David Lynch has returned to the strange and glorious realm that made him, and the brief holiday he took here on earth has left many artists the world over struggling to find the words to honour him: a man whose legacy of image and sound is deeply moving yet difficult to articulate in any way that feels suitably encompassing. I wish I had the kind of intrinsic relationship with Lynch's work that allowed me to appropriately eulogise him, but his passing feels like such a great and lurching shift in the timeline that I'm having trouble expressing it to myself.
Many have made the case, especially in the hours since the news of his death, that David Lynch might be the most important filmmaker of our time, and I believe I agree. Though it wasn't until university that I watched my first film of his, Blue Velvet, Lynch's touch is instantly recognisable to anyone who takes a sidelong glance into the world of cinema. His influence is as far-reaching as only a creative of his singular vision could achieve, transcending the bounds of film and TV into fields as diverse as horror games and dreampop music. David Ehrlich said it best when he wrote that 'David Lynch gave us the language we needed to better articulate the indescribable strangeness of our shared reality. “Lynchian” is so overused because it’s a viscerally understandable word without any known synonyms. I can’t imagine a more beautiful artistic legacy than that.' Even to those of us who weren't as immersed in his work during his lifetime, I could feel his presence in the world - through his films, his writing, his daily Covid Weather Report videos, and the wealth of good-natured memes that delighted in his wisdom and his idiosyncracies. Last night, I couldn't ignore the feeling of deep sadness with which I beheld the headline reporting he had left us. He was the kind of artistic giant whose absence is difficult to comprehend. The magnitude of his not being here can't be overstated.
I felt an urge to write something briefly about David Lynch, not because I can speak with a great deal of authority on the details, but because his work was so unique and so full of vigour that it made powerful impressions on even someone as unenlightened as myself. In my last year of university, my friend Anna insisted that we sit down and watch Twin Peaks, a show which until that I point I had only known as a kind of legend: the TV show that changed television. There are a few shows that have claimed that distinction, but none - to my mind, at least - have really earned it like Twin Peaks. Watching that show is like immersing yourself in a half-dimension between reality and unreality. It casts a spell of total absorption upon the viewer, akin to hypnosis. Though it has had its imitators and its homages, I couldn't believe how unique it felt watching it 34 years later. That nobody has ever been able to convincingly replicate that feeling proves to me that Twin Peaks' magic stems from a deep well of earnestness, so infused with Lynch and Frost's fears and fascinations that any attempt to recreate it feels, by nature, just not right.
Twin Peaks is also the most frightening show I have ever seen. Any fan can probably imagine the scenes I'm thinking of. I won't go into detail, as I think Twin Peaks' unique power, which resembles the instinctive gutpunch of a particularly scary dream, comes from its weaponisation of the unexpected, but I can say that a particular sequence involving backward-talking, inexplicable shadows and men of short stature remains the most convincing representation of nightmare I have ever seen on a screen. As a fan and writer of horror, the experience of being scared by a work of art naturally triggers a kind of soul-searching. How, I asked myself, could something so heightened in its unreality, so extreme in its melodrama, so absurd in its comedy, be as intuitively terrifying as this? I think the answer lies in a principle that Lynch embodied in every aspect of his work. He, more prominently than any filmmaker before or after him, showed us that the abstract can exist unto itself; it requires no explanation nor reflection through irony or smirking or pretension. Lynch's art is rich with meaning, but it is not something so reductive as a tool for transmitting a 'message' in simple terms. To even try to impose logic on intuition is is a losing game. "The words are not there," Lynch said. "The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose." The dreamlike constructions of his boldest sequences are designed to be pure symbol, stemming from and responding to the deepest recesses of our souls. They defy explanation, yet they resonate with something inside us. Sometimes, it's soaring, yearning emotion. Other times, it's terror. The mode in which Lynch worked - the way he tapped into the human brain's capacity to conjure images that we understand without understanding - is possibly the closest cinema has come to rendering the pure uncanny. And crucially, he did not just line up oddity after oddity for the purpose of provocation. His strangeness came from a real place which he would try to reach through free association, or through transcendental meditation: a place in which the mind runs freely and takes us into places that are sometimes exciting, sometimes threatening, and always peculiar.
"Sometimes I get ideas, and I don’t know exactly what they mean. So I think about it, and try to figure it out, so I have an answer for myself."
I think that's why, despite the fact I only recently became enamoured with his art, David Lynch's passing felt to me like something huge slipping quietly into the darkness. He was the first and only filmmaker I know who accurately reflected that particular part of my psyche on screen. I have never known nightmares like that outside of my own head. What a superpower it is to achieve that - what kind of rapport you must have with your own mind and soul to create something so true, so authentically intuitive, that your audience can see deeper facets of themselves in your work than they can capture in their own.
Like my friends who loved his art, and like the community of fans and artists who have cried out at his leaving us, I'm thinking of David Lynch today. He has unknowingly taught me lessons I will carry throughout my career as a writer and my life as a creative. I consider it a great honour that I still have so much of him to discover.
Listen to 'In Dreams' by Roy Orbison tonight.
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