High-school is Twin Peaks. All the cool girls are Audrey for Halloween, eerily twisting in pencil skirts. Unless they’re the Log Lady. Every cup of coffee is “damn good.”
College is Blue Velvet country. At every party, some bro will parrot Dennis Hopper when the keg runs dry. (“Heineken? F*ck that sh*t. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon!”) Before any of that we get the OG Paul Atreides, soiling his space suit as Frank Herbert intended. And though the maestro disowned this edit, your mother still jokes you have “Mentat eyebrows” certain mornings.
David Lynch, the inimitable auteur, has died at 78. Known for psychosexual, dreamy masterpieces like Mulholland Drive, he was a peerless weirdo. A precise bard of the American uncanny, as fun to interpret as he was to be unsettled by. Praising his canon, peers and former colleagues have called him wizard, friend, and “imagination voyager.”
In a moving Instagram tribute, Lynch’s longtime collaborator Kyle MacLachlan said “he was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.”
Today I’m struck by the length of the director’s shadow. For as long as I’ve know of it, Lynch’s work has felt immortal. Those images and characters (fire) walk with you from room to room and dream to dream. They existed long before you moved to the suburbs. They’re hiding in the closet still, determined to outlive you.
And as Patryk Chlastawa put it in a 2010 essay for The Point, the indelibility of, say, this scene is as much about theme as mood. “Lynch’s work confronts its audience with their own sense of helplessness and victimization,” he wrote. Which analysis helps explain how Lynch’s work, which is so often alarming or grotesque, managed to smack us teenagers sideways.
As in high school, nobody in a Lynch film ever knows exactly where, why, or who they’re supposed to be.
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In one of many nice remembrances this morning, John Semley of The New Republic recalled one of Lynch’s last screen appearances: a mega-meta cameo in Steven Spielberg’s self-mythologizing 2022 biopic, The Fabelmans. In a penultimate scene, Lynch chomps scenery—I mean, a cigar—behind an eye patch, cosplaying another great American director: John Ford.
As Semley has it, here is “a master of American cinema playing a master of American cinema, in a film by another master of American cinema, about the genesis of his own cinematic mastery. A seemingly random, throwaway role, it typified Lynch’s approach to art and creativity… eccentric and unexpected.” It’s true that one could hardly imagine an apter career cap. Exit, pursued by a legacy.
And on observing the explosion of a(n unmanned) SpaceX Starship shuttle yesterday, one brilliant BlueSky scout theorized that this could be the auteur’s true last will and testament. An uncanny and violent shock, “shot down from heaven.” Something to make you laugh. To freak you out. To wake you up.
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