Remembering David Lynch

The master of sincere oddity is no longer with us.

On May 22, 2009, David Lynch tweeted “These bodies come to an end; But that vast embodied Self is ageless, fathomless, eternal.” Last night, that tweet – a quote from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita – got extensively reposted to honor Lynch, whose own body came to an end at the age of 78, reportedly due to a terminal decline in health as a result of the Los Angeles wildfires (the filmmaker had previously disclosed that he was suffering from emphysema).

Tributes abounded on social media, from friends and collaborators, as well as quite a few of my fellow critics, many of whom shared anecdotes about discovering Lynch’s work at an inappropriately young age. The same would apply to me, as I stumbled upon Mulholland Drive on TV when I was still in middle school. To quote James Lipton (who was referring to one of his interview subjects on Inside the Actors Studio), I understood nothing and believed everything.

I gradually built up my Lynch knowledge over the years, primarily via a series of DVDs that came with my go-to movie magazine at the time as well as the Twin Peaks season 1 box set I received as a Christmas present (as luck would have it, season 2 was released – after a long wait – just in time for my birthday, a mere five months later). Sadly, none of those experiences were in the cinema, as the man’s theatrical output had slowed down – not by his volition – and Inland Empire was a no-show in the area where I was living back then.

And yet, he would pop up in other people’s projects, much to the delight of cinephiles. At the 2009 Venice Film Festival, after seeing the documentary Great Directors (a series of interviews with major filmmakers), my circle of friends kept circling back to Lynch’s remarks, complete with our best impressions of his voice. In 2012, at my very first Berlinale, he was one of the talking heads in Side by Side, about the celluloid/digital debate (he sided with the latter, and memorably said “Don’t kill me” to the documentary’s host Keanu Reeves when introducing his answer).

2017 was, of course, the year of the triumphant return of Twin Peaks, with a gala screening of the first two episodes of the new season at the Cannes Film Festival (I attended the catch-up showing the next day). But it was also the year of Lucky, directed by John Carroll Lynch (no relation), where he acted alongside his friend and frequent collaborator Harry Dean Stanton.

In 2022, my friend Alexandre O. Philippe made him the subject of the documentary Lynch/Oz, about how Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz was an integral part of his vision of the world and cinema, as brilliantly argued by various interviewees (but not Lynch himself, who famously refused to “explain” his work, adding to the layers of his nightmarish examination of Americana).

And then, also in 2022, there was The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s fictionalized retelling of his own youth. I saw it three times in theaters (at the Toronto Film Festival, and then on general release in Italy and Switzerland), and each time the crowd chuckled affectionately or outright cheered upon realizing who was playing the brief but crucial role of John Ford, who had an expletive-laden run-in with Spielberg when the latter got his first job in Hollywood.

Lynch, by all accounts one of the nicest men in the film industry (a quality he injected into his performance as Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks), slipped very comfortably into the skin of the notoriously curmudgeonly Ford, delivering the movie’s solitary F-bomb as he asks Sammy Fabelman to get out of his office. The young man obliges, only to stick his head back in to say, “Thank you”. Ford, with a minimal hint of warmth beneath the grumpy façade, replies: “My pleasure.”

That line is now the unintentional parting message from a great filmmaker who, even within the confines of the mainstream (Twin Peaks on ABC, a flawed but nevertheless fascinating adaptation of Dune in cinemas), always remained true to his creative idiosyncrasies and tackled the darker underbelly of the American Dream with genuine artistic joy. Wherever he is now, one can only hope he will go on keeping his eye on the donut and not the hole.