I haven’t written here for a long time due to many preoccupations, both within my control and not — all is well, but when life gets busy, creative exertions are inevitably the first thing to go. I’ve been kicking around the idea of this essay for a year, and losing David Lynch this week prompted me to finally write it. This is my humble and inadequate tribute to a creative force that will continue to shape my experience of the world for years to come.
David Lynch’s work has affected my consciousness so strongly that I can’t see something as mundane as a stoplight at night without feeling, just for a moment, transported to one of his works. If I had to reduce his creations to just one word, I would choose “challenging;” of all the great films and shows I’ve seen, Lynch’s work is singular in the way that it demands you to engage with it.
I was devastated to hear of his death; I had been thinking of him from time to time after his fairly recent announcement that he had finally quit smoking after living with emphysema. He shared that he could no longer do anything more difficult than walk across a room without an oxygen tank. Whenever I thought about his work, I thought about him, and how much he’d loved cigarettes. Even when he talked about his health to People in a quasi anti-smoking PSA, he couldn’t bring himself to renounce it entirely, saying, “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”
Though my love for his work doesn’t rise to the level of an addiction — more like a benign obsession — I can state definitively that David Lynch’s work is good for us. Yes, it can be dark, bizarre, strange, even twisted. But above all, it is challenging. Blue Velvet unearthed the decay and depravity underlying the idyllic Americana ideal and aesthetic. Twin Peaks took viewers on a decades-long journey through the harrowing, darkest parts of human nature (and even supernatural evil). It also illuminated the light and goodness that is also inherent to human nature, and to the balance of the universe.
If I had to choose one single scene to summarize David Lynch to someone who had never seen his work, I would probably choose the famous “In Dreams” lipsync from Blue Velvet. The scene is bizarre, as are the characters; even in the context of the film, the scene is a nonsequitur. It is taut with tension despite its seeming silliness. And yet it is transcendent in uniting the beauty of Roy Orbison’s voice with a visual performance that aches with pathos. In general, Lynch is matchless in my book as a filmmaker who can make visible the indescribable feelings that music evokes. I overflow with emotion when I watch certain of his scenes; his ability to visually depict the way music feels is just transcendent, even when he does so in a way that is so strange and unexpected that you simply could never have imagined it. If a filmmaker is lucky, their work will speak to some shared human experience. David Lynch’s work supersedes that feat; his most powerful scenes evoke underlying truths on a cosmic level — even, and especially, those I can’t remotely articulate.
David Lynch’s work extends far beyond the individual experience, but I always got the sense that he was so expansive as a person, his work very well might have represented his lived experience because even as just one man he seemed to have an unlimited scope of imagination and understanding. He was both a painter and a devotee of transcendental meditation, and the influence of both is very clear throughout his work.
I am particularly fascinated by what I perceive to be self-inserts in his work. He is anything but gratuitous or self-indulgent; these are not Hitchcock-esque cameos. Instead, his appearances feel more akin to those of a prophet or an oracle, bringing an admonition or a warning.
The first and more ambiguous instance that I often think of is the appearance of “the Cowboy” in Mulholland Drive. In this fascinating scene, the Cowboy is a mysterious figure who has summoned Justin Theroux’s hotshot director character (called Adam Kesher) to an abandoned corral and essentially is there to put the fear of God into him. There is a narrative purpose to the meeting and to the scene, and yet I felt almost immediately that David Lynch was speaking directly through this character to the audience, moviegoers and critics alike.
Cowboy: Howdy.
Adam Kesher: Howdy to you.
Cowboy: Beautiful evening… Sure want to thank you for coming all the way up here to see me from that nice hotel downtown.
Kesher: No problem. What’s on your mind?
Cowboy: Well now, here's a man who wants to get right down to it. Kind of anxious to get to it, are you?
Kesher: Whatever.
Cowboy: A man's attitude… man's attitude goes some ways. The way his life will be. Is that something you might agree with?
Kesher: Sure.
Cowboy: Now did you answer because that's what you thought I wanted to hear, or did you think about what I said and answer because you truly believe that to be right?
Kesher: I agree with what you said truly.
Cowboy: What’d I say?
Kesher: That a man's attitude determines to a large extent how his life will be.
Cowboy: So since you agree you must be a person who does not care about the good life.
Kesher: How's that?
Cowboy: Well stop for a little second and think about it. Can you do that for me?
Kesher: Okay. I'm thinking.
Cowboy: No you're not thinking, you're too busy being a smart aleck to be thinking. Now I want you to think and stop being a smart aleck. Can you try that for me?
Kesher: Look. Where's this going. What do you want me to do.
Cowboy: There’s sometimes a buggy. How many drivers does a buggy have?
Kesher: One.
Cowboy: So let's just say I'm driving this buggy, and if you fix your attitude, you can ride along with me.
Reading through it, or watching it, if you think about the Cowboy as David Lynch, the director — the one driving the buggy — and Adam Kesher as you, the moviegoer, or the critic, the message comes through loud and clear. By this point, the film is already strange and meandering; it’s anything but linear, and it’s not precisely action-packed. Lynch’s work is so unusual and, again, challenging that it can frustrate viewers or cause critics to call it nonsensical. So I watch this scene and I hear a sharp rebuke from Lynch himself. You’re so anxious to get to it. You’re too busy being a smart aleck to actually be paying attention to what I’m trying to convey. I’m the one driving this buggy, moving this film forward; if you fix your attitude, you can come along. I read it as a direct challenge to his viewers, and to critics in particular: Stop being such a smartass and actually watch the movie. The dialogue could be interpreted as an in-character threat — fix your attitude, do what I say — but I find it impossible to ignore the meta context, the feeling of a fourth wall that’s turned to glass. It’s extraordinary not only because it is so direct, but because it is totally without ego. It’s not about shutting up and listening to what David Lynch has to say; it’s about the viewer’s experience, and wanting them to simply get in the buggy and ride along with him to see where you end up.
The second self-insert is much more literal: in Twin Peaks, Lynch appears as FBI Director Gordon Cole, a hard of hearing, eccentric, and lovable boss to Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper. It’s always fun to watch Lynch as an actor, and Gordon Cole is a wonderful character. But I found his choice to put himself in the show most striking in one particular scene.
In the original Twin Peaks series, David Duchovny plays Denise Bryson, a fellow agent. When Agent Cooper calls Bryson in for assistance, he’s expecting the agent he knew as Dennis Bryson. When Denise reintroduces herself, Cooper is immediately accepting. One gets the sense that he might have questions, but he is unquestioningly respectful of Denise’s identity. The other two lawmen in the room are a little more circumspect; one shakes her hand, the other refuses, though with more of a look of uncertainty than antipathy. Most importantly, however, the show itself is unwaveringly respectful of Denise and what she represents. While the scene has humor and a character misgenders her, there is no way in which her actual identity is presented as a joke — an unusually progressive stance for the time, and even for now, when openly trans characters are still far and few between and not always treated as respectfully in the universe where they’re created. Denise and her identity are challenging, both to some of the residents of Twin Peaks and perhaps to the viewer, but Lynch will not allow her to be ridiculed. Denise herself is unembarrassed, and Cooper, the moral center of Twin Peaks, validates her rightful confidence.
We don’t see David Lynch’s Gordon Cole interact with Denise until season three of Twin Peaks (or Twin Peaks: The Return), which takes place both in-universe and in real life roughly twenty-five years later after the original series run. Gordon and Denise are having something of a reckoning in this scene. Because Lynch’s character is hard of hearing, he shouts all of his lines — both for comedic effect, but also, I can’t help but think, Lynch is sometimes shouting at the viewer through his character.
“When you became Denise,” Cole says, “I told all your colleagues — those clown comics — to fix their hearts or die.”
It’s one line, and yet it evokes any number of scenes and emotions in your mind, very possibly involving people you actually know. Fix your hearts or die. It’s such an incredible phrase that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already an adage. It’s so simple, yet so pure in its meaning; it’s not a threat, but a warning. Realistically, an FBI director would not threaten his workforce with actual death; though this line represents an ultimatum that the character of Gordon Cole could have actually issued, it transcends the world of the show to speak directly to our own world. Cole could have said “I told them to fix their attitudes or leave,” or something else more along the lines of what a typical character would say in a typical television show. Most shows would simply use this as a plot point — Cole stood up for Denise, and Denise owes him one. But not on Twin Peaks. Through Cole, Lynch issues a warning that goes beyond outward attitudes and reactions to the heart itself. Shape up, throw out your prejudices, or risk a moral death — fix your hearts or die.
It’s this phrase that I think of the most when I think about Lynch. He was famously philosophical about death as well as life; he once said, “I believe it is not the end when we die.” The death Cole speaks of is not a physical one, but a moral one. In many ways, I feel that Lynch’s work was a continuous challenge to us, shaking us out of the slow death that permeates our current society and so much of our media. Lynch notoriously loathed the concept of watching a film on your phone and all that implies; the idea of film and artistry as mere content to be thoughtlessly consumed was anathema to him. He also took a childlike joy in not only filmmaking but life itself. One only has to see the tributes from his many collaborators to have some inkling of what an extraordinary person he was, and is. Lynch lived and worked with an earnestness that is so rare and wonderful in a culture that’s more jaded and laconic than ever.
Lynch’s work follows a kind of dream logic — not an oxymoron in his hands, but a wonderful reality. His films seem to guide us beyond the human experience to the truly universal. In losing him, we have lost not only a great artist, but one whose work was true, in every sense of the word, at all times simply because he could not create in any other way. It’s deeply saddening to lose such an illuminating figure in these, yes, dark times. But the work lives on for us to ponder and get lost in again and again, not merely as spectators but dreamers.