So, yeah, David Lynch died

Well, it was bound to happen soon as he recently let it be known that he was confined to his home for health reasons… and he was 78 year old lifelong smoker who had just been evacuated from his home under circumstances that hurt the lungs of much younger and healthier people than him.

I’m currently feeling kind of numb. I had things to do but instead I took a walk, got back home, put on Fire Walk with Me and started to write this without any real idea about what I want to say. Here goes anyway.

I follow a lot of different kinds of movie critics: there’s the serious professionals like Breakfast All Day, there’s the less serious critics like Red Letter Media, there’s the video essayists like Maggie Mae Fish (and many more, but I mention her specifically because she has been making a podcast series around Lynch) and there’s the rest like 366 Weird Movies. How many directors are out there who are loved by all of these different groups? I can’t think of very many but Lynch was clearly one.

Now, honestly, I was a poser on this as a teen. I can honestly claim to have identified many movies of my childhood and teen years as under- or overrated but I was wrong about Lynch’s work. I thought he was very much overrated at the time. I liked Twin Peaks’ first season well enough but the second season was just boring (it was a lot later I learned he didn’t have much to do with the second season because it was kind of forced on them by the studio). My teenage ass didn’t really get Blue Velvet and Dune was a total mess. I saw Lost Highway in a theater but at that point I wasn’t ready to accept that not understanding a movie is not necessarily a bad thing. So, I kind of wrote him off but at the same time I was taking my first real steps into movie fandom and I knew he was liked by many in that world, so I had to pretend to like him as well. I also knew I wasn’t the only one doing that but are you going to call anyone out because that would just lead to them calling you out as well.

I just clearly wasn’t ready to digest all of that. Then came the age of DVDs. I quickly fell in love with the format as it made movies affordable and accessible to me, and I tried to pick up everything that felt interesting to me. Part of this was Lynch. I was hesitent because I hadn’t liked his work before but deep down I also knew my tastes had been evolving around that time, so I bought some of his movies I was able to find for next to nothing. And I also did like the first season of Twin Peaks, so maybe there would be more like that.

And indeed, there was. Well, obviously there is nothing quite like Twin Peaks but his next project I thoroughly enjoyed was his least Lynchian movie: The Straight Story. Sure, it’s meandaring and the stakes aren’t very high but it’s also just a nice little movie. The climax is just two elderly men who haven’t seen each other in decades sitting on a porch, which just feels very real. Like Lynch has a deep understanding of these people (he created but still).

From there I moved to Wild at Heart and little later to Mulholland Dr. At this point I wasready to appreciate his art. However, he really clicked with me when I saw Eraserhead. That was just such a nightmarish experience

He never became a personal favorite but in a way my understanding of him is similar to how I see John Waters: If we didn’t have him, we would need to invent him. The world needs these people who don’t really care about how things should be made. He had his opportunity to become a mainstream director but didn’t take it. Instead, he chose to do his own thing. Even when he stopped directing features after Inland Empire, he still did his own little projects.

He had a weekly cartoon in some small newspapers, he made 152 episodes of weather reports from LA over 16 years, he originally trained to be a painter and continued doing that his whole life, he made a lot of music, he built furniture and who wrote book. I appreciate all of this. It shows that he was a deeply curious person who was not motivated by money but instead by just being able to do what he felt like. The last thing I saw from his was What Did Jack Do?, a 17 minute short for Netflix in which he interrogates a monkey.

All in all, he was a weirdo who had his own views on life. He managed to carve himself a nice niche and make a living doing whatever he pleased. He made a “surrealist neo-noir mystery art” film that was ranked 8th best of all time by Sight & Sound’s Critics’ Poll and his neo-noir/psychological horror was ranked 85th. He also made one of the two TV series to make that list (the other being Histoire(s) du cinéma by Godard) and how often does a spin-off movie from a TV series make such a list? Well, Fire Walk with Me did.

He was 78 already and his career was mostly over, so this is a case where I would usually say that we should be celebrating his life, not grieving his death but I just can’t right now. On the positive side, it is nice to see so many people coming together to share their memories and the inspiration they took from his life.

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