No Headline Can Sum Up David Lynch

Permit me to share with you a David Lynch-related memory:

I am at what was originally known as the Waverly Theater (presently the IFC Center) in New York, watching Blue Velvet not long after it debuted to near-universal acclaim. The praises do not seem to have penetrated this auditorium. There is a growing restlessness as Dennis Hopper takes a young Kyle MacLachlan on a profanity-laden tour of hell, with pit stops for Pabst Blue Ribbon and a lip-sync serenade by Dean Stockwell. As the closing credits roll, the film is greeted with an audience-wide round of hissing.

Okay, not the kind of thing you’d expect at the start of an appreciation of a deservedly celebrated filmmaker. Would Lynch be pleased that his work was group-negged? (Keep in mind that the Waverly was located in the West Village, and so was patronized by people who, one would presume, would be David Lynch’s core demographic.) Probably not. Had he known of that reaction, would that have altered the course of his career? Doubtful. David Lynch was no Spielberg, calibrating his audience appeal with scientific precision. He followed his own creative heart, and trusted that his audience would be able to follow along. (Ironically, when Spielberg needed someone to play John Ford in The Fabelmans, it was Lynch who got the call).

Let’s try another:

I’m at a press screening for Lost Highway. In the film there’s a sequence in Fred and Renee’s darkened bedroom, where the camera turns away from the couple to do a slow track into an attached corridor. For what seems like minutes—though it probably wasn’t more than one or two—Lynch closes in on the surrounding murk, allowing the screen to slowly fill with blackness. After it is totally subsumed, there is a SMASH CUT to blinding white. As one, the assemblage of influential critics—their eyes dilated to the size of a shoujo heroine’s—groan in pain.

I have to admit I got a brief frisson of schadenfreude listening to the high-and-mighty having their retinas scorched. There have been times I’ve wondered whether Lynch wanted an adversarial relationship with his audience. The long, lingering shots to no apparent end, all those characters running up and down halls, people spouting cringy lines or repeatedly invoking cliches that aren’t really cliches (“It’s a strange world,” say the young protagonists of Blue Velvet, words that should not be emerging from the mouths of anyone under fifty). It at times felt like Lynch was deliberately testing the audience’s patience. Not everyone passed the test.

But if my notions of Lynch and his motives occasionally slipped into the shadows, there was also this:

One of the actors for—I think—Twin Peaks: The Return is being interviewed somewhere (I regret being so vague, but I didn’t take notes and Google wasn’t helping). She talks about the time she walked onto the set as the crew was setting up a shot, and there was David Lynch in his Deputy Director Gordon Cole get-up, sitting on-set next to a monkey. He turns to her and says, in that flat, Lynchian tone, “Ya wanna play with the monkey?” And while the crew finished their set-up, she and David Lynch together went ahead and… played with the monkey.

The most recent Lynch film I’ve seen was What Did Jack Do?, a short from 2017. (It’s far from his last work; he kept busy with shorts, music videos, even an aborted Netflix series, right up to the end.) In it, Lynch plays a detective interrogating a talking monkey, also voiced by Lynch. He frames the animal in tight close-up, capturing the creature’s large, soulful eyes (as with a baby’s or a dog’s, they’re proportioned relative to the face in a way that triggers our hard-wired instinct to protect), and its dialogue, delivered through an overlaid CG mouth, mirrors the creature’s confusion over landing in a situation it barely comprehends. The monkey is a lot like many of Lynch’s protagonists, trapped in situations out of their control, struggling to escape an infernal maze whose exit is continually receding into the distance. If I’ve been left wondering whether Lynch approaches his work, his characters, his audience with empathy or antagonism, the story of the director taking time to look into a monkey’s eyes, to try to find some sort of kindred connection, nudges my evaluation toward empathy.

When I heard of David Lynch’s death, the first thing I wanted to watch was Twin Peaks: The Return, “Part 8” (aka “Gotta Light?”). I thought taking the plunge back into what may be the most audacious bit of episodic television ever to invade people’s living rooms would somehow encapsulate the director’s work. It did, to an extent.

The scenario for this unhinged hour is hard to summarize, but I’ll try: After a bit of noirish, double-cross narrative between Evil Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Ray (George Griffith), followed by a musical interlude by “The” Nine Inch Nails (as the M.C. refers to them, and as they subsequently are billed in the closing credits—did the actor flub his line and Lynch decide to just leave it in?), Lynch flees the story at hand, to deliver an intensely disturbing essay on how evil came to Twin Peaks (or perhaps just the birth of evil overall, as I’ve come to regard it).

It starts with a recreation of the 1945 atom bomb test in New Mexico, the visuals—accompanied by Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima—as unsettlingly mesmerizing as anything Christopher Nolan could conjure. There are plunges into boiling, atomic stews, followed by a sequence of specter-like humanoids infesting an abandoned gas station in flashes of light and bursts of static. In 1956, a spectral woodsman in a filthy cap and tattered plaid shirt slaughters two late-night staffers of a radio station and broadcasts a cryptic message, causing a town’s (presumably Twin Peaks) inhabitants to fall unconscious, while a hybrid amphibian-bug creature crawls into a sleeping girl’s mouth. There are moments when the abstract imagery mirrors the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey so profoundly that I doubt it was an accident, although here, instead of invoking a humanity on the threshold of transcendence, Lynch provides us with a portrait of our race succumbing to corruption.

And I think if there’s any theme that runs through Lynch’s work, it’s an exploration of the loss of innocence. Lynch characters cry, a lot—tears shed as they realize how the paths they’ve taken have resulted in the sacrifice of something precious and fragile, something they can no longer retrieve.

In the midst of the swirling nightmare that is “Part 8,” there is a notable interlude: In a dark, rococo aerie, a woman in elaborate, bejeweled finery (Joy Nash) and a man, possibly some kind of butler (Carel Struycken, whose character is billed in the closing credits as “???????”) observe the infernal goings on down on Earth and send down a bubble containing the image of Laura Palmer. If this was a traditional narrative, we would understand that the one being dispatched would be the warrior sent down to engage in holy conflict with the forces of evil. But we know what Laura Palmer turns out to be, and it’s not a soldier of light but a sacrificial lamb, a figure of innocence whose purpose is to be corrupted and then die for our own corruption.

In his impressionistic farragoes of violence and sex and emotional turmoil and moral compromise, Lynch to me seems always to be exploring the existence of true evil, and our susceptibility to it. This flies in the face of modern storytelling, where evil is just an idea, where all characters, good and bad, have their reasons and see themselves as the heroes of their own tales. Lynch, to my mind, stands in direct opposition to that notion. Evil is real, Lynch would say, evil is tangible and powerful, and we all, to one extent or the other, one day will surrender to it.

And yet, Lynch does not grieve. Actors talk about the fun they have on a Lynch set, and Inland Empire—in which an actor played by Laura Dern goes through a severe crisis of identity and may or may not die on Hollywood Boulevard embraced by a homeless person—ends with that bane of CG animated films: a dance party, albeit one set to the darkness of Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. But as reviled as the dance party trope may be in computer form, here it feels wholly motivated, Lynch and company congratulating us for following them into the pit of darkness and making it through. There’s even a monkey present—everything in the Lynch universe comes full circle.

I’m writing this piece quickly, and unsolicited, before the feelings I have over hearing of David Lynch’s death dissipate. I talk about my ambivalence toward his work, which does remain—maybe it’s impossible to love him unconditionally… too complex an artist was he. But he was an artist who viewed humanity through his own, distinctive lens, and sought to translate both his darkness and his love directly to film. It is a measure of his value to cinema, to art, and to the world overall that he was able to do it in a way that allowed people to go to their neighborhood multiplexes and be stunned by singular, challenging visions the likes of which rarely if ever make it into the corporate popcorn palaces. We were lucky to have David Lynch, and poorer now for the loss.

Like I said, I’m writing this fast. I may have misinterpreted some things, and gotten some details wrong. If so, or if there’s anything else you wish to add about the artist and his work, the comments section is below. Please be kind.