A little about what David Lynch meant to me
Now I know how it feels when your favorite artist – and the one most impactful to your personal outlook on life and art writ large – dies. It hurts. And in that hurt I feel everything he ever made me feel, all the horror, despair, and pain. And all the laughter, love, and care, too. The bafflement, the excitement, a sense of intuitive understanding even if logic is unable to parse it. These feelings will be with me forever.
How can I begin to sum up what he meant to me? David Lynch was a filmmaker, painter, carpenter, animator, weatherman, and a million other things. All day I’ve seen those million things come out in the hundreds of tributes I’ve seen online, of which I am just adding to that pile. Seeing all these beautiful things is both a balm, and a painful reminder of exactly why I hurt so much in this moment. Few artists have created work that resonates not only so broadly, so intuitively, but so deeply with so many people. For the past day I’ve been revisiting my favorite moments, and scrolling to the comments and seeing so many others touched by him leaving their tributes. Despite his reputation for the esoteric, almost no other artist captured human connection the way he did, and in our shared grief and reliving of these moments of connection, he is connecting us once more.
I said this yesterday, but while his art plumbs the depths of darkness, exploring some of the rawest and most visceral pain that has ever been captured in any medium, what defines Lynch for me is his unyielding faith in humanity even in the face of absolute darkness. It does not matter if the darkness wins – the blinding glow of heaven at the end of Eraserhead, the remembrance of a hopeful dream at the end of Mulholland Drive, even at the darkest and most pessimistic, there is something to hold out hope for. “The possibility that love is not enough” is the defining existential terror of his work. Even in The Straight Story, before that beautiful last line, there is a fear that love will not be enough. But it is. The darkness in his work comes from those who turn away from love.
What makes his films so difficult to confront is oftentimes their bluntness in examining that horror. Fire Walk With Me is a film that reckons with the cultural failing of its predecessor series (note that I said cultural and not artistic failure), refusing to let the audience turn Laura Palmer into a prop within a greater mystery and instead reminding us that she is a very real girl going through a very real and horrifying pain. Inflicting pain on others is a borderline apocalyptic evil in his work, and it is that apocalypse that so many people think of in his output, flashing lights, nightmarish and contorted faces, the desperate cries for help.
Lynch’s work has a reputation for the bizarre and surreal in addition to its nightmarishness, but what I think sets him apart is the sheer authenticity of it all. His work is the sort of work that would so often be dismissed as pretentious (still is by some), and yet, at no point does his work give the impression of someone trying to be “above” the audience. He embraces everything, the bizarre, the heartfelt, the nightmarish, all in these massive and often messy packages that come from a place of truly deep authenticity. The strangeness of his work is so well known it has spawned an oft-misused adjective, and yet, Lynchian is something that we can all understand on a visceral level. The world is baffling and strange, and we cannot ever make sense of the whole. The drive to understand it, to piece together what we think of it, is the drive that makes us human.
There are so many amazing and beautiful moments across his work that I wish I could sum up, that I wish I had the words to describe. His art, and his work as a human being, changed me fundamentally as a person and as an artist. Ultimately, I cannot feel too terrible about my difficulties trying to sum up how I feel – my art does the talking well enough. His art speaks so much better to me, but I will continue to chase the dreams and the questions he unlocked till the end of my days, imagining a possibility for my art and relationships with others far beyond what I could have dreamed of before his work entered my life. No one could have ever made what he did, and I hope to one day be able to say that about my art.
Time to enjoy some black coffee, and continue my battle to make sense of the world. Somehow, it was a little easier when he was around.