You can only begin something like this with the bumble acknowledgment that you always knew this day would come. Last year it was announced that David Lynch had emphysema and had all but retired from directing. Yet, the reason why you were forgiven for thinking this day wouldn't happen is that Lynch almost immediately shot back when that news leaked that he will never retire and entertained the idea of shooting remotely for the first time. You believed (and were probably correct) that he would be creating up until he stopped breathing. Whether it was film, painting, making a cardboard barn with his daughter's class during COVID or just simply observing the weather, you assumed that Lynch would always be cooking something creative up in that beautiful mind of his.
My first knowledge of a Lynch movie was Dune, his fascinating failure of an attempt to mediate between a large studio genre film and an "un-filmable" sci fi text. I still have action figures of Sting and Everett McGill. I didn't see it in the movies but when it was finally available at home (I think I saw it HBO) I tried watching it and fell asleep, several times. I've come to love Lynch's Dune (even if Lynch himself never warmed up to it) but it is/was hardly the film to cement a life-long love to Lynch's films. I was 14 when Blue Velvet was released. My father, who never had an appropriate understanding of what films would be good at which age, recommended I watch it (much like the father in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale) with the caveat that I not tell my mother. To be honest, besides certain scenes (Dean Stockwell lip syncing to "In Dreams," the closet/rape scene, the ear and ants) the film didn't make a dramatic impression upon me the way David Foster Wallace writes about how it made an impression upon him and all his friends. I was too young and, though I don't often talk about films this way, the film was too adult for me at 14.
Twin Peaks (as evidenced by the theme of this blog) is my favorite Lynch. Specifically, Twin Peaks: The Return is my favorite Lynch. The title of this blog "A Nest to Ease Our Suffering" comes from Michel Chion's book on David Lynch, describing the town of Twin Peaks as well as the series Twin Peaks. As I've said before, Twin Peaks is more than two TV shows and movie, it's a cosmology. It puts forth an ethics about the universe and the people who find themselves there. You can think of the cosmology in literal terms within Twin Peaks: the White Lodge, the Black Lodge, the Woodsmen, the owls, the aliens...all of the metaphysical beings who inhabit our world. Yet, the cosmology actually resides in the aforementioned ethical stance: as dark as things get, and they sure get dark in Twin Peaks, there's never the absence of light. That lightness often comes from a sense of community, however, most importantly, that lightness comes from love. Laura Palmer represents that symbol of love not because she's good or moral but because the world has broken her as a result of its own brokenness. That's why the ending of Twin Peaks: the Return seems so dark: Dale Cooper can't allow Laura's brokenness to be redeemed by simply being acknowledged (literally by an angel at the end of Fire Walk With Me). Special Agent Cooper must use the force of the law to retroactively stop the crime from ever having taken place. But, as Lynch seems to be asking, which crime? Laura's appearance first comes with the spectral horror of nuclear war. Bob is belched out of an evil monstrosity created by the bomb. Laura is the counterbalance to that destruction.
During Twin Peaks run Wild At Heart was released in theaters. I saw it multiple times in the cineplex. One time I brought an exchange student who was staying with me as well as my friend Dave and his exchange student. That wasn't a good idea. To be honest, in retrospect, Wild At Heart is one of my least favorite Lynch movies. Between some of the more familiar motifs of Twin Peaks, ubiquitous after its surprise popularity, and the lurid moments of Wild at Heart, a Lynchian style took hold. In the process of writing this remembrance I bought, and then subsequently watched, Wild at Heart on Blu-Ray. My opinion of the film has changed. Yes, the first half is fueled by cars, sex, lurid noirs and giallo bloodshed. The second half, however, is a deeply sad film for most of its run. Like Eraserhead, its sadness comes from the main male character's realization that he's brought life into the world and is deeply afraid that he won't succeed in caring for this new life. The sadness in Wild at Heart also comes from Laura Dern's character Lula, not just if she will be a good mother--not make the mistakes her own mother has and continues to make--but whether Sailor will be able to see himself as a good father and consistent companion. The happy ending, which is not in the original novel, is literally a deus ex machina: Glenda the good witch (played by Lynch's avatar of redemptive love, Sherryl Lee) has come down to earth in order to tell Sailor to fight for love.
I, like so many others initially, had a mixed feeling about the second season of Twin Peaks on ABC (obviously I have changed my mind about this) and, like so many others, was confused, insulted and inspired by the season two finale. When Fire Walk With Me was released in the theaters, I went to see it three times on the opening weekend. That's the other thing about Lynch movies: because I knew movies such as Lynch's don't come around to the cineplex that often, I would try to see them in the theaters as many times as possible. I still do this at my local AMC whenever something like Crimes of the Future or Beau Is Afraid shows up: I want to see these visions at the size the filmmakers intended, while demonstrating to the corporate gods at AMC that people will go see these films if they put them in their theaters. Fire Walk With Me is a difficult movie to write about. As a Twin Peaks fan I'd be lying if I didn't say I was disappointed with the film when it was released. The pre-Laura Palmer stuff in the movie seemed to be the ultimate version of Lynch the hermetic filmmaker: the lady in the red dress at the beginning (my sister's girl) was the embodiment of Lynch's obstinacy in refusing to decipher his films and TV episodes for an increasingly hostile audience, all with a wink to the camera. The spirits weren't contained to just Bob, Mike and the arm: now there was a whole room above a convenience store where apparently a whole community of evil spirits lived. David Bowie had a southern accent. Kyle MacLachlan seemed completely done with the character of Agent Cooper (which he was) and the whole thing seemed desultory. The Laura Palmer sections, despite being brilliantly acted by the original Twin Peaks cast (mostly), seemed exploitative. Things that were hinted at in the television show could now be represented in an R-rated film. Since Lynch oftentimes reminds me of Hitchcock, Fire Walk With Me felt like Hitchcock's Frenzy, Hitch's attempt at an X rated film. I find Frenzy to be ugly and unpleasant, and I felt similarly about Fire Walk With Me for a long time. I feel differently now, but I will probably save that for another entry on that film itself.
When Lost Highway came out in the theaters I saw it six times instead of three. Recently re-watching Wild at Heart I couldn't help but see Lost Highway as a sequel of sorts: Barry Gifford wrote the novel Wild at Heart is based upon and co-wrote the screenplay for Lost Highway with Lynch. Imagine Sailor and Lula, seven years later, no longer young, infatuated with one another and running from Lula's mother, rather middle-aged, unhappy and running from their own identities. Lost Highway is a film I will write about separately, however I will just say that there are times when I think the first fifty or so minutes of this film might be the best thing Lynch has done (full disclosure: I also feel this way about the pilot and second season premier of Twin Peaks, the final third of Mulholland Drive as well as the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: the Return). The rest of the film, ultimately, not so much. I think of all of Lynch's films, Lost Highway seems the most dated. This isn't necessarily a critique: I think a lot of the contemporary landscape (both in terms of film and the culture at large) Lost Highway is reflecting only became dominant because of Lynch's influence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, there's something about the use of music (a sometimes amazing soundtrack to be sure), snuff films, arguments over traffic laws, Marilyn Manson, Balthazar Getty, etc that seems so indebted to an in an idea of transgression that marks the 90s.
I saw Mulholland Drive in Berlin which was too perfect and at the end of the film someone in the audience whispered "silencio" after the film ended because we were all silent after what we had just seen. If Twin Peaks: the Return isn't a film (I think it is but I'm not doctrinaire about it) then Mulholland Drive is Lynch's best film. I only saw it once in the movie theaters because of both geographically and emotionally where I was in my life. I was living with my partner at the time in Berlin, thus making the sell of seeing the film multiple times in the movie theater a harder sell. I have seen it many times after at home. It's a film that only gets deeper with each re-watch. It's both the culmination of any number of things which Lynch has been obsessed with over the years (sexuality, identity, Hollywood, noir, fantasy's dominance over reality until it ends) as well as a new examination of why these things capture both him and the viewer.
There isn't much after that: I never got to see Inland Empire in a movie theater: it played on night in Rochester, New York at the Dryden Theater at the Eastman Museum, but I had a sick newborn and was pretty much housebound. I eventually bought the DVD the day it was released, but the film never really made a deep impression on me. It's a brilliant display of Laura Dern's generational acting talent, as well as a fascinating example of a director willfully making his film look ugly, but of all of Lynch's films Inland Empire seems abstract and disjointed: ideas for another, more coherent, film (which, to be fair, is also kind of the plot of the film itself). The announcement that there would be another season of Twin Peaks brought exultation and fear. Why would Lynch, who always seemed to be moving forward, return to Twin Peaks again. Because this was a peak time for various companies to revive profitable intellectual properties, there was a fear that Lynch was trying to get some richly deserved capital from all that he had given the television landscape (especially in the era of streaming). Would Twin Peaks: the Return just plop us down in front of re-heated cherry pie and coffee? Was I genuinely excited for this? Did I want Lynch spending his dwindling productive years making 17 hours of Twin Peaks?
I, of course, should not have doubted Lynch's reasons for doing The Return. I think The Return is a summation of his life's work in film. There are images, like shaky stars filmed on a black background to simulate falling through reality itself, that show up both in Lynch's first proper short film the Grandmother as well as The Return. The aforementioned eighth episode can be seen both as a representation of the creation of good and evil in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks while also being a representation of the creation of good and evil in a post-WWII world. Once we created weapons which could kill 10,000s of people at once, a deep spiritual crisis was engendered, with the children born after that event (like Lynch himself) forced to swallow (literally) the unholy monsters birthed from the post-war dream of reason. The ending of The Return is (now literally) Lynch's final statement on his most beloved characters: Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer. Of course, this being Lynch and identity being mutable in his universe, Dale isn't Dale and Laura isn't Laura. It doesn't matter, though. Change the names, the surroundings, the stories and these are still our special agent and dear Laura being saved from the jaws of whatever darkness calls out from the void. Yet, this time, the void is in Dale. He's the one leading this new Laura to another uncertain destruction. But, like a person at the end of his life suffering from dementia and memory loss, Dale can't be certain what year it is. And when our moral compass, the gravitational pull of everything that's right and good in Twin Peaks is so uncertain as to be unmoored from time, space and any connections and responsibilities contained therein, becomes the void itself, no amount of praying to our special agent in the land of the one eyed jack is going to matter.
And, yet, that wasn't David Lynch's last statement. There apparently is a Netflix short movie where he argues with a monkey that was filmed after The Return? And, of course, there are the copious youtube videos he made over the last decade, the most famous of which are his weather reports. There were also music recommendations, arts and crafts and just general words of encouragement often in very difficult times. If Lynch's films and television shows were accused of being hermetic and difficult, these little videos from Lynch's corner of the world were the opposite: open and inviting, marveling at the simplest experiences and ideas. He also wrote a big memoir which I still haven't gotten to yet. It will be the first book I read when I move into my new place. Lynch also became a bit of a meme generator. One of my favorites is Lynch explaining that he's just eaten two cookies and drank a coke and the final frame of the meme has Lynch just staring off into the distance, wondering, marveling at the fact that he was able to exist at the same moment cookies and cokes and Bob's Big Boy and diner coffee and cherry pie and the mysteries of love and the Platters and Otis Redding singing "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and Elvis and Jack Nance and Laura Dern and Kyle MacLaughlin and Dennis Hopper and Roy Orbison and Chris Issac and transcendental meditation and so many other things. And we were able to exist at the same moment as David Lynch. Wow.