David Lynch presenting his book in Moscow, 2009. (Dmitry Rozhkov, Wikimedia Commons)
News broke today filmmaker David Lynch has died. He was 78.
This is a tremendous loss. Lynch was one of one, a quirky guy beloved by his coworkers who pioneered entire new categories of film.
His background and personality were as strange as his art. He was a corn-fed Midwestern Eagle Scout obsessed with transcendental meditation and the nature of evil. He liked to goof around making songs called “Crazy Clown Time” (NSFW). He once rescued five Woody Woodpecker dolls from a gas station:
“I screech on the brakes, I do a U-turn, go back and I buy them and I save their lives,” he says seriously. “I named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan and they were my boys and they were in my office. They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice.”
Looking straight ahead he says with a grim finality: “They are not in my life anymore.”
His art, though, was what made him special. I watched all Lynch’s films for a podcast last year and loved them. They’re gloriously unconcerned with making sense. They’re after bigger game.
As Lynch’s longtime collaborator Kyle MacLachlan put it:
What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.
Lynch realized by moving beyond literal stories or events, he could convey ideas that can’t be expressed normally (Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli shares this gift). It is a joy to watch his movies and luxuriate in their strangeness. Trying to decode them is endlessly entertaining because you’ll never succeed, and you’re not meant to.
I feel crushed. The world is unfathomably worse. Go watch Blue Velvet or Eraserhead. Live a little.