RIP: David Lynch

I sat in a screening room in the fall of 2001. When Mulholland Drive started, I somehow knew that a great film was about to open up to me, right from the start, when I saw the dancers jitterbugging with no background of any kind behind them, and then the images of the car moving forward in the night, with the foreboding Angelo Badalamenti score driving it sadly forward.

I'll never forget that feeling of intuition, which has almost never happened since with a movie, that feeling of “Oh my God, this is it....this is the movie...the movie underneath all the other movies....the movie at the bottom of it all...and bottomless.…” It's about unrequited love, and failure, but of course that isn't apparent until it collapses in on itself around halfway through its running time.

I saw it a second time, at a second screening, in October of 2001. And there was a critic from Staten Island next to me who started heckling it towards the end: “Are we on Candid Camera?” he asked. “What is going on here?” As the lights came up, I patiently tried to talk about the movie with him. (I can't believe I once had such patience.) I wrote about it for Show Business Weekly, which was my first newspaper job, and I've written about it several more times since. I have it on right now, streaming from the Criterion Channel. Below is the real knockout sequence from this major movie, when Rebekah Del Rio sings and the two female leads have to cry.

I kept the sparse press notes and 8’ by 10’ photos (standard then for newspapers) and the slides we were given, and even the ticket to the second screening, and they are precious artifacts to me. I just got them out and took some photos of them for you. They feel like clues now.

Below is a link to an article I wrote about Mulholland Drive and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) for Nylon:

https://www.nylon.com/articles/mulholland-drive-tree-life-best-films-20th-century

And below this is a photo of the donuts that were served at the viewing parties that Keith Uhlich and I gave for Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the much-belated third season of his groundbreaking surrealistic 1990-91 TV series, which actually captured a mass audience for a brief, pleasurable period. (I remember “the adults” talking about it, intrigued, perplexed, and then increasingly fed up.) The two screenings I saw of Mulholland Drive and this ongoing viewing party for Twin Peaks: The Return are markers in my life.

Lynch was an original. He cannot easily or too profitably be compared to any other artist. He was and is so original that we are lucky he existed in the first place, or at all. But he didn’t trust words. He trusted to images, and music. He showed us things we had never seen before, and only he could have conceived of them. This is what his family wrote on Lynch’s Facebook page today: “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole’….It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.” Well, sure…if you don’t go out in the alley behind the bushes….