Crackpots #18: David Lynch (Patreon)

The 18th installment of our newsletter, Crackpots, comes from Yung Chomsky. If you haven't already, you can read the previous entries and receive future dispatches from the TrueAnon crew plus rotating guests by subscribing to the Crackpots tier.

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American filmmaker David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, at the age of 78. Lynch studied as a painter, but became famous for his work in film and TV, including titles like Eraserhead (1977), Twin Peaks (1990 / 2017), and Lost Highway (1997). News of his passing hit me like a punch in the gut. I felt moved to express what he meant to me, but I struggled. What could I possibly say? I’m not a film scholar or an art historian. But while I’m too young to have experienced all of Lynch’s works when they initially premiered, I’m old enough that he’s been with me for two decades — half my life so far. One of the primary pleasures I take in engaging with an artist’s oeuvre is watching how they grapple with the same ideas in various permutations over time. Lynch had many consistent preoccupations, and while they’re distinctive enough to have spawned the term “Lynchian,” they’re also difficult to define with precision and even harder to emulate. I won’t try to provide a unified theory of Lynch-ness, but I will tell you about a few of his signatures that resonate most deeply with me.

While he worked within the mainstream, there was no mistaking that Lynch remained steadfastly an Artist. His famous resistance to explaining his work was part of that stance. He lamented the fact that people wanted him to talk about his films as soon as he finished making them. To him, the film is the talking; nothing more should be added. This attitude went against the grain in Hollywood, which has little use for subtlety or strangeness except as grist for the Content Mill: in-jokes and references which will be eagerly explicated by a legion of fan-creators in an all-consuming marketing machine. Lynch shunned this ‘splainer culture and instead asked us to accept the tension of not knowing. In Zen Buddhism there exists the concept of “mu;” I understand it as a response to a question that is neither affirmative or negative, but rather an indication that the question itself is flawed or incomplete. It means something like “un-ask the question.” That’s how I hear Lynch’s responses to those who demanded he explain himself.

“It looks like we are 100 percent certain that we're not sure.”

— Jerry Horne, Twin Peaks

This is not to say that we have nothing to gain by thinking deeply about art. But it does mean that engaging with Lynch’s work on its own terms requires a leap of faith. This wisdom extends beyond art appreciation: There is value in searching for answers that we know we may not find, or in embarking on a journey despite knowing we may never reach the destination.

Lynch’s films are filled with depictions of Americana. Cozy diners, the open road, cherry pie, men in cowboy hats. But in Lynch’s world, these familiar symbols are a backdrop for violence and tragedy. The opening sequence of Blue Velvet (1986) is illustrative. We see red roses, a blue sky, and a white picket fence. We hear Bobby Vinton’s 1963 recording of the song “Blue Velvet” as a man waters the lawn in some idyllic suburb. But his garden hose gets snagged; he struggles with it as the pressure builds until he suddenly clutches at himself in pain and collapses. The camera pushes down into the grass as he lies motionless, and we see that beneath the manicured lawn there is a mass of insects with horrible pincers and teeth, writhing and thrashing. 

There is a reading of this and other scenes in Lynch’s work which says that the wholesome exterior of the American town is merely a facade concealing the evil lurking below. But I don’t think the pleasant surface is the lie and the subterranean evil is the truth; I think both are real, and true, and coexistent. This is difficult to accept. It means understanding that the capacity for tremendous love and unspeakable cruelty can reside within the same place, or even the same person; that we sometimes hurt the ones we love most; that artists who conjure great beauty can also behave like monsters. It would be convenient if we could cleanly divide all things into immutable categories and move on; if we could separate friend from foe, art from artist, the purple mountains majesty of America the Beautiful from the fiery destruction of Fat Man and Little Boy. But that would be an illusion. I don’t believe Lynch’s depiction of America, or the family, or police, or small towns was cynical or ironic. I believe he saw that good and evil are always inextricably intertwined, and that there is no escaping this fact.

Mystery Man: We've met before, haven't we.

Fred Madison: I don't think so. Where was it you think we met?

Mystery Man: At your house. Don't you remember?

— Lost Highway

But the recurring idea in Lynch’s work that strikes me the deepest has to do with dreams, memory, and magic. We tend to think of forgetfulness as a flaw or weakness, but the ability to forget can also be an adaptation, a survival mechanism, a superpower. There is a type of forgetting that we do whenever we're stirred by a piece of art: We momentarily forget ourselves, forget that we’re in a theater, forget that we’re watching actors. Although we know what we’re seeing is artificial, the emotions we experience are the same as if it were playing out for real. It’s not an intellectual forgetting; we don’t run for our lives whenever a train is shown hurtling toward the camera. It takes place somewhere deeper and less conscious.

"I can't seem to remember if it's today, two days from now, or yesterday. I suppose if it was 9:45, I'd think it was after midnight!"

— The neighbor, Inland Empire

For most of us, this is a prosaic experience, but Lynch reminds us how profound an ability it is. It’s an asynchronous collaboration between audience and creator; the artist offers something moving, and the viewer allows himself to be moved. The director thus plays the role of magician or hypnotist — two archetypes that have appeared often in Lynch’s work, including Pierre Tremond in Twin Peaks, played by Lynch’s son Austin, or the Phantom in Inland Empire (2006), who can put people into a trance and make them kill. Hypnosis, after all, is a sort of waking dream: a state of focus, lowered situational awareness, and heightened openness and suggestibility. 

"My grandson is studying magic!"

― Mrs. Tremond, Twin Peaks

Lynch had different ways of dramatizing this metaphor, but a scene he returned to repeatedly involved a character lip-syncing to music. Synchronicity is very compelling to the mind; when two events coincide, we naturally conceive of connections between them. The experience of watching a film relies on this phenomenon. The image isn’t really moving, but when we see 24 still images projected every second, our minds fill in the gaps and we perceive motion. The motion is illusory but our experience of it is real. Similarly, when the actors’ lips move in sync with the audio, we feel as though the sounds are really coming from them.

“Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.”

— Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

In Blue Velvet, Dean Stockwell’s character, Ben, lip-syncs to Roy Orbison’s 1963 song “In Dreams.” The audience understands, as do the characters in the scene, that Ben is only lip-syncing. But the cumulative effect of it all — the wide-eyed lyric, Orbison’s passionate vocal, Stockwell’s uncanny countenance, the incongruity with the violent narrative — makes it difficult not to feel something. Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth acts this out: He stands motionless, staring into the middle distance, mouthing the lyrics, fighting back tears, his whole body contorting in sympathetic pain as the song reaches its emotional peak. But before it can fully unfurl, the magician behind the curtain reminds us once more: This is just an illusion. Ben abruptly drops the act as Frank ejects the cassette.

A scene in Mulholland Drive (2001) opens with a tight shot of a young woman in vintage styling. She sings "Sixteen Reasons (Why I Love You),” recorded in 1963 by Connie Stevens. We hear multi-layered vocal harmonies and a band accompanying her as the camera begins to slowly pull back.

As the shot gets wider, we see backup singers, then the control room of a recording studio, and finally a camera and movie set. Now we see — or rather, now we remember — that we’re witnessing the making of the film within the film, the dream within the dream. The song plays on as Naomi Watts and Justin Theroux, playing star-crossed ingenue and director, lock eyes.

This same sequence of events: the viewer being lulled into accepting an alternate reality before a sudden reminder of its falseness, as if waking from a dream before falling more deeply into another one, plays out several times in Inland Empire. Laura Dern stars as Nikki Grace, an actress playing the role of Sue Blue in the fictional Hollywood production On High in Blue Tomorrows. Justin Theroux plays Devon Berk, her co-star. As we watch them act out various scenes from the script, the tether between dream and reality gradually becomes more and more frayed, until the characters themselves start to lose sight of the difference.

“Damn! This sounds like dialogue from our script.”

— Nikki Grace / Sue Blue, Inland Empire

This strand culminates in a scene on Hollywood Boulevard. Laura Dern as Nikki (as Sue) is stabbed in the guts with a screwdriver by a woman who’s been hypnotized and commanded to kill her. She collapses next to a homeless trio in front of a shuttered store. After a bizarre exchange in which one of the characters references the name of the film-within-the-film, she dies in a bloody heap. Then the camera pulls back and reveals — a camera and a film crew. After a moment, Dern stands up again, unharmed. She is still Nikki, the actress. We remember what we’d let ourselves forget again: that we’re still inside a dream.

But this idea is illustrated most fully in the Club Silencio scene from Mulholland Drive. A man credited as “The Magician” steps onto the stage and delivers these lines:

No hay banda! There is no band! Il n'est pas de orquestra! This is all a tape-recording. No hay banda! And yet we hear a band. If we want to hear a clarinet... listen.

Un trombon "à coulisse". Un trombon "con sordina". J'aime le son du trombon in sourdine. Je le sens... a muted trumpet. 

At this point we hear a muted trumpet and see a man who appears to be playing it. But the trumpet continues to sound as the man raises his arms, moving the trumpet away from his lips. He’s not playing; he never was.

It's all recorded. No hay banda! It's all a tape. Il n'est pas de orquestra. It is... an illusion!

The scene continues: A man introduces the singer Rebekah del Rio. She performs an a cappella rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” from 1965. As Rita and Diane, played by Laura Haring and Naomi Watts, listen from the audience, the song builds to an emotional climax. The two women are moved to tears. But just before the song ends, the singer suddenly collapses. The singing continues as the singer is carried offstage. It was all an illusion: a lip sync to a tape recording. The magician let us know exactly what was happening. We knew that there was no band, and yet we heard one because we wanted to.

When Lynch introduced Inland Empire before screenings in 2006, he would read a quote from Hindu scripture:

“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. This is true for the entire universe.” In Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Lynch’s character, Gordon Cole, describes a recurring dream he has in which Monica Bellucci repeats the line about the dreamer who lives in the dream. She then asks: "But who is the dreamer?” When we’re dreaming, we forget that we went to sleep. After we wake, we soon forget the details of the dream. But the things we felt in the dream can linger in our minds much longer.

And if forgetting is a superpower, it’s also a survival mechanism. I read once that women must forget the pain of childbirth in order to go through with it again. I think that applies to heartbreak, too. And by the same logic, we must forget about death in order to live. It’s simply too overwhelming a truth to hold in our minds if we ever hope to accomplish the mundane business of our lives. Trying to think about death is like staring at the sun; we have to look away lest we go blind. In Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper visits the red room in a dream, and Laura Palmer whispers the truth about her killing into his ear. But when he wakes up, he’s forgotten, perhaps because what she told him was too terrible to face.In the introduction to her 2023 translation of The Iliad, Emily Wilson writes:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

My dad lives a couple hours’ drive from me. He’s just a few years younger than Lynch was. Earlier this week he was rushed to the hospital for the third time in the past twelve months. He’s stable now, but as I waited for news of his condition, I tried — as I had each of the previous times — to prepare myself for the worst. I don’t know whether pain is felt any less acutely if we spend time steeling ourselves for it, rehearsing for how we’ll react when it arrives. But I think that’s one of the things we seek from cinema, why we submit ourselves to its embrace. When we choose to forget our surroundings, we give ourselves permission to remember that which is otherwise too painful.

I was at first surprised by the strength of my own reaction to Lynch’s passing. I wept when I found out, and for some days after. I didn’t know David Lynch personally. He lived a long, full life. Why should his dying affect me so much? But these feelings shouldn’t surprise me. I was stricken by the loss not only because his work shaped the person I’ve become, but also because it served as a reminder that all I hold dear in the present will eventually become part of the past. Lynch was here, and now he’s gone. My father is here, and one day he will be gone. I’m here, but before long I’ll be gone, too.

At moments like this, I think of Delia Elena San Marco by Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite writers:

We said good-bye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once.

From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved good-bye.

A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o’clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice?

Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead.

And now I search out that memory and gaze at it and think that it was false, that under the trivial farewell there lay an infinite separation.

Last night I did not go out after dinner. To try to understand these things, I reread the last lesson that Plato put in his teacher’s mouth. I read that the soul can flee when the flesh dies.

And now I am not sure whether the truth lies in the ominous later interpretation or in the innocent farewell.

Because if the soul doesn’t die, we are right to lay no stress on our good-byes.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

One day we will pick up this uncertain conversation again, Delia — on the bank of what river? — and we will ask ourselves whether we were once, in a city that vanished into the plains, Borges and Delia.

Like the narrator, I also don’t know which interpretation is true. I ask myself if knowing the answer would make me change the way I live, and if so, how? But I don’t know how to answer that, either. Maybe this is knowledge I had once. Maybe it’s knowledge we were all born with, but have since made ourselves forget. Maybe one day — perhaps in some darkened cinema — the truth will come back to me.