David Lynch (1946-2025)

David Lynch wasn’t a weirdo. Or if he was, his weirdness was his most straightforward and explicable quality. Yes, he hung out on Hollywood Boulevard with a cow in a bid to get Laura Dern an Oscar for Inland Empire; yes, he adopted a quintet of Woody Woodpecker dolls he christened Chucko, Buster, Peter, Bob and Dan, whom he considered his dear friends until they turned against him; yes, during the making of Dune he proposed that a plastic surgeon should cut a hole in Jürgen Prochnow’s cheek. Some of this was the genius for self-publicity he shared with Hitchcock, Cocteau and Warhol (the first two he openly revered; the third he never spoke of). Some of it was the expression of a far-out sense of humour like no other (“What a great time to be alive,” he said fairly recently, “if you love the theatre of the absurd”). Some of it was simply the force of an original personality, far too preoccupied by the work in front of him to waste time trying not to be himself.

Very little of it was naivety—a quality I’m convinced he possessed significantly less of than most of us, including his fellow famous auteurs (I wonder if whoever first dubbed him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” had looked all that closely at the roles Stewart actually played, especially later on). It’s true that in interviews Lynch spoke slowly, used simple words, and repeated himself often. But this may tell us less than is sometimes supposed, except about his view of what it took to get a point across without misunderstanding. Regardless, in the end the quirks were no more or less than the particular form taken by his human oddity, which throughout his time on earth he was obliged to live with—just like you or I or the Elephant Man, who is us all.

Lynch’s jokes were always plentiful, and usually not so much jokes as blunt restatements of the obvious: when you felt yourself not getting them, the trick was to ask yourself in what sense you were failing to see the wood for the trees (or vice versa). For years in the 2000s and again during the pandemic, he recorded daily “weather reports,” updating us on the temperature and the look of the sky in Los Angeles, where he lived. That was his way of saying hello to us, and once you’ve said hello, what could be more ordinary and conventional than to talk about the weather?

In many other contexts likewise Lynch’s strangeness was the strangeness of radical orthodoxy, even or especially when it veered into conscious leg-pulling or hocus-pocus. As he told everybody on all occasions, what he was, and had always intended to be, was an artist; and since artists in America and elsewhere are expected to be eccentric, gosh darn it, he would be eccentric. Among other things, it was good for business, and Lynch was also a businessman, not to mention a salesman; this was his most American quality, never more so than when he was peddling enlightenment from the mystic East.

To say this is not to question the strength and sincerity of Lynch’s commitment to Transcendental Meditation (nor to criticise TM itself, a genuine aid to calm and to clear thinking). After all, in the parade of astonishments that was Twin Peaks the Return, Lynch himself had no qualms about parodying his own sales pitch via Russ Tamblyn’s Dr Amp—exclusive purveyor of Dr Amp’s Gold Shit-Digging Shovels, two coats of paint guaranteed, available for just $29.99 plus shipping and handling (I assume most people reading this have seen the Return; otherwise I would have qualms about spoiling the punchline of this beautifully-prepared gag, one of several scenes in the show which on my first viewing made me laugh as I’ve rarely laughed before or since).

Here is not the place to attempt to do justice to the scope, intricacy, and consistently startling intelligence of Lynch’s cinematic art, fully-formed by the time of Eraserhead and culminating in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a critical and commercial flop now well on the way to being reevaluated as the singular masterpiece it is (in a sense far beyond mere eccentricity, Jacques Rivette’s verdict, “the craziest film in the history of cinema,” is also not far from the sober truth). It’s enough to mention the phenomenal work with actors, from beginners to the most highly-skilled; the care lavished on textures and dynamics; the endless hidden details and the riddles included for the sheer joy of riddling. Lynch used the full orchestra of the medium, as few ever have. Or, to broaden the metaphor: outside cinema he could reasonably be classed as a painter who dabbled in other artforms, but as a filmmaker he was painter, musician, storyteller and much more.

Consider for instance the importance of dance in Twin Peaks, specifically the great first-season episode built around the contrasting but parallel dances of Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), and The Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson). Or look at the strange sculptural objects scattered through the Return, many of which Lynch reportedly worked on with his own hands—including the representations of mutilated corpses, which can be placed in the modern cinematic tradition of “body horror” but equally resemble three-dimensional cousins of the quasi-abstract figures in the paintings of Francis Bacon, another of Lynch’s acknowledged masters. Or look at the lamps.

More than anything, Lynch is a filmmaker of extremes: his movies are funnier and scarier than other people’s, more heartrending, more loaded with cryptic significance, gentler, crueller. There is no filmmaker I can think of, not even Stanley Kubrick, whose work so totally negates the distinction between high and low culture: anything but an avant-garde purist, Lynch was always after the biggest audience he could find, judging for instance by the three features that followed the cult success of Eraserhead, which could be crudely but not falsely described as inspirational Oscar-bait (The Elephant Man), a failed sci-fi blockbuster (Dune), and a lurid erotic thriller (Blue Velvet) made before the label caught on.

In its original network TV incarnation, Twin Peaks turned out to be the mainstream juggernaut he’d spent a decade seeking, which put him on the cover of TIME and made him the celebrity he remained for the rest of his life: an artsy subversion of TV conventions that happened to be packed with every surefire commercial element imaginable, starting out with a baffling murder mystery and including teen romance, sexual perversion, occult lore, government conspiracies, beautiful women, handsome men, loveable eccentrics, hissable villains, and a cosy diner where you’d be glad to go every week. Nor was any of this done cynically, in the sense of hinting even remotely that Lynch himself was above any of these pleasures, dubious as many of them might be. His 2014 response to a Guardian reporter who asked if Twin Peaks was a parody of soap operas can’t be quoted too often: “No, no, no, no, no. It is a soap opera.”

But for all his desire to please, Lynch never had another hit on the same scale; even when the Return made the previous two seasons of Twin Peaks look like child’s play, it failed to match Game of Thrones in the ratings or even come close (initially the two shows were scheduled head-to-head, one sign his commercial ambitions hadn’t waned). In contrast to his increasingly grandfatherly persona, nothing was softened or even remotely consoling about his later work, which remained alarmingly consistent in its view of the universe as an infernal factory enabling individual life to be broken down and ultimately consumed. (The sawmill in the opening credits of the original Twin Peaks is one image of this—and Lynch himself saw no contradiction in being both a lover of trees and a enthusiastic woodworker.)

Spend enough time with this vision, and you may start to sense that at its bottom lies something still more disturbing, too much so to be named: the films gaze long and hard not just at monstrosity but at the monstrous tendencies that exist in each of us, without offering even the reassurance of distanced judgement. Always, whatever moral logic might be operating on the surface is finally revealed as inadequate (the Return is especially clear about this). Likewise, while the protagonists may be urged to “wake up,” what they awaken to is never a single, stable reality (some people still think Mulholland Drive can be adequately understood as a straightforward parable about self-deception versus truth; you hear it less often about Inland Empire).

This perhaps is what Lynch meant by his frequent insistence that his work had no message. To offer a “message” would be fatuous, when the point is to give us as much reality as we can bear (to borrow a line from T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets is hidden on a shelf in the Return; Lynch often claimed to be no reader, but this didn’t stop him speaking warmly on one occasion or another of Joyce, Kafka and Blake, just as his claim to be no cinephile didn’t stop him making Mulholland Drive, which is woven of movie memories from beginning to end). More than one film ends in apparent murder-suicide, and I for one have often wondered uneasily how far Lynch might be advocating drastic solutions of this order, or at least framing them as valid alternatives. “I’m not anti-life,” he said in a very early interview; what’s notable is that he felt the need to spell it out.

But horror, while consistently present, is only one side of the story. It can equally be said that like Twin Peaks all of Lynch’s movies are made to give pleasure, as well as to “hold abstractions,” as he put it (“abstract,” for him, was always a magic word). Yet another perspective on his intentions is expressed in this statement from his 1990 TIME interview: “I believe this is a lesson world; we’re supposed to learn stuff.” Whatever his protests to the contrary, Lynch never shied away from teaching such lessons—and increasingly did so in his own person, whether under his own name or in his Peaks guise as the comically deaf FBI chief Gordon Cole, who as an alter ego gave him the chance to step inside the fictional world he’d built from the ground up.

When Cole is reunited in the Return with his transgender former employee Denise Bryson (David Duchovny) there’s a few layers to what’s happening between them—but Cole’s recounted admonishment to his transphobic colleagues, “Fix your hearts or die,” is one that Lynch himself was happy to endorse. (Granted, in the 1980s he also endorsed Reagan—but he had the grace to seem at least a little abashed about it later on, when he came out for Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter.) The unassuming workshop videos that he presented on YouTube during the pandemic are lessons too, of a more elusive kind: look closely, and you’ll see that each is a riddling parable, designed one way or another to catch us out.

If I understand Lynch at all, the main lesson he had to teach is one which he plainly stated both within and outside his films, and which in general is not at all unfamiliar. Indeed, it’s the same lesson taught over and over by Shakespeare, whom he resembles as much as he resembles anybody:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

In yet another of his many interviews, Lynch said the following, very straightforwardly, about his faith in reincarnation: “It’s like going to sleep after a day of activity. A lot of things happen in sleep and you wake up and have another day of activity—that’s how I see it.” How near that comes to the truth I have no idea; as he admitted, nor in the end did he. But I wish him a sound sleep, and a bright new morning.