on lynch

Twin Peaks meant the world to me when I was trapped out in the woods halfway up a hill in a geodesic dome with stone floors and a handmade spiral staircase and my mother was kinda spooky, like Sarah Palmer, and I was a closeted gay kid getting outed in high school and I was afraid for my life because my father was my abuser, and we had a doppleganger thing going with our resemblance.  So, y'know.  I felt the whole Laura Palmer thing.  I felt it hard.  I felt all the dumb highschool strung-out highjinx where you're out at night trying to cope with the first real deaths & tragedies you are going to come to know in a long line of them.  I felt like Twin Peaks described my small backwater where daughters were being molested by their fathers right next door, and everybody at church knew about it, and the cops let the daughter leave town with a suitcase after the family turned up shotgunned in the early morning.  I watched Twin Peaks religiously, like the rest of america, and I felt like it was talking about the forces that pulled a trigger and woke me in the absolute dark to gawp out the window at the little sallow house on the corner, listening to a wild agonized shriek fading fast.  I looked at Leland Palmer and I didn't see a man even remotely like my father, and knew the violence between us was wholly dissimilar from what happened to Laura, but I identified nonetheless because teenage kids everywhere live in terror of violence in the home.  I saw Lynch talking about america with a little a.

 

I bought the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, of course, and when I finally ran away from home, it was snug in my backpack, right alongside Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, and my microcassette recorder.

David Lynch is not the kindest or most elegant artist to attempt to describe the emotional violence of such circumstances.  His productions are not always what you would desire in terms of representation or sensitivity, and the male gaze is inescapable.  But he understood how deeply awful and weird and inexplicable human beings are.  His contributions to pop culture television trash & the metaphysics of soap opera existence aside, he's meant a whole hell of a lot to me creatively.  He understood music and sound in a way that spoke profoundly to me.  He made beautiful and terrifying melodrama with the soul of a painter.  He made the artistic life & the artistic process seem accessible & even desirable, as a form of self-expression, healing & therapy.  And he made some funny comix, too.  I liked his drawings especially, his use of black and white, his minimalist fixations in design.  He was a pleasure to watch creating art, or furniture, or sculptural paintings for installation; a delight to spy on, on set, in creative on-the-fly modifications to a shoot.  He inspired me throughout my life, and some of my forever favourite film experiences came from sticking with him:  Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE, Wild At Heart.  I love that he got to perfect some of his favourite shots & compositions & concepts from Dune and he snuck 'em into season 3 episode 8.  Even at the end he was hail mary-ing ways to express his vision with fine-tuned control & zero compromise.  He pulled off every stunt.

The man had a particular vision, and did his damnedest every time.  I will miss you, man I never met.