“I heard you perfectly”: David Lynch (1946-2025)
‘Twin Peaks’ hit me like few other things. The key to the career of the man who made that, 'Mulholland Drive' and "Blue Velvet' was that he was always, uncompromisingly himself.
I don’t think I can remember any TV show or movie hitting me like Twin Peaks did.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series ran for two years, in 1990 and 1991 when I was in 7th and 8th grade. I was younger then than either of my sons are now, and in retrospect, pretty clearly way too young to truly understand the show, whether it was the mature themes or even the plot complexity (Which is to say nothing about Fire Walk With Me, which I saw at age 14, or the “Secret Diary of Laura Palmer” book.)
But the style, the images, the dialogue, and the music, of this show about the murder of a homecoming queen, the supernatural elements behind it, and a small town full of bizarre characters? The 12-year-old me knew enough that I was never less than transfixed and enthralled. And I knew that Twin Peaks had taken television to a level it had never reached before, and wouldn’t again until the Sopranos/The Wire/Mad Men era. Nothing in my multiple subsequent revisitings of the series ever disabused me of that notion.
David Lynch, the co-creator of Twin Peaks and the director of a long list of unique and often great movies, died Thursday at 78. It had been known that Lynch was in poor health, and he’d announced a few months ago that he would no longer be able to direct projects in person, but still, this death is a gut punch.
Much has been said about what Lynch brought to his many projects in the numerous tributes published in recent days. He was a filmmaker from an avant-garde background who nevertheless found his way toward mainstream success on multiple occasions. He was most associated with film but perfectly willing to do some of his best work in television at a time when few top filmmakers did so. Lynch had a welcome, sometimes goofy social media presence, which sometimes came through in a memorable body of work as an actor, both as Gordon Cole on Twin Peaks, and a brief run on the memory-holed sitcom Louie:
He had a large company of performers, A-listers, and marginal character actors like, who he worked with repeatedly. He had a fruitful collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti; it’s hard to imagine Twin Peaks, in particular, with any other music besides his.
Lynch continually referred to many recurring themes, but the most prominent one was the contrast between images and tropes of traditional Americana — small towns, apple pie, diners, homecoming queens, ingenues fresh off the bus in Hollywood —and the hidden darkness beneath them. It’s a rich subject, one that gave Lynch plenty of material. There have been arguments over whether Lynch’s approach in doing so was liberal or conservative, but I don’t think any answer to that is especially simple, or even useful.
And while the Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana, was not from Philadelphia and never made a film there, his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which inspired the making of Eraserhead, tied him to the city forever. He was so beloved there that he even inspired the unofficial name of a neighborhood, the Eraserhood.
“It was a mixture of heaven and hell, Philadelphia,” Lynch once said, in a quote that now adorns the website of PhilaMOCA, the Eraserhood’s only film venue, which for many years hosted an annual Eraserhood Forever event.
But most of all, Lynch was an auteur of auteurs who eschewed compromise and was always, unapologetically himself. This sometimes led him to clash with producers and studios, and few of his movies were huge financial successes.
It’s hard to think of a Lynch film that didn’t gain in esteem over time. Even Inland Empire, his final feature film, barely got a release in 2006 but drew excited repertory audiences when it got a Janus Films re-release in 2022.
Outside of Twin Peaks, Lynch made two absolute film masterpieces, 1986’s Blue Velvet and 2001’s Mulholland Drive, both of which made the Sight and Sound 100 in 2022, with Mulholland Drive — a feature film salvaged from a TV pilot — even making the top ten. Dennis Hopper, in Blue Velvet, was one of the best movie villains of the ‘80s, while “Why do there have to be puppets like Frank” is my favorite joke in all of Arrested Development.
As for Mulholland Drive, Club Silencio sequence is, for my money, the best thing Lynch has ever made for the big screen:
Eraserhead, made when Lynch was young and had no money to work with, is one of the strangest movies ever made, and I mean that in a good way. The Straight Story, from 1999, a G-rated tale of a man riding a lawn mower across two states to see his brother, sounds nothing like a Lynch film but feels everything like one; I don’t love Lynch’s Dune, mostly because it feels less like a Lynch movie. Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man, and Lost Highway all have their moments of greatness.
But I return, again, to Twin Peaks.
For about six months in 1990, Twin Peaks was a mainstream success, on magazine covers and at the center of popular culture. And culture had lots of fun with it- like when Kyle MacLachlan hosted Saturday Night Live, “gave away” in the monologue that Shelly the Waitress was the murderer, and had “David Lynch” (I assume it was Phil Hartman doing the voice) call and yell at him:
Peaks-mania, thanks to a second season that baffled many and the show solving the Laura Palmer mystery too quickly, petered out quickly, and the show was canceled after two years. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me arrived in 1992, and didn’t make much of an impression at first. So it looked like that was about it for Twin Peaks.
But then, in the years after that, the Internet rose, and Twin Peaks became one of those things that people on there loved to discuss. Through various physical media releases, in different formats throughout the 1990s and 2000s, multiple generations of fans discovered the show and chewed over its many mysteries.
While the show wasn’t quite a cult hit enjoyed by a small but rabid fandom when it first arrived, that’s what it became in the ensuing decades. I know that’s not the main thing Jane Schoenbrun’s great film I Saw the TV Glow is about, but there’s a lot of Twin Peaks in The Pink Opaque, both the show itself and the way the characters react to it.
I’ve written that Twin Peaks has the best, and least-toxic fandom that I can think of. It’s not nearly as male-dominated as most, something explored in Courtenay Stallings’ fantastic book, Laura's Ghost: Women Speak About Twin Peaks.
“I think when it comes to Twin Peaks, us fans are too busy theorising and gushing about the show to be horrible to each other,” one fan told me when I wrote about this in 2018.
Another notable thing was that, for all those years, there wasn’t any new Twin Peaks to talk about. There were two seasons and a movie — plus occasional releases of new ancillary material — and that was it.
Until, on October 3, 2014, that wasn’t it:
Sure, it took almost three years after that to debut, including a period when Lynch temporarily quit the project. But Twin Peaks was back, to see us again in 25 years, just like Laura Palmer promised in the Black Lodge.
There are quite a few things about 2017’s 18-part Showtime series Twin Peaks: The Return that are miraculous. It is, once again, the exact show Lynch wanted to make, even if the plot makes very little sense in any traditional way. There were trailers, and almost no indication provided in advance of what the show might be about. It juggled a massive number of new and returning characters, countless subplots, and a lot of locations that weren’t the town of Twin Peaks.
Lynch also found creative ways to get around various actors being unavailable or dead — David Bowie died? Now his character is a giant tea kettle — while also giving final roles to two performers (Miguel Ferrer and Catherine E. Coulson) who were suffering from end-stage cancer.
While it was lacking in any traditional fan service, not even having MacLachlan play the traditional Agent Cooper until the series was almost over, instead playing two characters who were not Cooper. There weren’t a lot of answers given, but that was what Internet discussion was for, as was the case for the show’s fans for the previous quarter century.
And it was glorious. Especially the episode that tied the series’ central mythology to the Trinity Test:
It didn’t have very strong ratings, or win many awards, and I don’t think a single Twin Peaks fan cared about either. I don’t know of any Twin Peaks fan, from any era, who considered The Return a disappointment or wished it hadn’t been made. And I have fond memories of watching the finale of The Return while visiting my parents, in the same house where I had first watched the original series.
Sadly, I never got to meet, interview, or be in the same room with David Lynch. He came to Philly occasionally, including visits to his alma mater and a well-remembered appearance at Bryn Mawr Film Institute in 2014, but I missed those appearances for some reason, which I’ll always regret. I imagine, though, that the city’s repertory houses are preparing Lynch retrospectives as we speak.
I was there for the world premiere of The Fabelmans in Toronto in 2022, and I’ve written before about how being in the same room with Steven Spielberg was one of the few times I’ve been genuinely starstruck. I had heard that Lynch was in the film and was hoping that he would be on hand too, but I guess by then, he wasn’t able to travel.
But we’ll always have Lynch’s turn as John Ford, one icon portraying another:
There were rumors in recent years about new Lynch projects in the works, that sadly never came to fruition, including a Netflix series that was first scuttled by the pandemic, and later by Lynch’s health. That goes on a long list of projects throughout his career that Lynch wanted to make but wasn’t able to bring to fruition for whatever reason.
There was also a bizarre report in 2022 that a “secret” Lynch film was completed and set to debut at Cannes, which got everyone excited for a couple of days until Lynch refuted the report. (Don’t ever believe anything on World of Reel without a second source, is the lesson here.)
We will have to be happy with the many wonderful projects that David Lynch did make. And much as I love so many of the movies, I’ll always think of Twin Peaks first when I hear his name. And in some ways it’s apropos that Twin Peaks: The Return, in many ways his magnum opus, will go down as his last major project.
10 things I’ve written about David Lynch’s work — and in one case, a Fringe Festival show inspired by it — over the years:
How Twin Peaks Gives Us Hope For the Future of Fandom (Living Life Fearless, 2018)
Lynch/OZ is a Dynamite Film Essay About a Director’s Inspiration (Tilt Magazine, 2022)
‘Mulholland Dr.’ At 20: David Lynch’s Masterpiece About Broken Hollywood Dreams (Living Life Fearless, 2021)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: A Darker, Creepier Look at Laura Palmer (Tilt Magazine, 2022)
A Guide to All the Recent David Lynch Weirdness (Living Life Fearless, 2022)
Lost Highway Was Pure, Uncut David Lynch, for Good and for Ill (Tilt Magazine, 2022)
In Philly, a donut tribute to David Lynch (TechnologyTell, 2014)
Interview: 'The Mosquito Coast' star Melissa George on the show, reuniting with Justin Theroux, and her rollerskating past (AppleInsider, 2021)
Philly Fringe 2019: The Antidote presents ‘Red Lodge, Montana’ (Broad Street Review, 2019)
Unwrapped from plastic: “Twin Peaks” to return in 2016 on Showtime (TechnologyTell, 2014)