Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine

All along the way

There have already been and will be many more remembrances of the great artist David Lynch; this one is mine.

Like many, Twin Peaks was my first introduction to Lynch. Like many, it changed my life. The pilot episode, which stands among the greatest works of American art, teems with that Lynchian “weirdness,” as has become a pseudo-genre unto itself, but also with something that transcends any of its imitators, a deep sadness that pervades throughout an unparalleled body of work about the human pysche, its violence and its compassion, its evil and its goodness, a duality that is never just that.

Nothing I say, nothing any of us can say, will feel sufficient to capture what it was that Lynch “had,” and how he was able to navigate an irreproachably authentic career with shockingly few compromises. His art was always, always honest, and this goes some way toward explaining how such a singular vision has been able to connect so intimately with so many people. It was heartbreaking but also moving to see the endless cavalcade of love for the man on my Twitter timeline today, from desperate attempts to explain what he meant to any of the numerous breathtaking images and sounds he leaves us with. That such an artist could command such a wide range of appreciation is commendable in itself, and he may be one of the last to do so on such a scale.

Those that love Lynch’s work appreciate how he is able to split us open and expose the rawness beneath. Many are talking today about how he “rewired” their brains, and it makes sense — he showed us things we’d never seen before, tapped into feelings we’d never felt or couldn’t explain, and forced us to see things that seemed familiar but in an unfamiliar way. This impact would spur so many of us to explore cinema and other mediums voraciously, looking for more of the same, but we always come back to him.

The cinema in particular, though, has felt his influence. “Lynchian” became a shorthand, however imperfect or frustrating, in a way that so few artists ever do, leaving his mark on too many filmmakers (and musicians, and painters, and writers, and so on) working today to name. To even try and talk about that influence is foolhardy; it is a simple fact of American art today.

Someone on Twitter succinctly wrote: “his movies felt like they were made just for you, no matter who you were. They whispered secrets no one else knew. At one point, everybody’s favorite director was David Lynch.” This is true. He has been my favourite for as long as I can remember, even if those words themselves feel inadequate. All this, though, reflects how eager we are to connect with others and how they see the world, because in Lynch’s work, that’s what we got — an unflinching window into his unique yet invitingly specific perspective, the kind of artistic intimacy that is exceedingly rare and treasured once encountered.

His work was dreamy, surreal, nightmarish, haunting, eerie, yes. It was also personal, tender, hopeful. For someone so clearly obsessed with the ruinous darkness of life, it should not be a surprise that he was equally invested in the richness of being alive in this absurd place, most of all through our interactions with each other, that inexhaustible curiosity about other people and other ways of seeing, embodying what art is all about.

Mulholland Drive tells us this, that being alive in this reality, the one imposed on us, is unbearable, and so there is fantasy and there is unreality, there are ways of becoming something else and finding connection differently, and it is meaningful all the same. Wild at Heart tells us this, that life may be hopeless but love is possible. Perhaps most of all, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me tell us this, depicting the unnatural pain and sorrow of Laura Palmer only to offer a stunning coda of grace, and putting me into tears every time: “the tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”

Lynch found the horrors of life to be inexplicable, and sought to exorcise the ridiculousness within, a sublime rendering of life’s complicated emotional textures, presented through a matching aesthetic absurdism that bristles as much as it feels wholly real. He saw that as worth fighting for, even if it always remains just out of reach, a goodness and beauty that is as necessary as it is elusive, working through the pain and the sorrow to find the dim light.

I’m writing all this because I feel like I have to if I want to begin to process what this loss means, for me, for culture, for everything. It feels pointless — if you’ve seen his work, you already understand, and there’s nothing else to say.

As he once famously said, “As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it. The film is the talking.”

Thank you, David.