In Dreams: A Tribute To David Lynch

David Lynch at the 42nd Emmy Awards – Governor’s Ball in September 1990. Photo by Alan Light.

Written by Jonathan Lees

“This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” — Barry Gifford

Echoing from the smokestacks of an industrial plant, crawling in a severed ear on a freshly cut, watered lawn, or scrawled within the torn diary pages of a troubled teenager, David Lynch sought out the inexplicable side of human nature, not to understand it, but to reinterpret its absurdity and beauty with the same fiery passion of two forbidden lovers escaping down the dividing lines of a dark highway.

“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” – David Lynch

A career artist, writer, painter, photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, and occasional weatherman, a forbidden romance might be an interesting way to describe David’s creative life. The business of the American film market didn’t often allow for such sordid dreams to be projected with this level of intensity, experimentation, and introspection. The director is publicly considered a towering figure in film and given an immense amount of credit for what ends up on the screen, but despite Lynch’s illustrious vision, he has always invited people to dream alongside him. He was the ultimate collaborator. The bass lines amplifying the tension orchestrated by Angelo Badalamenti, the deepest darks or flickering electric lights explored by cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Peter Deming, the inspired casting, from Kyle MacLachlan to Laura Dern, all gave impact, life, and truth to the odd language of Lynch. It is the people, not just that ideas, that Lynch loved, giving immense screen time to those that would only have populated the corners of another director’s frame. 

“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods, and it just seemed to me that people only told you ten percent of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other ninety percent.” —David Lynch on his childhood in the Northwest

When thinking about the characters that dress the dreams of Lynch and the mysteries they inhabit, it is discrediting to just consider them “weird”. Given his aw-shucks demeanor as a public figure and his cryptic, often hilarious, retorts when asked to discuss the intricacies of his art, David Lynch’s persona appears within all the people populating his stories. The ones that remain curious, those that delight in finding truth through mistakes, or the few that dedicate their day to luxuriate in the little moments of life, the stranger, magic moments that make it all more intriguing.

“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!”  — from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

When speaking of horror and its prominent creators, Lynch is not often front of mind, a glaring oversight as he understood that dialogue of the nightmare and the unstoppable forces invading the dreams of innocents as intensely as anyone who affixes the genre to their creative title. His most transgressive or terrifying ideas are set in locales as mundane as a suburban street corner, a mountain lodge, or the sunny parking lot outside of a diner, not just the blackened woods or a darkened room. He understood that no matter where we felt safe, in our own homes, under the disquieting hum of a ceiling fan, there lurked the most unforgiving and punishing terrors that sought to rip us away from what we know, if not the fabric of reality itself. It is beyond that fabric, often symbolized by rippling red curtains, behind the reversed language of unknown entities, therein lies the mystery of love and the fire that he lit upon on the darkness outside and within. 

Rest in peace to one of our greatest dreamers, David Lynch. 

See you in the White Lodge, we hope.