Farewell, David Lynch

In Heaven, everything is fine.

Man, this hurts. The late, great David Lynch has left this world and how there’s less weirdness for us to discover.

Over the past 30 years or so, he became one of my favorite filmmakers and artists. My first encounter with his work, without knowing it was him, would have been TV commercials for his adaptation of Dune in 1984 — but my first actual encounter is lost to chronology from the haze of my college days. At some point in the late ‘90s as I was studying art and film at University of Michigan, I finally watched Dune somewhere in the same breath of discovering Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and most significantly, Eraserhead. The latter film mesmerized me at home in the dark from a rented VHS, and even more so at a midnight screening in a campus movie theatre. It served as huge inspiration for a black & white film I made in live-action & clay animation called Snot Living, about a booger that comes to life.

To this day, Lynch’s nightmarish debut feature from 1977 fascinates and terrifies me the most, and I don’t even know how to describe the spell it casts — but my brother-in-law Mike (who I had such a delightful time introducing the film to and watching him react) pretty much nailed it in one of his Letterboxd reviews: I like this enough to come back to it, but it is not something I like to watch. Will I watch it again? Yes. And it will again be bizarre and uncomfortable. But yet, like almost all the Lynch films I’ve seen so far, it won’t leave my head for days and eventually I’ll want to watch it again to experience it and try and feel out something new.

Exactly. And the Lady in the Radiator will always scare the bejeezus outa me.

I also can’t describe how fascinated (and terrified) I am by Twin Peaks in particular — to the point that it’s infiltrated so much of my personality, my quirks, regular conversations between so many friends sharing memes and quotes, and the kinds of art I’m drawn to. It was one of the first pieces of storytelling to teach me that something can be weird, hilarious, beautiful, violent and terrifying all at once. To know, appreciate, and understand the appeal of this show is to know and appreciate who I am, the kinds of things I love, and how quickly we will become friends.

Over the past decade or so, I’ve gradually caught up with the rest of Lynch’s feature filmography and further cemented my fandom & fascination for his visions of dark delight. I love his humor, his weirdness, his outlook on art & life, his grasping of mystery, and the juxtaposition of beauty against his darkest & most viciously violent images and ideas.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate more and more the wisdom behind brutal honesty in art & storytelling. The dark things of the world should not be reveled in, brushed off or taken lightly — they should be exposed, feared, and painted to disturb and unsettle. If we are frightened to death of Lynch’s films, we damn well should be — for it shows our hearts are in the right place.

And yet, there is still hope and beauty, waiting for the shadows to clear and the sun to rise. Weaved into the same fabric as the dark ugliness that Lynch exposes are human beings stuck in the middle of it and trying to make sense of it along with us. From the quirky community of Twin Peaks to the happiness-seekers of Mulholland Drive to the quest for forgiveness in The Straight Story — and even the loneliness & awkward fears of Eraserhead’s Henry Spencer and The Elephant Man’s John Merrick — there is light, love, empathy and a Christ-haunted grace.

My friend Jeffrey Overstreet of Give Me Some Light brought attention this week to David Lynch as Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks — to quote him: More than 30 years ago, Lynch gave prime time television David Duchovny in the role of a trans woman named Denise working for the FBI. And would eventually set this scene where Cole says this to Denise. Those last five words have become perhaps the most memorable and resonant in all of Lynch's work, an urgent prescription for the whole world — particularly the world of fearfulness and hatred.

FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE.

In the years to come, we are going to need the prophetic art that David Lynch left us more than ever. As the headlines and daily news will pummel us with exploits of the Frank Booths, Mystery Men and BOBs running the insane asylum our world has become, we will need the swift hand of justice & protection from Agent Dale Cooper and the Bookhouse Boys — the love and grace of Frederick Treves — and even the hilarious one-liners of a monkey named Jack to remind us to laugh.

And we’re gonna need a lot more coffee and cherry pie to remind us there are still good things to savor in this world, and though there will be trouble, it’s only ‘til the robins come.