Remembering David Lynch
Exactly one year ago, we lost the great David Lynch. It won’t surprise many of you that his work meant a great deal to me. In fact, I can’t recall ever being quite as sad to hear about the passing of a public figure I’d never spoken to or met. It was a Friday, the holidays were over, and I had more than enough on my plate. But within a few minutes of reading the news, I fired off an email to my editor at the Toronto Star and spent the day trying to capture in writing what Lynch’s work means and why it matters so much to so many of us. I also did my best to articulate what was so utterly singular about his style. From the piece:
In most movies, the likes of innocence, earnestness, cruelty, and carnal desire express themselves as discrete and different things. In Lynch’s films and characters, they invariably coexist and interpenetrate one another; the boundaries between them becoming ever-more porous; the fantastic comingling with the banal; the world of dreams and fantasy perpetually encroaching upon the waking mind. “I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world,” as he once put it, “and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.”
You can read the piece in its entirety here. On the one-year anniversary of his death, in any case, I think of Naomi Watts’ wonderful description of Lynch as “a curious man, beaming with light” and also this from Kyle MacLachlan:
“David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. I can see him now, standing up to greet me in his backyard, with a warm smile and big hug and that Great Plains honk of a voice. We’d talk coffee, the joy of the unexpected, the beauty of the world, and laugh.”
David Lynch was not just a great filmmaker, but a luminous soul. We were very lucky to have him — and are so fortunate to have all he left behind.
Beautiful tribute that captures what made Lynch irreplaceable. That quote about goodness in blue skies coexisting with wild pain and decay is the entire Lynchian worldview distilled into one sentence. Most filmmakers treat surface-level normalcy and underlying darkness as opposing forces, but Lynch understood they're inseperable and that tension is what makes existence both terrifying and transcendent. I remember watching Mulholland Drive for the first time and feeling like the boundries between dream logic and reality had permanently blurred in my own head.