Beautiful Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine
It would have been David Lynch’s 79th birthday today. Gonna have some black coffee and donuts in tribute.
It’s been really heartwarming to see all the tributes and remembrances from around the web the last few days, clearly I’m not alone in having been deeply touched by the man.
Some clips of or about the man that I’ve enjoyed over the years:
David Lynch on Where Great Ideas Come From : A few jobs ago I used to quote this incessantly.
David Lynch Meets George Lucas : I get it, I really do, but man, the Lynch Return of the Jedi would have been amazing.
David Lynch on iPhone: I think it’s very funny that Lynch only says “telephone” in this, and the kind of nerd who would edit this together had to, just had to make it about the iPhone, specifically.
David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film (Masterclass): an abbreviated version, and cough check the description.
Naomi Watts, Laura Dern & Patricia Arquette Tell David Lynch Stories | W magazine: I cannot think of another famous person who everyone does an imitation of, but the imitation is always positive.
John Ford Scene | THE FABELMANS (2022) Movie CLIP HD: Spoilers, I guess? Lynch as John Ford at the end of The Fabelmans
David Lynch: The Art Life - The Films - The Criterion Channel: The Criterion Channel has made The Art Life free though the end of January!
Mulholland Drive - Original TV pilot: Oh snap! I havn’t watched it yet, but the original TV pilot configuration of Mullholland Drive is up on the internet archive.
His book is out of print, but the audiobook version is still available, and considering he read it himself that’s probably the better way to go: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
As the man always said: Have a Great Day!
A Place Both Wonderful And Strange
I first encountered the works of David Lynch with Twin Peaks. In what I suspect is a common experience for the Gen-X cohort, I was just slightly too young to be ready for it, which probably means I was exactly the right age. It was different, it was funny, it was scary, it was exciting; it felt dangerous in a way that is still hard to describe.
A lot of people have that story about that piece of art that changed everything for them; their first punk rock album, or seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or finding a book of Bosch paintings, or watching the Star Destroyer go overhead in Star Wars, or hearing Bowie for the first time. For me, it was watching Dale Cooper drive in to Twin Peaks. That was my “you’re going to grow up to be a different person now” art moment.
I’m clearly not alone, Peaks was a lot of people’s first contact with Lynch. It was a huge hit, mostly what I remember was that my entire family was obsessed; both my parents and every single aunt and uncle. Peaks was pretty much all anyone talked about at family get-togethers, as the oldest child in my generation on both sides of the family, and at the age where I had, metaphorically at least, moved from the “kids table” to the “grownup table”, I was looped in on all of that.
(My other abiding memory of that original broadcast is an Aunt who was absolutely livid that they didn’t solve the Laura Palmer case by the end of the first episode. Just gobsmaked that such a thing was even possible; it had never occurred to her that a TV show might not tie everything up in a bow at the end and then start over next week.)
I was initially hostile for a reason that’s extremely 1990 and now feels like a transmission from another place: that second season of Peaks aired on Saturday nights. My parents were not and are not night owls, they preferred to tape it and watch it later, which had the benefit of being able to watch it more than once. The problem was that also airing late on Saturday nights on PBS was my favorite show, Doctor Who, which they would also tape so we could watch it the next day. Two shows on different channels at different times was beyond the ability of the 1980s VCR technology at hand, so the year Peaks was on became a Who-free desert.
(Ironically, Who had been cancelled by that point, but I don’t think we knew it yet. I don’t think the last season had made it across the pond yet, and any delays around more were still using phrases like “hiatus”. It has not escaped my notice that my two favorite TV shows of all time’s original broadcasts were separated by only four months, that has always felt like sloppy writing in my backstory.)
In any case, that initial hostility was short-lived, I was transfixed by it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but both shows attracted me for the same reason—they were about people who solved problems by being smarter, braver, and kinder than everyone else, not because they were stronger or better armed. Dale Cooper is one of the all-time great protagonists, solving problems by being willing to think about them differently. Whatever the opposite of “toxic masculinity” is, that’s what Agent Cooper was.
So, you know, that ending was a little bit of a bummer.
I didn’t see Fire Walk With Me until much later; my parents hated, hated, hated it. There was a real sense of betrayal there: you ended the show on a cliffhanger, then got to do a movie, and the movie is a prequel? Screw you too, etc.
For a long time, my line about FWWM was that it was pretty good if you could take it on its own, but it was a terrible conclusion to Peaks as a whole; now that it’s finally free from having to serve as the capstone, it’s much easier to see it for what it is. Personally, I think it has my favorite Lynch movie, which is a big change from how I felt about it circa 1996 or so.
I used to say that I had spent my entire adult life wondering about Cooper and the Red Room; other things got sequels or reboots or rumors thereof, for me Peaks was always the one I wanted more of the most. How does he get out?
Flash forward 25 years, and then it actually happened. It’s hard to even know how to set expectations for something like that. The 2017 Twin Peaks: The Return was the one truly great revival of the Legacy Sequel era. Things I wanted to happen didn’t, things I was afraid would happen did, but mostly what I wanted was to be surprised, and boy was I.
Sidebar: I was solidly in the “Diane isn’t real” camp until the 2017 show came out; but when they started announcing the cast, and Laura Dern was in it in an “undisclosed role”, I said out loud, at work “oh, she must be Diane.” Heh.
Watching The Return was and will probably remain my all-time peak media-consumption experience of any flavor; I was way more excited about that than anything else, and found it endlessly enjoyable.
It was on the same night as Game of Thrones, and so we’d stream the pair, Thrones first, then Peaks. The difference was fascinating; this was Thrones at the height of its powers, the peak of “peak tv”, and with a rep for being shocking and surprising, built on the back of killing off a character played by Sean Bean, aka the guy whose character always dies.
And every week, because we’d seen more than one TV show, Thrones would do basically what you expected. Every storyline would move forward a little in a generally expected way, and it was fully entertaining.
Meanwhile, I literally never had any idea what was going to happen that week on Twin Peaks. Always surprising, never even remotely what you expected. An hour both wondrous and strange.
Personally, I found the end incredibly satisfying. And if nothing else, I will treasure “Deputy Bobby Briggs” until my dying day.
The words people usually reached for to describe Lynch was “weird” or “odd” or “incomprehensible” or “confusing”, but it wasn’t really any of those things, what it was was “unique.” A very specific viewpoint of a singular artist. It clearly wasn’t an affectation, he wasn’t doing it to “Be Weird”, he was just being himself, and refused to stop.
Plot-wise, at the 10,000 foot view Twin Peaks is incredibly straightforward: it’s a show about FBI agents fighting evil ghosts. But it’s the details where it sings. A lot of people have made art about “the dark underbelly of small towns”, but no one else made art about a small town where everyone accepted The Log Lady. Where a former coworker shows up with a new gender and the reaction is “OK!” and a handshake.
What made Lynch’s work so compelling weren’t the monsters—Killer BOB or Frank Booth or whomever—it was everyone else around them. Everyone in the town of Twin Peaks were fun to spend time with, they liked each other, they were compelling without being awful. Even certified Nasty TeenTM Bobby Briggs was someone you rooted for to get his act together. What made that “dark underbelly of small town America” so frightening was that you really wanted everyone else in that “small town America” to be okay. They weren’t just cannon fodder for some serial killer.
I could talk about Twin Peaks all day, but the movie I want to pause on for a second here is The Straight Story, because that’s the one, I think, that proves it wasn’t an act. It’s unquestionably a Lynch movie in every frame, except it’s also a G-rated Disney movie about a guy who goes on a road trip on his riding mower. There aren’t any ghosts or killers or gangsters; the “dark underbelly” there is just age, creeping up on all of us.
The secret to Lynch’s work, as strange or off-kilter as it often was, was that it was all sincere. It was never a joke or a satire, the characters were never an object of fun. No matter how silly the situation or plot, Lynch treated all of his characters with profound respect. It was all emotionally true.
The dominant form of TV-style media is the mystery-puzzle-procedural, stories structured as a puzzle that the characters, and maybe the viewer, solves by the end. He was the killler! Here’s how he did it! Here’s how he figured it out! Even stuff that isn’t explicitly a murder mystery is structured as a series of questions-to-find-answers-leading-to-more-questions way. Stuff with an explicit, “here’s the solution, here’s what it means.”
Lynch wasn’t ever interested in answers because he knew the questions were more interesting.
People sometimes act like Lynch’s work is utterly incomprehensible, and that’s only the case if you’re treating it as a puzzle to solve. It floats along on emotional logic, instead of clicking down a path of “plot.” You couldn’t “beat” a Lynch movie, there wasn’t anything to “solve.” You had to engage with the emotions and the visuals, and let it take you somewhere.
They’re not questions, they’re not puzzles, they’re prompts.
It’s easy to overindex on the fact that Lynch was a painter, but in this case I think it’s revelatory to his approach to art. Paintings don’t have explainer videos or wikis of easter eggs (usually.) It’s understood that between the art and the audience something happens, and it’s that something that’s “the thing”, the part that matterss is the viewer’s reaction to the art.
The reason his enigmatic but good natured refusal to explain or talk about his work became such a meme was that Lynch understood that maybe better than anyone else in our lifetimes. The point isn’t to figure out what it meant to him, the point is to figure out what it means to you. Him refusing to elaborate had the same energy as a really good teacher with a twinkle in their eye asking “well, what do you think?” You have to bring yourself to it. You gotta let it in, let it rearrange you brain a little. Works that demand your full attention.
Whether or not this approach works for you was a real “your mileage may vary” situation, and not just for his work as a whole but per-project. Every Lynch fan I know seems to have one movie of his they can’t stand. The one most people seem to give themselves permission to dislike is Inland Empire; personally I loved it—the one I bounced off of was Lost Highway.
But it was all unquestionably his. The most unique, vital artist of our lifetimes. No one’s ever had an oeuvre like that, and no one ever will again. It was a privilege to have been alive at the same time.
It seemed like it was probably coming soon, but it was still a shock. He’d stopped doing his weather reports, he had a project evaporate at the last second for what seemed like they might be health issues, he’d been isolating in his house to avoid COVID exposure the last few years, he recently revealed that he had emphysema. And then it seems he died from complications due to being forced from his house because of the fires.
The closest comparison I can make is to when Bowie died in ’16, but Bowie didn’t die as a downstream result of a massive metaphor for the current omni-crisis. With everything, this really has the quality of the last Elf sailing from middle earth.
But, dispair was never a theme of his work, even in the darkest of times there are Donuts to eat, mugs of Damn Fine Black coffee to drink. Cooper did make it back out of the Red Room, even if it took him a while. So, I’ll leave you with my favorite obscure Lynch work, this delightfully unhinged TV Commercial for the Playstation 2:
Thank you, Mister Jackpots.