Warning: This article contains spoilers for Twin Peaks
It’s not often that the death of a public figure has much effect on me. I’ve become desensitized to the act of scrolling through Twitter and seeing the headlines “[Insert Name] Dead at 80 Years Old” and moving on to the next post, and the sadness I feel for the passing of a famous person who I never knew personally is obviously incomparable to the grief of losing a loved one. It was around 2:30 PM this past Thursday though, when I woke up from a nap to the news of legendary filmmaker David Lynch’s passing at the age of 78, that I experienced a new pain I had never felt before- as if I had just lost a long-time friend and companion through life. I lost my hero, my idol, my biggest inspiration in everything I do. And the world lost one of its brightest lights.
My relationship with David Lynch began when I was maybe 10 years old. My parents pulled out their Twin Peaks DVD box set and put on the pilot for me and my sister. I don’t remember much about watching it that first time, except that I thought it was weird. I think we tried to watch a few more episodes, but we never got further than that. What remained with me were the seeds planted in my head that said art can be weird, life can be weird, it’s okay to be weird- and these seeds would spend the next decade slowly growing into something much bigger than me.
It wasn’t until years after I watched the Twin Peaks pilot, when I was 15- the age that I started to get more interested in film and was exploring the medium more deeply- that I dipped my toe back into Lynch’s work with Eraserhead. This is many people’s first Lynch film, and it was a perfect reintroduction for me. I sat down with my parents to watch it and was left totally perplexed. I had never seen a film at that point that so adamantly defied categorization. I expected to watch a horror film that night based on how my parents had described it, but I was shocked that at every turn the film subverted my expectations and refused to be pinned down. I was beginning to use the app Letterboxd to keep track of my film-watching activity, and my dopamine-chasing adolescent brain loved the act of assigning star ratings to films. Eraserhead was the first film I ever saw I simply could not attach a trivial numerical value to. This was the first instance I can remember in which I realized that art didn’t need to be understood. It didn’t need to be labeled, categorized, or deciphered. It only needed to be felt. This was a challenging concept for me, but it forever changed the way I viewed cinema, art, and the world in general.
One week later, I watched Mulholland Drive. This was the movie that changed it all. I understood absolutely nothing about it. It broke my brain. I was left even more in the dark than I had been by Eraserhead. What really changed me was a revelatory second viewing of the film at age 17. Suddenly, it all clicked. It was a dream. The whole film was a beautiful, terrifying, fantastical, surreal, all-encompassing dream that I never wanted to wake up from. And from that moment on, I was never the same.
One thing most people are taught in any screenwriting class at any university across America is that the explanation for a film being “it was all a dream” is a cheap copout that should never be used in a script. This is often the least interesting interpretation one can have of a film. It’s too easy. The framing of a dream reduces all aspects of a film to one simple answer that immediately eliminates any potential for further examination. Yet the dreams of David Lynch’s films enrich every aspect of them. These dreams reveal the darkest sides of humanity, the desires that we repress, the pieces of ourselves we’d rather ignore, our worst fears that shake us to our cores, and most importantly, the profound eternal love and light at the center of humanity that shines through all that darkness.
Lynch works in broad strokes, tackling large ideas that have been expressed through art since the beginning of time- ideas that could easily come across as nothing but banal platitudes in the hands of lesser artists. He makes art about light and darkness, good and evil, and how neither can exist without the other. The shiny allure of Mulholland Drive’s utopian Hollywood could not be without the presence of the terrifying monster that lurks by the dumpsters of Winkie’s Diner. The red roses, white picket fences, blue skies, and beautiful robins of Blue Velvet would have no foundation to stand upon if it weren’t for the violent rummaging of filthy, sickly insects just beneath the surface. The sweet cherry pie and piping hot coffee of the cheery small town of Twin Peaks could only be served in a place where the beloved homecoming queen was raped and murdered by her own father.
In today’s world, it’s often hard to see the light in the face of such darkness. I’ve grown up in a time of especially tumultuous political strife in America that has seen a catastrophic pandemic, a gradual return to fascism, and is accompanied by the looming threat of a climate crisis, all while battling depression, anxiety, OCD, and facing the pressures of a heteronormative world as a queer person. The way I find hope in this chaotic world is by looking to Lynch as my guiding star. To quote David Bowie in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, “We live inside a dream”. When the terrors and contradictions of reality fail to make any sense, it is through this logic of dreams that I understand my life. Our world is so full of these contradictions- so incomprehensibly terrifying and beautiful and surreal all at the same time- that there is no spoken language capable of describing it. It is in the oneiric poetry of unreality so perfectly captured by David Lynch's films that we call “Lynchian” that this language exists.
The word Lynchian is perhaps one of the most widely misused in all of film studies. It’s become a catch-all term for weirdness. For something to be truly Lynchian, it must contain very specific qualities that few films possess. However, in the misuse of the word is where its greatest power can be found. What other word exists that is misused as frequently “Lynchian” simply because this world is too bafflingly strange for humans to come up with any other term to describe it? David Lynch’s art taps into the liminal area between pure light and darkness, humor and horror, boundless joy and unrelenting despair, in such a distinct manner that I can’t make sense of my life without the context of it. I live inside a dream every day. And whether “golden sunshine and blue skies” or “garmonbozia (pain and sorrow)” awaits me in this dream, I can find comfort in knowing that I will never truly understand why the world works as it does. It doesn’t have to make sense, and that’s okay.
In a 2015 interview with Australian film critic, David Stratton, Lynch responded to the quote “We live inside a dream” with this statement: “It’s sort of the truth. And one day we wake up, and we realize that it was a dream, and we realize who we truly are. It’s a glorious day when that happens”. I think Lynch has woken up from that dream now. And it comforts me to know someday when I die, that I’ll just be waking up from a long dream, and it will be a beautiful, glorious day. Death terrifies me. That’s not an easy fear to get over. Lynch, however, makes it all seem just a little bit less scary. And for me, he does the impossible. He actually makes it seem beautiful.
When I look back on the evolution of my relationship with David Lynch, I can clearly see how much happier I’ve grown over the years in specific relation to how much further I’ve delved into his filmography. This is not to say that Lynch is solely responsible for the improvement of my life- that’s far from the truth, but I can trace my personal growth through the deeper enlightenment that I’ve gradually gained after watching each of his projects. When I first saw Eraserhead as a depressed 15-year-old, I think I subconsciously resonated with Henry’s fear of adulthood, responsibility, and relationships. I feared the great unknown future ahead of me that I couldn’t imagine for myself because I was so miserable in daily life at such a young age, and the existential dread of Eraserhead- while impenetrable to me at the time- helped me feel less alone.
When I watched Mulholland Drive for the second time, I felt closer to the core of my being than I ever had before. I experienced feelings that I couldn’t normally get in touch with during my waking hours. Through its communication of pure oneiric consciousness, I experienced the exact feeling of dreaming while awake, and I uncovered things about myself I had repressed that no human has the language to describe. I don’t know how exactly, but I feel that I became more of a real person after watching it.
Blue Velvet taught me to believe in the blinding light of love in the face of a world without robins. I learned to have faith that the robins will return. Lost Highway forced me to reckon with the fact that I will never be able to escape the consequences of my mistakes. I confronted the sobering reality that I can’t live in a dream forever. One day the dream has to end. The labyrinthine nightmare of Inland Empire pushed me to accept that no matter how smart I think I am, art- and life- will continue to challenge me in ways I can never be prepared for. Wild at Heart gave me the courage to believe in my “individuality and personal freedom” to experience love outside the bounds of heteronormativity with fiery resistance to those who attempt to push me down. The Elephant Man reminded me that no matter how cruel humanity may seem, there will always be someone who will love you for who you truly are. The Straight Story inspired me to hold my family close and never take them for granted. Watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as a 20-year-old healed my old depressed high schooler self with its undying empathy and immense compassion seeping from every frame. Though my childhood was very different from Laura Palmer’s, I felt closer to her than any other fictional character I had encountered in my entire life. I saw myself in her, and she gave me the strength to keep pushing forward no matter how dark things got. And finally, Twin Peaks: The Return- possibly the greatest piece of art I’ve ever had the privilege of experiencing- proposed this to me: “We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” And in the spirit of Lynch, I won’t say anything more about that.
It's such a gift to have grown up watching these films, and I can't wait to revisit them time and time again throughout my whole life. The day that I'm 60 years old and I pop in my 12K Criterion Blu-Ray of Mulholland Drive to watch for the 50th time will be just as special as my first viewing at the age of 15. The deep sadness I feel in the wake of Lynch's death is incomparable to the lifetime of joy that he has left me to experience. I can't be devastated, because he's still with me every day- in the lessons I've learned, the courage I've gained, the love I've shared, and the dreams I've dreamt.
I frequently talk in absolutes when discussing Lynch. The word “ever” keeps coming up... “the greatest artist ever, the greatest character ever, the greatest film ever, the closest I’ve ever felt to...”. But how else can one talk about David Lynch? How else can one mourn the loss of such a massively important cultural figure? “Ever” seems the most appropriate word to describe him, because the love and light he brought into this world will never die. It will live on forever. The world was a better place because of him, and I can’t imagine my life without him. But as David has said, “In the other room, the puzzle is altogether”. Where is the “other room”? He says it’s “over there”. So, I know that right now, David is just in the other room over there. And someday we’ll all join him over there, we’ll wake up from the dream, and the puzzle will be together. The robins will come. The sadness will end.
コメント