Farewell, David Lynch

I was in back to back meetings most of yesterday, as various friends wrote me about the news of David Lynch’s passing. It’s hard for me to know what to say, as I doubt another filmmaker will ever have a comparable impact on my life to the extent that Lynch has had. Part of it is down to the age I was, since encountering a film like BLUE VELVET (it’s been described as a lot of different things, but let’s say “dark coming-of-age mystery” for now) as a teenager was ideal.

While I could name other directors and the kinds of movies they were known for prior to seeing BLUE VELVET, that was really where I started thinking about film as a director’s medium, as opposed to focusing on the actors or genres. I was coming to BLUE VELVET as a fan of horror, and I think part of what I responded to was the dark suburban atmosphere of something like HALLOWEEN, but applied to something…well, realistic isn’t the right word, nor grounded, but something different. I’m sure I encountered ironic elements in film prior to BLUE VELVET, but the deadpan comic delivery of lines like, “Yes, that’s a human ear all right”, or the sincere-or-parody aspect of Jeffrey’s earnest “Why are there people like Frank?” outburst and the Sandy’s dream about the robins, I had no previous context for questioning directorial intent in this way.

There’s a question I sometimes asked on Supporting Characters about making film “social”, and I think that a deep interest in cinema can sometimes be a little isolating, all that time staring up at a screen in silence. But it occurs to me that no other filmmaker's work has connected me with other people more frequently than that of David Lynch. I’ve loved movies my whole life, but I was more of a music person than a film person prior to the time I saw BLUE VELVET. And I don’t know how unique this experience is, but because Lynch was popular in alternative music circles (Bauhaus and Pixies covered ‘In Heaven’, thrash metal and industrial acts appropriated Frank Booth, The Wedding Present covered ‘Falling’, etc.), he was a figure who bridged the musical circles of my teenage years and the film circles I became involved in as I grew older. 

I’m realizing now that I have very few memories of watching Lynch’s work alone. Films like ERASERHEAD, BLUE VELVET, LOST HIGHWAY and MULHOLLAND DRIVE were encountered for the first time (and many subsequent times) with friends, and I’ve gone through the entire David Lynch/Mark Frost series TWIN PEAKS in different social settings more than once, never solo, never more happily that my first time watching it in Ithaca, NY. And Lynch’s work always inspired long, animated conversations, whether it was trying to piece together the mystery of a cryptic narrative like LOST HIGHWAY, or just marveling at the eeriness of Bob climbing over the couch in TWIN PEAKS. 

My late friend James Izzo was with me when I saw BLUE VELVET, and some of the sentimental fondness I have for Lynch is probably tied to making all of those initial discoveries together and sharing in the excitement. The first time I drove a car of my own, the TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME soundtrack cassette (a gift from James, who bought it for a penny at a garage sale…Lynch was never consistently popular) was the first music I played in it. The first mail order bootleg VHS I ever bought contained badly degraded copies of Lynch’s early shorts THE ALPHABET and THE GRANDMOTHER, which we studied over like communications from another planet. Upon going away to college, the first film I ever wrote about for a class was BLUE VELVET; it would also be the first one I wrote about for a print publication after I’d graduated. 

I still have many friends from my two years in Wilmington, NC, a city I moved to mostly because it was the town where BLUE VELVET was filmed, where I managed a video store that already had an ERASERHEAD painting hanging on the wall when I first walked in the door, and where one of our customers, Dave Ryder, became a friend who would later co-host a podcast with me devoted to interviewing crew people from BLUE VELVET. I moved there in 2001; MULHOLLAND DRIVE opened that Fall, only weeks after 9/11, and it’s fascinating to me how that one came to be the cannonized item on his filmography, all those years after the midnight movie legend of ERASERHEAD, the classy and emotionally direct THE ELEPHANT MAN, the Palme d'Or-winning WILD AT HEART, the stylistically dazzling LOST HIGHWAY or the bittersweet Americana of THE STRAIGHT STORY. Even DUNE, maligned by many critics and by Lynch himself, is an immensely important film for many people I’ve met. I have just as much affection for, say, the eerily austere “Blackout” episode of HOTEL ROOM as I do most of the feature films, but I understand the reverence for the works that feel like grand "summing up" statements, with MULHOLLAND DRIVE being the most accessible and concise (maybe thanks to that initial TV pilot straitjacket), though TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN's sustained 18 hours of pleasure might give it the edge for me. It was the nicest surprise, as I dreaded a cynical nostalgia-driven cash-in on an aged franchise, full of celebrity cameo stunt-casting, not something in the conversation for his boldest and most emotionally impactful work. If there are technically other bits of whimsy that followed, like WHAT DID JACK DO?, I still think of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN as a great send-off, not just for Lynch, but for certain actors we lost around that time, like Catherine Coulson, Miguel Ferrer, Peggy Lipton and Harry Dean Stanton. 

Any regular listeners of my Supporting Characters podcast probably heard Lynch’s name come up on a number of episodes, and so many of the guests have authored books, produced podcasts, recorded audio commentaries, and written articles exploring Lynch’s work. Whether it was Danny Peary and Jonathan Rosenbaum writing about ERASERHEAD and the midnight movie phenomenon when it was still recent, or genre specialist writers of the fanzine era who saw Lynch extending the possibilities of horror in interesting ways, or the film critics and/or podcasters of my generation who grew up with Lynch’s 80s and 90s output…not every guest on the show was a fan, I can think of a few who dislike Lynch’s work, but it’s possible no other filmmaker had a greater overall impact on the multiple generations of guests I’ve interviewed.