We Live in a Dream - RIP David Lynch
In high school I often suffered from insomnia. After going to bed I would often stare at the ceiling for hours, eventually giving up and heading downstairs to watch TV. It was on one of those nights that I was introduced to the world of David Lynch. I clicked on the TV and turned the knob to HBO hoping to see a late night boob comedy. Instead I got Blue Velvet.
I was immediately hooked as Kyle McLaughlin’s character, Jeffrey Beaumont finds an ear covered in ants in a vacant lot. He takes it to the police department and gives it to a detective. Later that night calls on the detective at home who tells him that his find was important but he can’t tell Jeffrey anything about it. Leaving the house he encounters the detective’s daughter Sandy. She tells him she can hear what her father is talking about from her room. Sandy tells Jeffrey it is probably related to Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, who is a lounge singer. He concocts a plan to find out more about it by posing as an exterminator to break in to her apartment.
After watching her sing Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s home. She arrives home much earlier than expected and catches Jeffrey watching her undress. She pulls a knife on him and forces him to undress. Someone knocks on the door and she tells him to hide because whoever it is will kill him. Enter Frank Booth who is terrifying. At this point I realize I will be watching this whole movie.
When it finished, I tiptoed upstairs to my room the morning sun starting to peek over the trees of High Street. I fell asleep immediately and exhausted. Watching that movie changed the way I thought about small towns forever.
I grew up in a small town of about 5000 or so. In a town that small you know everyone and everyone knows you. I would often list my teenage complaints about it sitting with my parents and grandmother. They always told me this tiny town I couldn’t appreciate was safe and wholesome. I didn’t really believe it. There was something dark and disturbing that I was never able to really understand until I watched that movie. Is it a mystery? How about horror?
A year or two later me and two of my friends rented Wild at Heart. It was another intense experience. Many of the scenes were seared into my mind. Diane Ladd loading on the lipstick is one. It still gives me chills just to imagine it. Bobby Peru is one of the creepiest things ever imagined. Then there is all the meta Alice in Wonderland stuff. I was starting to realize David Lynch movies were fearful and seductive. This insane viewing party also led to under blanket cuddling with girls, so that was also pretty great. That movie became a staple of dorm life at Emerson College. We were all obsessed with Nicolas Cage and that movie is still my favorite performance by him. It may not be truly his best, I’m looking at you Raising Arizona, but it is the one I always think of first. I’m sure some of what grabs me is the first experience of watching it. Girls and art house films are strong beckoning vectors, as are snakeskin jackets and the good witch.
It probably has the best line ever delivered by Cage, “I found her lying in a room filled with assault weapons and spankhouse magazines.” All of these cinematic experiences I remember vividly 30 plus years later.
The next Lynch film I saw was Fire Walk With Me. Someone brought it into my dorm room. I hadn’t seen Twin Peaks and did not know it was going to spoil the whole mystery of the show, but still I loved it. It was also the first time I realized how much the audio and music define Lynch’s work. I didn’t fully understand it but couldn’t stop thinking about it, processing in my subconscious for years.
I watched Eraserhead in a college movie club where the professor showed us the first films of many directors. That one isn’t as dear to me, I find it plodding and difficult to watch so I’ll leave that there.
The summer before my junior year of college I moved to a trashy roach infested apartment in the symphony district. One of the guys who lived down the hall had the the whole series of Twin Peaks on VHS which I rabidly watched through that unforgivingly hot and humid summer. It was often hard to sleep then, like my days in high school and I would binge watch through them, hitting the Bob reveal episode on a pyramid gel of LSD. So, yeah, that still scared the shit out of me. Over the years and rewatches, I think it is my favorite thing even though middle of the second season sucks eggs. It does end strong and on a cliffhanger. The show was canceled after that season leaving our hero Dale Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge, his evil doppelgänger released on to the world. One of the lines, which seemed like a throwaway was “I’ll see you again in 25 years.” Cut to 25 years later and a new season airs on Showtime. I spent that summer talking about David Lynch and Peter Jackson. He now works for Peter Jackson, and I found out Lynch was editing on Final Cut 7, the release I managed. I consider that my greatest professional accomplisment.
Fire Walk With Me recasts Laura Palmer’s narrative. She is no longer just another dead girl on tv but now she is a hero who chooses to sacrifice herself over allowing herself to be possessed by Bob. She manages to regain her agency. Even though we know how it will end it still maintains tension and ultimately has tremendous emotional resonance as Cooper and Laura watch the angel in the lodge, and she weeps tears of joy. Cheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer is tremendous work, potent and raw. I watched it again the day Lynch died. It holds up tremendously, maybe even better now.
I was finally able to see a Lynch film in the cinema when Lost Highway came out. It starts with the car driving into black night to David Bowie’s I’m Deranged. I went to it three times in the theater. The first time was opening night with a packed house. The dread energy was hypnotic and brutal, the crowd pulling me into the imaginary world of duality. This can also work in the wrong direction — I’m looking at you Phantom Menace.
America’s kings of criticism once again gave a Lynch film a bad review. When I visited LA the next year there was still a billboard my friends took me to that read “Two Thumbs Down from Siskel and Ebert — Two more great reasons to see Lost Highway!” I generally agreed with Ebert but he just didn’t get Lynch at all. He thought Lynch exploited women but I think he had it backwards. He was showing us the world that exploit women, the men that hate them. This shadow work playing out on the movie screen started to inform me of the world where men kill women or treat them as property. It tears at the fabric of civilization and makes us all worse for it.
A lot of Lynch’s work is about duality. The duality in Twin Peaks: The Return is extremely disturbing. The malevolent spirit Bob was pretty odious inhabiting Leland Palmer but his symbiosis with Cooper is exponentially worse. Leland seemed to only care about predatory sexual behavior. The Bob/Cooper doppelgänger runs an organized crime cohort. At times it hard to tell which one is the host and which one is the parasite. Is Cooper responsible for any of Bob/Mr. C’s behavior. He is a genius level predator, horrifying in every way. What if Laura had not put on the ring, calming death over possession? How much power would he have wielded with her?
For all the darkness in Season 3, there is some pretty astounding humanity as well. Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl is an example of kindness that lives there. Big Ed and Norma, the Sheriff’s department - except for Chad - what a douche he is - The Log Lady, Garland Briggs. I was incredibly touched by Bobby’s change since we last saw him. The pathos he shows when encountering the evidence from Laura Palmer’s death feels real and loving. He is more like his dad than we saw 25 years ago. Twin Peaks The Return is beautifully strange.
Love him or hate him there is no one else like him. No one else has ever been so formative to me as an artist. I will miss him greatly.