An Ode to David Lynch
Image Description: Black and white drawing of David Lynch Smoking a Cigarette
Mild spoilers for almost all of David Lynch’s work, but especially “Twin Peaks: The Return,” ahead.
I have never felt as represented on screen as I did when I saw Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” She was a girl, waiting for her life to begin, writing her frustrations in her diary as I did, yearning to grow up and to feel sexy and desired when the only people who made her feel that way had ulterior motives. To see Laura smile at the culmination of the film, her cheeks glowing blue as she stared at a floating angel, meant something to me I could not comprehend on first watch. I felt female companionship, born out of shared trauma, and resilience with my sisters that I had never seen articulated so abstractly on screen. A woman who had been brutally sexually assaulted and murdered had finally found peace. She was not the blue corpse, wrapped in plastic, washed up on the shore anymore. She was the good that we should all find within each other. Her suffering was intense and horrific, yet she still could smile. She still meant something to the people of her community beyond her final breath. I found my peace in her smile. I knew I had to make art even an iota as meaningful as this for the rest of my life. I knew this because David Lynch was brave enough, strange enough, to do it first.
The first Lynch film I ever watched was “Blue Velvet.” His 1986 venture is cold, chilling, and hauntingly beautiful. David’s ability to pick at the underbelly of white American suburbia and reveal the ants just beneath its idyllic grass was as revelatory as it was sickening, going on to inspire works like “American Beauty” and “The Virgin Suicides.” What David truly understood about the American ethos is our ability to ignore the suffering of women. Portrayed fearlessly by Isabella Rossellini, the character of Dorothy Valens is a Dorothy who’s been kidnapped off of her path down the yellow brick road. She suffers, yearns for love, and bears her sexuality with ferocity, yet is still vulnerable to the evils of men. Dorothy was only the first in a long line of strong, complex female leads within David’s career. The Madonna of “Blue Velvet” is equally as complex. Sandy Williams, played by Laura Dern, is a dreamer. She is the blond girl next door who dreams of robbins and love, yet is still intrigued by and tempted into a scheme to break into a woman’s apartment. Rather than reducing these women into empty archetypes, David graces them with depth, curiosity, vigor, and bravery as they navigate their patriarchal environment.
“Mulholland Drive” is considered by many to be Lynch’s seminal work. An indictment of the Hollywood system and its horrific treatment of actresses, Lynch penned a career-changing role for its (at the time unknown) star Naomi Watts. I’ll never forget the power, and sexuality she exudes in her audition scene. Watts’ bold performance ensures she is not reduced to the victim of the “casting couch,” a predatory industry practice where roles are exchanged for sexual favors, but instead wields her appeal to prove herself as a creative, showstopping artist. A look into feminine desire, Lynch humanizes his murderess ingénue by giving her the depth necessary to portray her devolution into madness. He reflects on Hollywood for the strange, crooked world it is. Lynch explores how two beautiful women’s burgeoning relationship can be corrupted as they are made to compete with each other under the ever-watching eye of the male gaze. The character of the Cowboy reflects the colonialist roots of the silver screen, his dark and enigmatic threats floating over the rest of the film. David criticizes a traditional America, an America that refuses to contend with the ever-malleable progress of our nation and its people. The Cowboy, and other enigmatic, frightening white male characters throughout his filmography, seek to hunt down the nonconforming and exploratory women of his films.
David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a hypnotic descent into identity, obsession, and the dark undercurrents of desire. “You will never have me,” says Patricia Arquette’s Alice Wakefield at the tail end of the film.” Here, Lynch contends with his willingness to put women in violent situations in his films. Alice represents the alluring, idealized blonde of cinema history (a trope Lynch has explored several times) to protagonist Fred/Pete, played by Bill Pullman. The Mystery Man, though interpreted by some as a check on Fred/Pete’s sexual desires, is to me, the voice of his murderous instincts, the voice of his superego, a superego that is contending with a man so obsessed with controlling women, that it fails to stop him from committing sickening violence. In this film, Lynch criticizes the male inability to see women as multifaceted individuals, individuals with sexual desires, cravings, and secrets. The fractured characters of Renee and Alice, sensuously played by Arquette, refuse to be typecast, to be limited by her partner.
“A Woman in Trouble” is the logline for David Lynch’s first, and only, digital feature film “Inland Empire.” Helmed exquisitely by Laura Dern, the film explores unreality, panic, and repression. Crackling, frenetic handheld digital shots follow Dern’s Nikki through an unrelenting nightmare as she fights to reclaim her identity as an actress and as a woman. Perhaps Lynch’s most “transcendental” work, I admire it so intensely for its complete disregard of the film form, and its trust in its audience to feel and understand Nikki despite a complete lack of narrative cohesion. I saw “Inland Empire” for the first time in a nearly empty theater in Hillcrest, San Diego and it was the first time I had seen anything Lynch on the big screen. There were only three other people in the theater, who began laughing almost immediately upon the film’s beginning. I was furious. How was this funny to them? Maybe the introduction to the film, which is a nearly 20-minute scene of an eerie, backward sitcom inexplicably led by people in rabbit costumes is kind of funny, though I found it disturbing and strange. Thankfully, they left the theater about halfway through the three-hour epic, and I was left to proceed ahead, alone. I sank into it. Felt the heat of the Valley and the cold of the streets of New York. I cried her tears. I held my breath. I took a page out of Lynch’s book: to the question “Will you elaborate on that,” he answered, simply, “No.” I let myself sit in this unreality, this confusion, and let the deep terror seep into my bloodstream. The evils of humanity are sometimes unable to articulate in words.
That concept brings me to the best thing ever made, “Twin Peaks: The Return.” I first watched the original 1990 series when I was about 15 or 16, and it irrevocably changed my life. The jazzy score, the ensemble of strange characters, the unrelentingly incredible Dale Cooper. The central mystery, which Lynch resisted solving for a staggering 15 episodes, changed the television landscape forever. The first non-serialized television series to date, “Twin Peaks” opened the door to long-form, episodic television, which of course led to the so-called “Golden Age of TV” producing hits like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” Neither of these shows, as well as “Fargo,” “The Leftovers,” and even “Severance” would have ever been possible without “Twin Peaks,” and Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost being resilient enough to see their vision through. What also became possible through “Twin Peaks” was a push to de-atomize female corpses, to let the murder of a woman ring throughout an entire series, an entire town, and an entire nation, instead of having her be forgotten when the mystery is neatly solved. Laura Palmer, as well as female characters Audrey Horne, Donna Hayword, Shelly Johnson, and Norma Jennings, opened the door for the examination of female suffering and desire on-screen. I yearn to be as confident and precocious as Audrey. I aspire to be as caring and innocent as Donna. I hope to be as close to another woman as Shelley and Norma were as they worked every day in the RR Diner. The lead of the series, Kyle Maclachlan’s Dale Cooper, is a shining beacon of morality and ingenuity as he works tirelessly to solve Laura’s murder. In “The Return,” this becomes his fatal flaw.
“The Return” Is unlike anything anything anyone has ever seen on television. On the surface, it criticizes the nostalgia bait boom of reboots seen in the late 2010s. In this darker version of Twin Peaks, Lynch reminds us that we cannot go home. We cannot look to the past and yearn for it, we must try to make a better future for ourselves, for our women, and for our young. Spanning from New York to Vegas, back to Twin Peaks, Washington, “The Return” picks up 25 years after the cliffhanger end of the original series. Exploring the evil of the nuclear bomb in the trailblazing “Episode 8” (unequivocally the most insane, moving piece of television my eyes have ever seen), to the terrors of drug addiction, capitalism, and corporatism, “Twin Peaks: The Return” is not the cherry-pie smelling, toasty world of the original series; it is an indictment of America itself. We see our beloved Dale Cooper as a crooked, evil criminal. His eyes are black and unfeeling. An average TV watcher must see a little of Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Don Draper in this anti-hero figure, and wonder why we ever rooted for them in the first place. Lynch emasculates our hero through another Cooper alternate, Dougie Jones, forcing the viewer to wait impatiently for the return of Dale Cooper. Dougie’s innocence and childlike whimsy are heartening, his strange ability to make everything work for himself is undeniably cosmic in some way. When Cooper finally returns, something feels wrong. He gives us his iconic thumbs up, he saves Twin Peaks from an evil presence. All of our heroes from the original series are together again, celebrating their victory in the Sheriff’s station, when a dream overtakes the scene. Cooper has something left to do, something he had been waiting to do for 25 years: save Laura. The final episode of “The Return,” and the final onscreen work of David Lynch, is haunting. I will never forget watching it for the first time. We are reminded that women cannot be saved when they are already gone. We are reminded that a society that abandoned and disregarded Laura’s pain is responsible for her death, and the deaths of so many suffering women, and that death is final. While her light in the “real” world has been snuffed, her presence will continue to live on in the cosmos, in the memories of her friends and family. Our archetypal male hero, her knight in shining armor, cannot reverse her death. The system must be changed. I will never forget her scream.
I went to visit David’s Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant in Burbank a few days after his death. I had been camped out in San Diego for the last few days after evacuating from the LA fires and found out about his death through a text from my dad. Those few days were, admittedly, full of grief. I had never felt the death of a celebrity, of a person I did not know, in this way. A cold knife hit me right in the heart. So, visiting Bob’s Big Boy, where every day for almost a decade David would go in on his 2:30 lunch break and enjoy a chocolate shake, was as silly as it was cathartic for me. I was surrounded by my nerds, my people, who all had a gift, a card, an ephemera, an image, a cigarette, a donut for David. I was struck by how many women were there. I shed a tear, took some pictures, and found solace in the community David had formed in his illustrious career.
So I promise to you, David, to always write down my ideas, not only to stave off suicide but because, as weird and dark as my ideas may seem, I know someone will find the beauty in them. I will take my coffee black and enjoy the dark reflexivity of the liquid, the bitterness on my tongue, and inhale its warm smell. I’ll collect stuffed animals, I’ll throw paint onto a canvas, I’ll even meditate. I’ll keep making films for you. As Monica Belluci says in “Part 14” of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” “We live inside a dream, but who is the dreamer?” I’ll never be able to answer that question, as well as many questions posed by Lynch’s work. However, I will always dream for David and for those who love his work as I do.
