RIP David Lynch
I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we'll all meet again, like the song says. It's sad but it's not devastating if you think like that. Otherwise I don't see how anybody could ever, once they see someone die, that they'd just disappear forever and that's what we're all bound to do. I'm sorry but it just doesn't make any sense, it's a continuum, and we're all going to be fine at the end of the story.
David Lynch, BBC (2022)
It’s been both sad and comforting to read all the David Lynch tributes on social media since he passed away on January 15.
Last June I wrote a post about Sublime Eternal Love, a song and music video from the album album Cellophane Memories by Chrystabell and David Lynch. But I’ve not watched anything by him since.
In August David Lynch announced he had emphysema and had no intention to retire. I tried not to think about what the worse case scenario would be, and sadly the day arrived.
Since then, I’ve been wearing shirts buttoned up at the collar, an homage to his style.
I don’t think I can write or say anything that can top what has already been published, so for now I will share a few images, videos and links to honour him.
RIP David Lynch (January 20, 1946 - January 15, 2025)
Lynchian.com was launched last week, its aim is to collate all the David Lynch tributes and stories posted online since his death.
I’d like to start with words by Mark Frost, his collaborator on Twin Peaks who I feel doesn’t get enough attention whenever it is discussed or written about in mainstream media.
Kevin B. Lee recently shared What Is Lynchian? on his Instagram account, a video essay he made in 2015. It features clips from films by Lynch and text adapted from David Lynch: The Man From Another Place by Dennis Lim.
If there is a utopian sensibility running through Lynch’s films, it is here – in this boyish, inchoate, but touchingly stubborn intuition that a single woman’s suffering can tear the fabric of the world.
Women in Trouble by Max Nelson, New Left Review, January 22, 2025
Earth, Lynch once suggested, is “a learning world,” in which love and suffering are twin sides of the coin. Late last fall, in the same profile where he revealed his 2020 emphysema diagnosis, Lynch offered his advice to readers: “You can quit these things that are going to end up killing you,” he said. “I owe it to them, and to myself, to say that.” Although, he added, he didn’t regret it. “It was important to me,” he said. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”
David Lynch’s Cigarette Cinema by Meaghan Garvey, GQ, January 22, 2025
A nicotine fiend and a coffee addict who mixes existential dread with sadomasochism in all-American settings, Lynch is that rare director who makes subversive films without a chip on his shoulder, seemingly without any will to provocation. He is at home with his neuroses and obsessions. His secret is that he proceeds as though he is acting from the most impossible condition of all: normalcy. While directors like David Fincher and Lars von Trier explore similar terrain with grim determination, only Lynch enters nightmare worlds like the Eagle Scout he was, as inquisitive about the depths of human psychology as he is about bugs and twigs.
The Interpretation of Screams by A. S. Hamrah, Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2016
Twin Peaks foregrounds a kind of American emptiness of the soul that is filled by violence. The show, hopscotching between its original locations and South Dakota, New York, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia, places this evil in the whole country now, not just in a single town.
Lynch was a 20th-century man—1950s and ’60s iconography held permanent sway over his oeuvre—and yet his work always felt like it was in the perpetual present tense. The introspective, thematically recursive nature of his films makes them an evergreen canvas on which to project contemporary fears. Maybe his unwavering belief that our better angels can’t be so easily snuffed out feels hopeful instead of naïve because of how much he embraced the darkness of the modern world. Or maybe it will always feel like I’m communing with his spirit whenever the sound of my laptop overheating engulfs the silence of my bedroom.
David Lynch’s Guts by Vikram Murthy, The Nation, January 22, 2025
via Neil Bahadur, “The last words Lynch ever spoke in front of a camera that's currently public were”
May everyone be happy, may everyone be free of disease, may auspiciousness be seen everywhere, may suffering belong to no one, peace.
via David Lynch's last published broadcast speech at meditate america september 13 2024
