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David Lynch, the visionary film director, artist and musician, student of transcendental meditation, and owner of the most magnificent shock of white hair, has died at the age of 78. His film career spanned 50 years, ten feature films, and three seasons of one of the saddest, funniest and most sublimely beautiful television shows ever made.
It was through this TV show that I first encountered Lynch, which I now understand to have been a kind of cosmic gift. A gloomy, suburban 13-year-old, I was naive to the idea that he might be “important” or influential – a film-maker I was supposed to watch. I had never heard of his avant-garde debut Eraserhead (1977) or the tender story of The Elephant Man (1980). I was simply a pre-teen obsessed with the TV show Lost. My stepfather, who had recently joined our family, watched one episode of the impenetrable island-set drama with me, and declared it a rip-off of a show called Twin Peaks. It wasn’t long before I received the DVD box set of the first season as a gift.
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Twin Peaks first aired in 1991. A tragic and often frightening mystery, it centred on the violent murder of a beautiful teenage girl in a strange, small town nestled in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The protagonist was a handsome FBI agent who drank black coffee and spoke in riddles. There was a lot of spontaneous dancing fuelled by a bizarre, forbidding undercurrent of danger. I didn’t understand it at all. I was gripped. I became obsessed with its images of Americana: desolate diners and roadside dive bars, clanking industrial machinery (the fictional town of Twin Peaks has a sawmill), flanked by jaw-dropping natural beauty.
It was a great introduction to many of the director’s long-standing preoccupations: the rot of evil, the mysteries of desire, parallel worlds and the portals to them. The show featured a curdled nostalgia for the 1950s, the music of Julee Cruise, and contained much discussion of the weather (in 2020, Lynch started publishing charming daily weather reports on YouTube), and music from the 1950s. Like his most beloved and best-known film, the Blue Velvet (1986), it deals with the utter devastation of losing one’s innocence. Like my personal favourite of his films, Mulholland Drive (2001), an uncanny, LA-set neo-noir about delusions and doubles, there is a chilling and significant red velvet curtain.
I discovered his other work later: his sweetest film The Straight Story, the Oscar-nominated, subversive mystery Blue Velvet, and the divisive and harrowing Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me. I clapped at the end of Wild at Heart, and left a screening of Lost Highway with a furrowed brow. In 2017, Twin Peaks returned for a third season, critically lauded, and my sister and I binge-watched the entire series over Christmas. I found his films cruel, odd, moving, and hilarious. Lynch didn’t take well to explaining his art, but he didn’t feel the need to defend it either, an approach that only works when the art in question is good. He didn’t always articulate his ideas. He didn’t need to: his films did.
The term “Lynchian” is too often used as a tedious shorthand for things that feel spooky-beautiful and slightly weird. The Canadian film critic Adam Nayman described the term more accurately in his Lynch obituary as an experience that defies description. Like the Twin Peaks town eccentric known as The Log Lady, Lynch was a shaman, whose films gave visual and aural expression to repressed, subterranean feelings like intense desire, or the clear cosmic sense that something is wrong. Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and its sequel The Return wrote in a tribute that the director “was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.” That place was a sincere and bone-deep understanding – though almost never an explanation – of the coexistence of primal joy and sadness.
In Blue Velvet, Laura Dern’s Sandy declares that she doesn’t know if Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey is a detective or a pervert. The ever-inscrutable Lynch is more interested in the question than its answer.
[See also: The Pierre Bonnard renaissance]