Remembering David Lynch (1946-2025)

I don’t remember when exactly I watched Mulholland Drive. I know it was sometime in the late 2000s, and I didn’t start logging films on Letterboxd until the Spring of 2020. The exact time doesn’t matter, not really. What matters is that I was smitten by the film. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. I loved it all, but in particular the scene where Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Herring) watch a stage show where Rebekah Del Rio sings “Llorando” (“Crying”). Oh, and yeah, that Winkie’s scene. That damn Winkie’s scene. In short, it was a hell of a film.Weirdly, that didn’t get me to rush out to watch the rest of David Lynch’s filmography. Why? I don’t know. I guess I was scared off by my own imagination at how awful the baby might be in Eraserhead. Mostly, though, I just don’t think I saw Lynch as a director of note. Sure, I knew he had made Twin Peaks, but that was just the weird show that got bad and died quickly, right? Even as I kept hearing how good his work was, I just stayed away. I was much more familiar with Lynch the actor, between his voice work on The Cleveland Show and his run of episodes on Louie. It’s quite likely the second thing of his I saw was What did Jack Do?, a short film he made for Netflix where he interrogates a monkey about possibly committing a murder.

Finally, in the spring of 2021 I watched the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. In the following years, I watched each of his feature films, and watched Twin Peaks: The Return. And then rewatched all three seasons of Twin Peaks and many of his films. Over the past four years, Lynch has become one of my favorite filmmakers and TV creators. Better late than never, right?

I could sit here and talk about why his work is so important to me. I could break down this scene or that. But I don’t know if I would have the words to accurately convey, because so much of why his work is so effective to me is because of how it makes me feel. And those feelings are my own personal feelings. I guess I can try, because why not?

One thing I really like about what Lynch could do is take something that isn’t scary in and of itself, but becomes the scariest damn thing when it's fully rendered by Lynch and the others working with him. Take for instance a guy climbing over a couch, or someone coming onto camera out by a dumpster. If you have never seen what I am talking about, that doesn’t sound scary, right? But if you do, you are likely nodding your head in recognition. Lynch was so good at finding the right sound, the right composition, and getting the right performances from the actors, to turn the everyday into something truly terrifying.

But the beauty of Lynch’s work is that it's not just terror that he did so well. There also beauty and compassion and joy that he finds in a situation, no matter how awful. Some of the darkest, most horrible things are interspersed or followed by moments of pure beauty, and it just hits so hard. This is true whether his subject is something like the first detonation of an atomic bomb, a fictional character like Laura Palmer, or a fictionalized version of a person who actually existed, like John Merrick.

And there's this: few other filmmakers get at the dual nature of America, particularly its small towns, so well. Having grown up in a small town, there's a few examples of work I can point to that truly gets what it's like, but many of them are from Lynch. He clearly admires small towns and the people that live there, but also was completely comfortable looking at the darkness that is there as well. The obvious examples are Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, of course. But The Straight Story gets at it as well. Sure, there’s nothing to the level of terror and sleaze found in the other works, but Alvin Straight and his hometown of Laurens, Iowa are shown as is, neither glorifying nor denigrating them. 

As I wrap up here, I could share a clip from one of his films. There’s a whole lot of them to share. But instead, I want to share his cameo at the end of The Fablemans, Steven Spielberg’s semi-biographical film. In it, he plays legendary director John Ford, in a scene based upon an actual encounter between Ford and Spielberg. I’m not going to explain the scene or why it works so well, it should just be experienced.

Goodbye for now, David. We’ll see you down the road.