In Heaven (Everything is Fine)
A series of memories about the late David Lynch
I started to write this post several times now and each time I had to stop myself because there is just too much to say. This is very stream of consciousness.
About a week ago when the fire was spreading though the Hollywood Hills I woke up in the middle of the night consumed with the thought that David Lynch was not okay. The next day his producer and friend Sabrina Sutherland shared that he had evacuated, but that he was fine. A think a lot of us breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Today I read the news that David Lynch had died five minutes before I was set to interview a filmmaker about her film that will be playing Sundance in a few weeks. I had to stay in the present and really listen to her responses. That is the only way to do a good interview. I think it was a good conversation. I don’t know how I found the concentration. David Lynch is my favorite filmmaker of all time and I felt broken.
In December, my partner
, I started a re-watch of Twin Peaks so that he could finally watch The Return. I have watched the whole show through many times. The first time I watched it was right after I dropped out of grad school during the recession in 2009. I was staying in a small house in my hometown. I watched each episode a disc at a time, posting on Tumblr as I watched. Occasionally watching episodes with my mother, who said she finally “got” the show while watching it with me (I’m not sure if that’s true; but I love that she shared that time with me regardless). I then rented all of his films, a disc at a time. I watched Eraserhead in the middle of a blizzard when I had no heat, which really made me feel like I might have actually been in Eraserhead.I had first heard of Twin Peaks from my first boyfriend about five years earlier when I was in college. He and his friends had just finished watching the whole show one cassette tape at a time from a Blockbuster in Berkeley that would shutter soon afterwards. He refused to watch it with me even though so much of his friends’ inside jokes were lines from the series. This was not why we broke up but it should have.
I think the first Lynch film I ever saw was his Dune. I remember it scaring my brother and I because we were kids. Even the commercials for it on TV scared us. In college, a few semesters after breaking up with the boyfriend, my friend group went to a midnight screening of Blue Velvet at the Shattuck Cinemas (RIP). We created a Facebook group called “Heineken? Fuck That Shit. Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!” where we posted about the movie all time. I’ve since seen Blue Velvet on the big screen multiple times (along with almost all of his films. I still have a few stragglers!) and it’s always treasure to share watching one of his movies with an audience (even the rowdy ones).
When I watched all his movies in 2009, I watched them in chronological order and each one spoke to me on a different level. Each one was brilliant. But, like a lot of Twin Peaks fans, I was not a fan of Fire Walk With Me when I first saw it. Years later I saw a triple feature at the Roxie in San Francisco that was Otto Preminger’s Laura, the international version of the Twin Peaks pilot, and Fire Walk With Me. I took the bus, but it was running behind, so at one point I got off and ran the whole way there, barely making it on time before the curtain opened. That time I saw its brilliance. It’s unending empathy. If you’ve never read Willow Catelyn Maclay’s piece about the film, now is the time to read it. That stint in San Francisco, when I was attending grad school (the second time), was when I first read Lynch on Lynch, which gave me a whole new perspective on film in general and David Lynch as an artist in particular.
When I graduated, I moved to Los Angeles to work for Warner Archive Collection, and I kept thinking of this quote from Lynch on Lynch:
Number one, the intense light. Also the different feelings in the air. But like every place it’s always changing. And it takes longer to appreciate L.A. than a lot of cities, because it’s so spread out, and every area has its own mood. What I really like about it is, from time to time, if you drive around - especially at night - you can get a little gust of wind of the great days of the silver screen. All there in, like, living memory. It just makes you wish that you’d lived in those times. I think that if you could go back, that’s the one place that you want to go back to. Maybe they didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it was an incredible place to be at the beginning of cinema.
A few months after I moved to L.A. David Lynch had a coffee and album release event at the Whole Foods on the corner of Fairfax and Santa Monica Blvd. It was mid-day on a Saturday. I asked the parking lot security if it was okay to leave my car there for a few hours and he smiled and said as long as I was on the premises it was okay. He was a good guy. There were two people in line in front of me. They had a huge Lost Highway poster. They had driven all night from New Mexico or Arizona or something because they wanted to meet their favorite director. The person on the other side of me was Courtenay Stallings, whose book Laura's Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks is one of the great works about Lynch, along with Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Another Place.
At the event they said Lynch was only going to sign his albums and his coffee. But he was gracious and signed the poster those guys had driven all night with. He also signed my well worn copy of Lynch on Lynch. I told him I had just moved to Los Angeles and that I lived near the Bob’s Big Boy. He said “The milkshakes are different now!” and then came out from behind the table saying, “Let me shake your hand!” It was one of those perfect moments that so rarely happen.
During my stint in Los Angeles (the first time), I dressed as David Lynch once for Halloween (a fit I wore to both a weekend party *and* to work at Rotten Tomatoes) and also as cherry pie for a Twin Peaks themed party where a surf rock band played while people mingled talking about what Lynch’s work meant to them.
He became part of my professional life a few times as well. When I moved to Atlanta to work at TCM, I specifically chose to live near the Midtown Art Cinema. The first week I was there they screened Mulholland Drive. I soon discovered there was a bar not even a block from my house called The Book House Pub that served Twin Peaks themed drinks (they has since sadly closed). A few weeks into working there my boss let me do a live tweet and write about Lynch when TCM Underground programmed his early shorts and Dumbland. That same year I dressed as Audrey Horne for Halloween (which allowed for a work appropriate costume to wear to the office). When I worked at FilmStruck (also RIP) we co-presented a screening of the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life at SXSW with the Criterion Collection.
That same SXSW I was lucky enough to attend the pop-up Showtime had built to promote The Return, while in line I made another dear friend and also briefly spoke to Kyle MacLachlan. I also made many, many GIFs from Eraserhead for FilmStruck’s official GIPHY account, which subsequently led to a wonderful inside joke with one of my co-workers after the birth of his second child. I also helped raise funds for Richard Green’s forthcoming documentary I Know Catherine: The Log Lady, about the life and work of Catherine E. Coulson. I had met Richard a few years earlier that first summer I moved to L.A., through someone I knew from Tumblr. Another one of those connections that Lynch’s work always seemed to create.
Cut to many years later, when I worked at Netflix. I worked on the marketing campaign for What Did Jack Do?, which included sprinkling esoteric tweets on the NetflixFilm account written by Lynch himself prior to the film’s release on the platform. Of the hundred or so films I worked on for them, this was the biggest honor.
In 2023, while Robert and I were in Berlin my friend and one-time Netflix co-worker Nicolette introduced me to a bar that was Twin Peaks themed. It even had a red room in the back. Sadly, it too closed its doors recently. But when Robert was back in Berlin early last year, he pilfered one of their laminated menus for me. There’s also one similar to it upstairs at the Alamo South Lamar in Austin (or at least there was).
A year earlier, when we were in New York for a very brief weekend, Robert came with me to several exhibits of David Lynch’s work: I Like to See My Sheep at Sperone Westwater and Big Bongo Night at the Pace Gallery. We almost didn’t make it to the second show, but Robert figured out how to make it to the gallery and still have time to get to the airport on time the day we were scheduled to leave. I am still so grateful.
In 2017 I spent a three-day weekend rewatching all of Twin Peaks, The Missing Pieces, and Fire Walk With Me in preparation for The Return. After the first few episodes of that groundbreaking work aired a tweet of mine ended up in a round-up in The Independent:
A few months ago I decided to make my Twitter bio simply red “Hardcore David Lynch fan.” because it felt like the most important descriptor at the moment. It still does.
As I wrote earlier, when the news broke that David Lynch had died I was about to conduct an interview. When the conversation was over, I looked at my phone and there were so many texts from friends who wanted to make sure I was okay. Including Courtenay, and my dear friend and colleague Hillary, whom I met on Tumblr all those years ago, where we became friends because of our shared love of Sam Shepard and David Lynch. Years later we worked together on FilmStuck. A lifelong connection was formed. Someone on Instagram commented on my post saying they discovered Lynch and learned more about him as an artist because of my posts back then. It will always amaze me how someone’s work can touch you so deeply, and if you’re willing to share that love with the world, you can find others who are actually part of your same community, bound by that shared love. It’s a beautiful thing.
There is a quote in Lynch on Lynch that absolutely changed how I think about art:
I love the idea that one thing can be different for different people. Everything’s that way…and then there are films or writings that you could read once and then ten years later read again and get way more from. You’ve changed; the work stays the same. But suddenly it’s got way more meaning for you, depending on where you are. I like things that have a kernel of something in them. They have to be abstract. The more concrete they are, the less likely that this thing will happen. The maker has to feel it and know it in a certain way and be honest to it. Every single decision passes through this one person, and if they judge it and do it correctly, then the work holds together for that one person, and they feel it’s honest and it’s right. And then it’s released, and from that point on there’s not one thing you can do about it. You can talk about it - try to defend it or try to do this or that. It doesn’t work. People still hate it. They hate it. It doesn’t work for them. And you’ve lost them. You’re not going to get them back. Maybe twenty years later they’ll say, “My God! I was wrong.” Or maybe, twenty years later, they’ll hate it when at first they loved it. Who knows? It’s out of your control.
I couldn’t tell you which one of David Lynch’s films is my favorite because each one is my favorite as I am watching it. Each rewatch reveals something new, speaking with who I am at the moment, as well as who I have been throughout my life. Thankfully pretty much all of his films, his shorts, even his bonkers TV commercials are widely available. I will also always be grateful for his weather report videos he recorded during quarantine (all of which are archived on the David Lynch Theater YouTube channel, along with lots of other great videos). I have a folder full of screenshots that bring me joy every time I look back at them.
I’ll end this piece with another favorite quote from Lynch about why he loves the art of filmmaking:
I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream…allows you to dream in the dark. It’s just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.
David Lynch’s work taught me that it was okay to see the violence all around us, but to keep your focus on the love. To focus on the donut, not the hole. His work taught me that it was okay to be aware and in awe of the mysterious connections in the word. His work taught me not to look for answers, but to just embrace the dream.
Thank you so much for this, Marya.
Love, love, and more love to you on the darkest of days.
Thank you, Marya. I especially appreciate the quotes you've found.