There are the artists you love and then there are those special artists who you don’t just love and feel like an actual part of you, their work shaping your taste, your passions, who you are as a person and how you experience the world. And when they leave, a part of you goes missing.
David Lynch made art that felt like it belonged to you. No matter how many others celebrated it, it was yours. Made for you. It communicated with you in ways you didn’t always understand, but always felt. He famously never explained what his movies meant because he refused to rob the viewer of that personal connection and interpretation. Things didn’t need to make logical sense — they made emotional sense.
More than any artist in any medium, Lynch has shaped how I move through life as an adult. Encouraged me to accept mystery and darkness, and embrace the light with open arms when it creeps back in. I experience the sounds of wind, radiators, really any form of electricity more profoundly because of David Lynch, aware of their life and that I am alive myself. Thanks to living just down the street from fictional Twin Peaks in Seattle, I never take for granted the sea of the magnificent Douglas firs that surround me.
Then there’s how I navigate life’s contradictions, good and evil, love and hate. Few artists were intrepid enough to burrow themselves into depicting mankind’s true capacity for evil. The internal war of being optimistic and pessimistic, or more rawly, the experience of loving being alive and later wishing you weren’t breathing in the same day — this is all over Lynch’s works. Think of Sandy’s dream of the Robins in Blue Velvet, or the final images of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: just when things couldn’t get more harrowing, we are smacked by grace and beauty. Or the inverse, like in Twin Peaks: The Return where it feels like everything is finally going to be okay, only to be crushed by a hopeless loop of a loveless void. Life’s contradictions and swings and sways.
As an all encompassing formalist, Lynch was peerless. Cinema is sound and images, and nobody married the two with more power. His god tier images speak for themselves, but what he created with his meticulous sound design is so critical to his singular tone and making some of the most absorbing works of art I’ve ever seen. Not just absorbing, but in almost all cases, devastatingly emotional.
Every memory of watching a Lynch movie is vivid, no matter how many times I’ve seen them. Blue Velvet and Eraserhead came first. Then Mulholland Drive. And then I went through them all before diving into Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me just prior to the The Return’s premiere. Many of the films are the absolute superlative about what they’re about (to me): Eraserhead (Fatherhood), Blue Velvet (America’s underbelly), Lost Highway (male insecurity/jealousy), Mulholland Drive (Hollywood), and especially Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the most moving film I’ve ever seen about abuse and trauma.
And of course, Twin Peaks: The Return, the great American novel as a television show (or 18 hour film, depending who you ask). Watching new episodes of Lynch’s uncompromised vision during the summer of 2017 is one of the great experiences of my life. Chromatics performing “Shadow” at the Road House, the greatest episode of TV ever in Part 8, and the very end of the series — the most shaken I’ve ever been by a work of art’s conclusion. We were immeasurably fortunate to get this swan song.
I’ve felt a hole in my heart since I learned yesterday that David Lynch died. But the works, the images, the sounds, the damn good cups of coffees and cherry pies, cutting them up like regular chickens, the screeching mutant baby, “Heineken?! Fuck that shit!! PABST! BLUE! RIBBON!!!,” Dean Stockwell lip syncing “In Dreams”, Lula seeing the Wicked Witch of the West, Fred Madison going apeshit with his saxophone, “that’s fucking crazy man”, the reunion in The Straight Story, the diner and dumpster at Winkie’s, Betty’s audition, Llorando, every fucking scene of Inland Empire, Major Briggs’ monologue to Bobby, all the soul shattering moments between Laura and Leland Palmer, “gotta light?” and “what year is this?” — these are all eternal. How they’ve made me feel and how they’ve changed me and changed you will never leave.
About once a year I venture out to the different Twin Peaks locations in my area — the falls, the R&R diner, Laura Palmer’s house and neighborhood. I’m going to make it a point to visit these places in the next few weeks. It always feels special, because David Lynch made art that genuinely changed me. I suspect I’ll run into others whose lives were changed by Lynch at these places too. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I’ll leave you with Lynch talking about his cherished collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti, not long after his passing.
Bonus: the greatest Ice Bucket challenge video ever