I’m woefully late in paying tribute to the late David Lynch, but better late than never. As Lynch was fond of saying, “Keep your eye on the donut, and not on the hole.”
The first time I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead, it was in 2005 at a midnight screening at Dallas’ iconic Inwood Theatre. When I moved to Denton for college – the home of the University of North Texas is about a forty-five-minute drive north of Dallas proper – I quickly discovered the Inwood’s Friday and Saturday night midnight screenings and attended as many as I could.
I saw Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn at an Inwood midnight show. I saw one of my all-time favorites, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, at a midnight screening at the Inwood in the early days of maintaining this website. Rae and I attended a midnight screening of Airplane! at the Inwood on our first date – we had both very recently put our 20s behind us, so at that time we were people who were young enough to be out until two AM and still be functional human beings the next day, unlike now.
(A side note about the Inwood: the theater recently went through a closure scare when it’s parent company, Landmark Theatres, defaulted on the rent in late 2024. Their robust midnight movie series, which nurtured me as a young cinephile while studying the artform at UNT, is virtually non-existent now. They do a one-weekend-a-month midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show, with a live theater troupe, Los Bastardos, providing the audience participation element for which RHPS screenings are known. In my research for this piece, I discovered a tribute to the Inwood by critic and film thinker Matt Zoller Seitz that he wrote for D Magazine in February of this year.)
The Eraserhead screening was memorable not only because Lynch’s bonkers debut film about the anxieties of becoming a father seared itself onto my brain. It’s also memorable for what happened immediately after. I and a close friend had recently graduated from UNT and the two of us and my brother decided to take a road trip to see the Grand Canyon.
We had the itinerary for the trip locked when I discovered that I could see Eraserhead for the first time, and on the big screen. This was two decades ago, so I’ve forgotten the exact rationale, but we decided to go to the midnight Eraserhead screening and then, at two in the morning, drive the first seven-hour leg of our road trip. That drive gave me a lot of time to think about the visually stunning fever dream I had just witnessed.
I didn’t know it at the time – and wouldn’t know it for almost another decade – but David Lynch, who died on January 16, 2025 at the age of 78, would articulate a philosophy on art and life that has shaped my own views on those subjects in the last ten years.
It was the waning days of my high school years and immediately after when I became absolutely obsessed with all things cinema. There was an ill-fated attempt to make a movie with my brother and friends the summer after I graduated high school. I focused on history at the local junior college I attended, in order to get some basics out of the way, but in the back of my mind, I had started to wonder if it was possible to study the one thing that had become my passion.
During those early days of my budding cinephilia, my brother had subscribed to a magazine called Total Movie. The publication’s major selling point was that each issue came with a DVD – this was the early days of the format, right when DVD players were becoming affordable – packed either with trailers for upcoming movies, exclusive DVD extras, and featurettes or a complete movie on its own. I remember one of those DVDs containing a public domain version of Night of the Living Dead. Each disc’s case triumphantly declared, “THE WORLD’S FIRST MAGAZINE/DVD COMBO!”
I remember first coming across the name David Lynch in the pages of one of those issues of Total Movie. I can no longer tell you what the focus of the article was, but I was enraptured by the (sometimes lurid) descriptions of these strange and unfamiliar movies. Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway. I needed to do some homework.
The first Lynch movie I saw was Mulholland Dr. It was a few months after moving out of my parents’ house in the fall of 2001 for college. I know that one of the four of us roommates sharing that tiny, cramped student-housing-adjacent apartment rented the Mulholland Dr. DVD from Hastings, our local video store, but exactly which one of us it was is now lost to time. (I worked at Hastings as the Video Department Manager while in college.)
That first DVD release of Mulholland Dr. was infamously light on special features. It didn’t even contain chapter markers because, according to Lynch himself in a 2003 New York Times magazine piece about the then-nascent DVD technology, chapter stops ruined the experience. “The film is the thing,” Lynch said. “For me, the world you go into in a film is so delicate — it can be broken so easily. It's so tender. And it's essential to hold that world together, to keep it safe."
Chapter stops, along with other DVD special features, worked to “demystify” the movie. "Do not demystify,” Lynch said. “When you know too much, you can never see the film the same way again. It's ruined for you for good. All the magic leaks out, and it's putrefied."
What can I tell you? It took six years to convince Steven Spielberg to allow E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to be released on VHS. It was a weird time.
The DVD did, however, come with a curious insert. On this unassuming bit of cardstock were printed “David Lynch’s 10 Clues to Unlocking” the mysteries of Mulholland Dr. Among the cryptic statements included were, “2 Notice appearances of the red lampshade,” “6 Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup,” and “10 Where is Aunt Ruth?”
If nothing else, that intriguing card stimulated my curiosity concerning what I was about to see. It did almost nothing to help me put the puzzle pieces together once the movie was over. No, this world that Lynch created was as much a mystery to me at the end of the movie as it was at the beginning. Still, there was something unsettling and strange about it. My 21-year-old brain felt as smooth as silk when faced with trying to explain what I had just witnessed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
After several more screenings of this inexplicable picture, and what I’m sure must have been an assist from internet writers delving into the movie’s themes and hidden meanings, I was finally able to wrap my arms around Lynch’s masterpiece. The attribute that I was most obsessed with when it came to Mulholland Dr., it’s dreamlike quality, turned out to be the key to the movie.
Understanding that large swaths of Mulholland Dr. are happening in a dream state, and figuring out who’s dreaming and, more importantly, why, unlocked the entire movie for me. Lynch’s darkly satiric, unsparing depiction of Hollywood, the ultimate dream factory, filtered through the subconscious aspirations and disappointments of a hopeful starlet resulted in one of the most searing portraits of the entertainment industry ever made.
It was inevitable that the artist Lynch would gravitate to filmmaking and Hollywood. His modus operandi was to explore the carefully hidden darkness that lurks within all of us under our manicured lawns and good manners. Who better to explore the contradictions of Hollywood, where dreams become reality, but where the price of those dreams are often unspeakable compromises and humiliations? All the glitz and glamour are a façade, hiding the nastiness in the dark.
In his teen years, Lynch was gifted the book The Art Spirit, written by Robert Henri. The painter father of a friend gave Lynch what would ultimately set him on his life path. As detailed in his wonderful book Weirdsville USA: The Obsessive Universe of David Lynch, author Paul A. Woods tells of Lynch declaring (to himself, if no one else) that he would dedicate himself to what he called the “Art Life” after reading The Art Spirit.
Lynch initially attended university to become a painter. After a few uninspiring stints in colleges and an ill-fated trip to Europe in the hopes of studying under Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, Lynch landed in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he finally got a taste of the Art Life.
Of the atmosphere in this phase of his life, Lynch once said, "[I]n Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." According to Lynch, Philadelphia had "a great mood—factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters and the darkest night. I saw vivid images—plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows."
Having grown up in multiple idyllic surroundings due to his father’s work as a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lynch got lost in the beauty of the forests where his dad worked. According to the director, his father "would drive me through the woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads, through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very tall and shafts of sunlight come down, and, in the mountain streams, the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods." These could practically be the words of Special Agent Dale Cooper, the Eagle-Scout-like hero of Lynch and Mark Frost’s iconic television series, Twin Peaks.
An event in Lynch’s very early childhood would sear itself onto the young boy’s brain, giving him a view of humanity that was diametrically opposed to the beauty and wonder of nature. As told by the director in the 2016 documentary about him, David Lynch: The Art Life, when he was very young, he and his brother were witness to a shocking event. Playing outside in their Spokane, Washington neighborhood one evening, the two boys saw a naked woman coming out of the shadows, her mouth bloodied.
If you’re familiar at all with the filmography of David Lynch, you’ll probably recognize that scenario as coming straight out of his 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet. (I was able to catch Blue Velvet at one of those Inwood midnight screenings, probably in the mid- to late-2000s.) It’s such a disturbing sequence that film critic Roger Ebert famously lambasted the movie upon its release for its misogyny and degrading treatment of actor Isabella Rossellini, who portrayed Dorothy Vallens, the woman in Blue Velvet who is reduced to wandering naked in the streets seeking help. (Rossellini and Lynch were also romantic partners between 1986 and 1991.)
The juxtaposition of those two worlds – the one on top, where everyone smiles and waves when they see you, and the one underneath, where women are left naked and bleeding in the street and where severed ears sometimes turn up in empty fields – define much of Lynch’s oeuvre. From The Elephant Man to Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire to Twin Peaks, Lynch was fascinated by humanity’s darkest impulses.
Nowhere is that more on display than in the aforementioned Twin Peaks. I won’t spoil the show’s central reveal – “Who killed Laura Palmer?” – but the answer, and the elaborate world Lynch and Mark Frost created to explain it, plumbs the depths for depraved human behavior. Twin Peaks aired on ABC between 1990 and 1991, was revisited by Lynch in the form of the 1992 feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and then resurrected for a third, limited-series season, called Twin Peaks: The Return, in 2017 for Showtime.
In anticipation of The Return, Showtime CEO David Nevins touted the project as, “the pure heroin version of David Lynch.” He is not wrong. Episode eight of The Return, titled Gotta Light?, is one of the most bewildering hours of television ever produced.
I discovered Twin Peaks during college. Years after first screening Mulholland Dr., one of my roommates, who worked at Old Navy while earning his degree, told me about a coworker and his wife who would hold Twin Peaks viewing parties, complete with hot coffee, stacks of donuts, and fresh-baked pies (IYKYK). I was ten/eleven when the original Twin Peaks aired, so I didn’t know much about it. I have a vivid memory of my mom watching the first episode and deciding it was too weird for her taste. My roomies and I devoured each disc of the Twin Peaks box set, marveling at how funny, strange, and mysterious this world was.
I’ve been through the original Twin Peaks twice – Rae and I are currently at the start of working our way through it again as part of a Lynch career retrospective – and I’ve watched Fire Walk with Me a handful of times. I’ve only been through The Return once; I’m looking forward to diving back in as part of this current rewatch. This third time through the original series is like revisiting old friends. I smile each time I see Big Ed Hurley, Major Garland Briggs, or good ole Pete Martell on screen.
Twin Peaks is also an easy obsession for me because there are so many rabbit holes to fall down. Two books, written by show cocreator Mark Frost, titled The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, offer up innumerable revelations about the history of this strange Pacific Northwest location and what makes it so. Of course, Lynch jokingly deflated these titles by declaring that they are Mark Frost’s interpretation/explanation for the world of Twin Peaks, not Lynch’s own definitive reality of this fantasy world. Lynch famously delighted in never discussing or interpreting his own work, instead preferring to leave it all a mystery.
There are also innumerable rabbit holes to fall down when it comes to the man himself. To the director, living the Art Life meant constant artistic creation. When he wasn’t working on movies, Lynch was painting, sculpting, making music, writing, or expressing himself in some other way artistically. Actor Kyle MacLachlan said as much in a SXSW interview panel held not long after his close friend’s death.
If you’ve made it this far – first of all, thank you! – I won’t keep you much longer. I haven’t mentioned yet how I get swallowed by Lynch’s 1997 head-trip Lost Highway (“Dick Laurent is dead”) each time I see it. Among many wild twists in Lost Highway, actor Bill Pullman plays a character who falls asleep in a jail cell only to wake up the next morning as a completely different character, now portrayed by actor Balthazar Getty.
I’m transported to another universe each time I watch Lynch’s late-career waking nightmare known as Inland Empire. One of my most treasured memories of Lynch came to me second hand during Inland Empire’s release. A college friend who now lives and works in LA as a screenwriter told me once of attending a premiere for Lynch’s last film, and the director was in attendance. According to my friend, Lynch’s introduction, delivered with an impish grin, was short and sweet: “I hope you find a way to enjoy my movie.” That’s one of the things I love most about David Lynch. The art he made was for him. If an audience could appreciate it, great. If not, that was fine by him. He made exactly what he wanted, and he made it for himself.
Lynch was also intensely involved in every aspect of his films. The sound design in each, which Lynch personally oversaw, creates an unsettling atmosphere where nothing is as it seems. He was also a major proponent of transcendental meditation, and began smoking cigarettes at the age of eight.
There’s so much more I’ve left out. I’ll sign off by recommending a stunning 2022 documentary about the director from Alexandre O. Philippe titled, simply, Lynch/Oz, which tackles Lynch’s obsession with The Wizard of Oz. During a Q&A which took place at the New York Film Festival, Lynch once said, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz.” Lynch lived the Art Life, something I’m trying to do myself, if only by way of drinking in and wrestling with — instead of creating — as much of it as I can while I’m here. If I’m being honest, I doubt there will be many days that go by in the remainder of my life that I don’t think about David Lynch, one of the best filmmakers to ever do it.
(photo by the author)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
The FFC’s political soapbox
Days since the US government sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran concentration camp with no due process: 70.