Yesterday, David Lynch crossed over. An artist with an unmistakable style and vision and a fascinating mind.
I fell in love the moment I viewed Blue Velvet (1986) starring an exquisite Isabella Rossellini. This was during the beginning of my BFA at NSCAD, the end of the 90s and early 2000s. The slide library (yes, slides!) had a little room off of it that contained the film holdings. A treasure trove of film gems I had the delight to plow through over the years while I gorged myself on film directing, screen writing, set decoration and film history classes.
Wild at Heart was another film that grabbed my attention early and immediately. It is such a quotable, unforgettable film that I have revisited many times over. I adore Lynch’s work for its strangeness and wildness. I have also always enjoyed Lynch’s cameos in his work and the quirky, unassuming characters he created for himself.
I have gone back to Twin Peaks, in all its forms, over and over. I’ve visited that world when in need of comfort and I recently read that Lynch felt he was expressing his personal version of spirituality through those series/films. That makes me love them even more and want to dive back into that world of his once again. I also lived, for a few years, in the Pacific Northwest, and so that stunning, eerie landscape is familiar to me in a most welcome way.
I have been through his oeuvre, many times and there are others that keep me coming back. I watched Lost Highway for the first time while high on hash and could not stop laughing at the sax solos, although I find that movie haunting and unsettling.
Mulholland Drive (2001) was released while I was still in art school. This film, alongside a few other enduring notables from around that time - The Sea Inside by Alejandro Amenebar and The Diving Bell and Butterfly directed by painter Julian Schnabel, remain embedded, together with Mulholland Drive, in my memory for some reason. Perhaps it is the dreaminess, elegant sensitivity and painterly qualities of these films that group them together for me. Or the unknowability of amnesia and total paralysis that permeate the threads of these stories like a fever dream.
Once, on my second visit to LA, back in 2012ish, I requested to drive, with a friend, the length of Mulholland Drive to experience it in its fullness. LA, its extremes and eccentricities is a place that I hold dear and can relate to, just as I can relate to David Lynch and his brilliantly webbed brain.
David Lynch offered us the inside of his strange and beautiful mind and I hold this gift close. Particularly now that he has crossed over. I do hope he sends us messages from the beyond. If anyone would/could, it would be him.
Rest easy David Lynch. Reach out any time. XO
Damn the destruction reaped by those fires.