A Scrambled, Rushed, Static-Charged Ode to David Lynch
I was introduced to David Lynch’s work by someone who was a dear friend, years ago. We watched Twin Peaks and they sat with me through basically all of the episodes, especially so they could watch my increasing rate of “what the fuck?”-’s as Season 2 came around. From the coziest small town life we all, someday dream about to an increasingly bizarre, violent, chaotic, funny, messy, undulating view of life, Lynch fucks with your head in every way possible. Sitting someone down and introducing them to David Lynch feels like it had become a rite of passage for millennials, especially, as it helped us connect with the coolest remaining weirdos of older generations and likewise helped us found a language for something wholly wrong about the “American Dream,” even while it offered charms, nice landscapes, good characters sometimes.
A whole relationship of mine, a really memorable, beautiful one was built off of David Lynch as a foundation. Plenty of online friendships bloomed in the years since as I spoke to people about this or that Lynch movie. Throughout most of graduate school, when it was safe to do so, I went to see every Lynch movie I could on a big screen; Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire were among the films I went to see, more than once, and invited people to join me for, so I could share this vision of life with them. Lost Highway became my favorite for its—in my opinion—perfect portrayal of the oblique, the ineffable, the asymptotic nature of dream logic, which, somehow, describes life better than the “clarity” of language we’re sold by certain sectors of “philosophy.” Only in dreams did I find a satisfying view of life, and, somehow, David Lynch taught me more about them than Sigmund Freud ever could.
With confidence, I can say that, with Lynch, I went from years of watching “movies” to watching “film,” just as Kurt Cobain said that he tried “hard to have a father” but instead he had a “dad.” Twin Peaks, in particular, I believe is the best gateway drug not only into surrealism as a whole but the joys of abstraction, experimentation, and formal qualities of art that I’ve come across. The show, like Blue Velvet—though it’s my least favorite of his—plays with surface and depth, but TP seems to guide you, bit by bit, into a world that you’re already familiar with and somehow alienates you from it. The only other creator I’ve found to elicit a similar feeling—though the fans are insufferable—is Hidetaka Miyazaki, who uses the surface of Dark Fantasy to teach you about the incredible depth of suffering, joy, grace, aporia, all through an elaborate apophasis…but more on this, another time.
David Lynch had a lot in common, in my mind, with Tom Waits, The Ramones, the No Wave movement, and maybe Jim Jarmusch (though I find him a bit more pretentious); a generation grows up the shadow of the Baby Boomer “American Dream,” tries to reconstruct it on their own terms, and fails. The Ramones reconstruct The Beatles but in Queens, New York, or the Rust-Belt aesthetics of Manhattan, Tom Waits attempts to bring back Folk in an age where “God’s Away on Business,” and No Wave turns the melody of Americana from copper to verdigris. Lynch was part of the Philadelphia crowd, a bit adjacent to all the action, but nevertheless there was something in the air, likely toxic but invigorating, like “The Zone.” David Lynch kept returning to an idyll he knew never existed, finding comfort in sharp edges where he sought feathers, radiator rhythms—you know “the girl”—where he looked for melodies, and turned Hollywood into a mirror for itself; Mulholland Drive takes the disgusting, murderous underbelly of the film industry and connects it to the Dreams it projects. Our unconscious is trying to tell us something, whether we approach it through psychoanalysis, odd, dollar-store paganism, or quasi-Buddhist filmmaking.
Above all, Lynch personified the quality I find most admirable about him: a mix of “high” art with “low” comedy. His work exuded depth but denied it, it overflowed with decades of film history but beat it back down to our “stupid” reality, and made highways out of tri-via.[1] Lynch encouraged me to double-down on my love of philosophy while mocking it, to encourage “idiots” and “losers” and “weirdos” to pick up the work of “geniuses” and make it their own, to cheer the Communists Heinrich Heine imagined using books as table props, and to especially take the Ivory Tower down to the gutter. Lynch accompanied me through some of the worst horrors of my life, through countless goodbyes, panic attacks, breakups, and began many of my friendships and continues to nurture them. I carry him and his odd teachings, everywhere.
David Lynch was the first celebrity I thought I personally knew, because somehow he knew me. His works accompanied me, I built multiple friendships and relationships out of a shared love of his vision of life. Serious, funny, tragic, goofy, bizarre, and somehow more real than the every day. I cry and cry and cry watching Mulholland Drive, where dreams die and are reborn, or Twin Peaks, where horror and love and the fate of the cosmos hangs in the balance on the halls of a diner. I can’t believe he left us so soon.
I loved David Lynch.
[1] You can never go wrong with some etymology.