RIP David Lynch, 1946-2025
We weirdos lost a spiritual uncle today.
Lose isn’t exactly the right word–the work is still there, the tremendous body of works, the films and images that I’ve returned to for so much of my life, films and images my fourteen-year-old son has recently been drawn to himself, wholly independent of me, getting there through his own weird back channels, my son who asked me just the other day if we could watch Eraserhead, and I said, Not yet, although I was the same age as he is now when I watched Eraserhead and let it do something weird to me. Maybe we’ll start with The Elephant Man instead, let it break his heart a little. Keep him away from Fire Walk With Me until he can handle it (you can never really handle it). I saw them all too young. Was way too young when my older cousin showed me Blue Velvet; I think it imprinted on me. Rewatching it (for the fifth? tenth?) time a decade and a half later, I realized I was Kyle M’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through the closet in horror at the Adult World. Maybe I wasn’t too young. But I’ve loved them all, again and again—Lost Highway, the first one I got to see in a theater, Mulholland Dr. (the best one?), Inland Empire (really the best one). Even Dune, the first one I saw, perplexed as hell. My parents let us watch it again and again on VHS and it always refused to cohere. I think they thought it was like Star Wars, which it both was and very much wasn’t. Even the straight one he made for the normies (especially the one he made for the normies–although I don’t know if they appreciated it). But really, especially, when he Got the Old Gang Back Together for Twin Peaks: The Return—it was such a gift, a gift that seemed to come out of nowhere, unexpected, but I think even then we could recognize what a beautiful gift it was — even if it broke my heart all over again at the end, in the best possible way (“What year is this?” / “Laura!” / HOWL). I think we all knew to say Thank you then; I think we showed our love in return for the artist’s gifts. I’m thankful now, sad, selflishly sad that there won’t be one more gift, one more vision that could never come from another mind. But thankful.
Biblioklept 