We live in strange times, and strange times call for men who can make the strange familiar. David Lynch was one such man.
Lynch has tended to surface in my life at times of great upheaval. In my first semester of college, I discovered Blue Velvet with my roommates, and it became a bonding agent for us at a time when we were still adjusting to the new and unfamiliar world. (We spent the rest of the semester barking Frank Booth lines at each other – “Heineken? Fuck that shit!!”) During Covid, Lynch’s daily weather reports were a much-needed beacon of light at a time when the world threatened to be swallowed by chaos. And in the summer of 2023, when my reality was collapsing around me without my knowing it, I again found myself slipping down the rabbit hole into the Lynchian dreamworld, perhaps because it felt like a more honest reflection of the reality of my life than I was yet willing to consciously face.
The last year has been no exception to this general rule. In the spring I saw Wild at Heart for the first time at the Texas Theatre in Dallas, accompanied by live music and a Q&A with Lynch’s co-writer Barry Gifford, and it was one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life. Over the summer, I marched through all of Twin Peaks, also for the first time, which by turns baffled me, mesmerized me, and had me righteously craving donuts. Lynch became for me both a personal and a social phenomenon; at one point I had no fewer than four friendships based in whole or in part on discussions of his work. His art, having waited its turn, was now insisting upon itself, asserting that its time had once again come.1
There’s a particular intensity to Lynch at his best. When people use the term “Lynchian,” it’s this quality to which they’re referring. It eludes description, so the best I can do is point to specific images, to particular characters and settings and moments. The Mystery Man in Lost Highway. The Red Room in Twin Peaks. The car crash in Wild at Heart. When I think of Lynch I think of the haunted dreamlike melancholy coursing through Mulholland Drive. I think of his female leads with their otherworldly and often menacing beauty. The way his stories elude rational sense while still seeming wholly intuitive. The way the sentimental visions of Americana and romantic evocations of old Hollywood are codependent with the sinister, the dark, and the unexplainable, and the inexplicable.
Lynch’s vision is so clear and so consistent across his body of work that one can’t help but feel that he saw through the artifice of modernity and into the true nature of something. Watching his films can feel like seeing through to that something – the true nature of Hollywood, or of dreams, or of America, or of existence itself – even as seeing never quite gives way to understanding. With Lynch, it never gets that far. There are many great works of art that are mediums from which the viewer (or the reader, or the listener) can derive a new understanding of themselves, of history, of the world. This is not the case with Lynch. A David Lynch film is not a medium for anything. You are a medium for it.
But while his visions are often dark, they are rarely wholly devoid of light. Throughout Lynch’s work, there is an unmistakable belief in the possibility of the power of love. That love in his work is fragile and delicate and often threatening to transmogrify itself into horror, the possibility that it may not be enough, is the very thing that makes it worth preserving. It has power and potency despite its fragility. Only the power of love, which is to say the possibility of human connection, can be a true counterweight to the inexplicable evils always threatening to overrun the world.
The last David Lynch film I watched was Eraserhead, in December a few days before New Year’s. We’d been planning it for a while, but it finally happened, and on the night I drove to my friends’ it was cold and it was dark, and when I sat down to watch the movie it was on a couch that had had its legs removed to prevent the cat from slipping inside and entrapping itself.
We’d all seen Eraserhead before, but despite this – perhaps because of this – there was a sense that in watching it we had shared a profound experience. There is something in Eraserhead, something distinctly Lynchian, that insists upon itself even as it refuses to make itself known. We submitted to it and discussed it afterwards, but I don’t think we even began to touch what we had just seen. The film had jointly bonded us, but exactly what it had bonded us in is not and perhaps cannot be known.
Everyone who loves movies loves David Lynch, and I love movies, so I love David Lynch. He was and is a bonding agent; a Medium Man capable of injecting his audience straight into the heart of love and darkness. He may be gone, but Blue Velvet and Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks will endure for as long as there are people hoping to see through to the strange, unknowable something.
In this sense, David Lynch will live forever. His physical form has left this world but he will never die.
Something similar happened with William S. Burroughs, about whom I’ll have much more to say very soon.