him create these utterly distinctive worlds of his, the power of which formed permanent bonds between those who appeared in them and those who where enchanted by them. It makes for a connection with the audience very few things can match. Do yourself a favor and check out some of the behind-the-scenes footage to get caught up in the great deal of love shared between everyone making the show.
And lest anyone thought Lynch might’ve gone soft in his twilight, The Return was every bit as odd and over-the-top and shocking and funny and enigmatic as anything he’d ever made. It felt like the culmination of the entire David Lynch project, a totemic work about 21st-century America, a nation in perpetual decline physically, spiritually, emotionally. The final word on his thesis of the ouroboros of violence, exploitation, and degradation of people—of women specifically—in our culture and the undying hope that goodness might conquer all of it. It will give you nightmares, and it could make you cry with laughter or happiness or sadness. There were things to blow your mind and things to maybe bore you out of your mind. It all added up to one gorgeous, brilliant mosaic about human tragedy and human connection.
Lynch was always most effective at finding these connections, between feelings and ideas and especially people. He was a cool, silver-haired fox who was unflinchingly earnest, uncompromising, and dead serious about art. He was one of one, and without him the world feels like a shadow of itself, like a doppelganger rather than the real thing. Luckily, he’s left us with more than enough guidance on how to live in a world like that.
