Manflesh of an Era: David Lynch

At the turn of the century, amidst all my obsessive X-Files fan research, I stumbled upon a fateful fun factoid that intrigued me: David Duchovny played an FBI agent before he was Fox Mulder, in a short-lived but groundbreaking series called Twin Peaks. My teenage self was shocked to see a screenshot in one of my fanzines, which depicted my favorite TV idol costumed in drag as the trans Agent Denise Bryson.

 

If there was nothing else The X-Files taught me, it was to investigate everything for yourself. I had to see Twin Peaks.The Gods of Cinema shined down on me in a subtle way, because the cable network Bravo or some other happened to be re-running the early-90s show on the regular. I had no other means of seeing it or finding out which specific episode to watch at the time. The only thing to do was start taping it so I could accidentally catch the few episodes in which David Duchovny appeared. 

In that weeks-long process, Twin Peaks hooked me in other unexpected ways. I was entranced by the haunting Angelo Badalamenti music, intrigued by the prominent DIRECTED BY DAVID LYNCH titles over serene imagery of the Pacific Northwest at the start of every episode, and I soon had a crush on Agent Dale Cooper, as nature intended. 

Hello, Kyle MacLachlan, where have you been all my life?

 

My dad, ever hip to my constant flow of interests, suggested that if I loved Kyle MacLachlan, I should watch the movie Dune.

 

At this point, one might insert a colossal, mind-blowing Inception-style swell of subsonic sound.

 

One day, there was Kyle MacLachlan, clad in a tight, black rubber stillsuit, riding a sandworm in a fever-dream-orange desert to the epic guitar arias of Toto—all on my thirteen-inch TV/VCR combo set up in my bedroom. I was instantly captivated by the film, which spurred my imagination despite the tragically small scale of its presentation (I was similarly exposed to Lawrence of Arabia on the same TV). I was nonetheless mesmerized, having never seen anything like it before or since. I felt deep down in my ovaries that this was something.

 

My dad, utterly bemused by how impressed I was by the film, then swept out his hand and presented a new command: “Read the book.”

 

Thus, in the year 2000, when I was 17 years young, in 17 days (I scribbled the dates on the first page of my paperback for posterity), I read Dune for the first time. That very same book, now battered, stained, taped up and dog-eared, has passed through many a hand of anyone I heard was interested, and it sits on my shelf to this day, ready for yet another re-read at any given time.

Like many viewers, I then developed the sense that David’s film was… not quite the Dune I had imagined while reading the book. Subsequently, watching the SciFi Channel’s adaptations in the following years did not satisfy that deep Dune need either, but instead instilled in me that love-cringe relationship with the 1984 version. 

My appreciation of David, however, only grew and grew.

David’s oeuvre, which is all preternaturally brilliant, makes his early foray into big budget Hollywood insanity an entirely forgivable blip in his career. My love of David and Dune led me to cement some deep friendships in my life; there’s nothing quite like the bond one has with people who adore the same explicitly weird shit as you do.

My college bud Elissa and her husband Joe love Dune so much they had a band play one of the themes from the movie during their wedding ceremony, because, of course. Joe often entertains us with his top-notch David impressions, and once attempted to read a passage from Macbeth in that distinctive honk of a voice. Just last year, at my insistence, Joe and Elissa finally watched Eraserhead, and fell in love with Spike, the famously disturbing and yet empathetic creature featured therein. Spike has come to represent a manifestation of our collective love—the ineffable child sprung from our oddities and passions over the years.

My dear Annie and I unanimously agree that Twin Peaks is one of the few eternally re-watchable TV series (The X-Files, Star Trek, and MadMen being the others—and David himself has professed his love for MadMen). One year, for Annie’s birthday, I drove her down to Tampa to watch Dune on the big screen in the (probably haunted) Tampa Theatre—a beautiful and precious experience locked in my memory forever (THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED was on the old-fashioned marquee that night). 

David Lynch is a singular, extraterrestrially precious artist, and we shall not, as Hamlet says, look upon his like again. He was saint-like and open-hearted towards difference, and demonically direct with his opinions on art. He miraculously survived nearly 79 years on wine and coffee and cigarettes, and always had a glorious, sculpturesque pompadour. For a long time, he felt like a beloved, elderly cockatiel you start to realize you may have to put in your will. His presence was always so constant, his work so uncompromising and pure, radiating light and alpha particles from deep within his psyche and soul. 

His inimitable art consistently found ways to reveal the world we know to be wild at heart and weird on top. And although there are red ants underneath, he taught us to feel the humour in all the absurdity, accept that life makes no sense, and that the only sane thing to do is to love and to dream.

Having shuffled off this mortal coil, David can finally see what dreams may come.