Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine, All Along the Way

 I saw my first David Lynch movie only when I was 19, my sophomore year in college. It was Mulholland Drive, and to be frank, I didn't like it.

But it lingered with me. And later, I would go on to watch Blue Velvet - which I liked a lot more - and then eventually Twin Peaks (including Fire Walk With Me and the Return when it came out,) which is probably my favorite of his projects.

Regardless of my feelings about one or another of his works, David Lynch was an influence on me before I had even seen anything by him. The Reaganite era that Blue Velvet vivisects and exposes as fradulent was the era I was born into. Twin Peaks, which brought surreal strangeness to the sacrosanct myth of "small town America" influenced a lot of other works in the 1990s and beyond that all then influenced me, bringing the otherworldly out of the utterly mundane.

If you have read any of my Dispatches From Otherworld blog, there are elements that were not necessarily intentionally "Lynchian," but I can certainly feel a subconscious draw to that aesthetic (in particular, I think of "the coffee" that allows people to see the faceless men - a substance that is probably not too far removed from Lynch's Garmonbozia, seen in Fire Walk With Me, which is a physical rendering of pain and suffering that looks like creamed corn).

Lynch's fascination with the mid-century (I guess pretty soon we'll need to specify that we're talking about the mid-20th-century) aesthetics is something that I think I kind of inherited. He was two years older than my dad, putting him in essentially the equivalent generation - the oldest of the baby boomers. I never experienced the 1950s or 1960s firsthand, but received it filtered through the nostalgia of the Reagan era and the skepticism and deconstruction that followed in the 90s, with Lynch perhaps as the vanguard of this response.

The artists I tend to really admire are the ones with a deep humanism. Lynch made scary movies - truly terrifying characters like Frank Booth or BOB. But the service that these villains played was always to allow for us to connect with the human beings around them. Twin Peaks' whole reason to exist was that Lynch felt TV shows were far too quick to dismiss victims of murder as mere plot devices. The show wasn't supposed to ever answer the question of who had killed Laura Palmer. It was meant to focus on Laura, to appreciate the life she had - both the beauty and the shadows in it.

I'm hesitant to speak on any artist's personal conduct, given that many artists I've admired have been revealed as quite monstrous. As far as I know, Lynch appears to have been a gentleman, though I think it's probably wisest to leave such judgments out of this remembrance. I certainly never met the guy, and couldn't tell you what he was like as a person beyond the snippets of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, which never reveal everything about someone.

And hell, that's kind of the point: we never fully get to know everything about Laura Palmer either.

I don't think I encountered this when he first did it on the gone-but-not-forgotten Indie 101.3 (a station that closed shop shortly after I moved to LA) but during the height of the pandemic, Lynch did daily weather reports - a little bit of normalcy and ritual that helped us get through those difficult times. These I'd hear on KCRW, LA's main NPR station. The reports were usually pretty simple, probably read off of some website or something, usually with some thoughts and ideas, typically in which he said "today I'm thinking about..." and then name a song, which the station would play after his report. Given that this is Southern California, the weather is usually pretty good - and he'd describe this as expecting "blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way."

I'm going to miss him.