David, Walk With Me

Or, We Lost a Good One

In the early 90s, my friend Jason and I used to play video games in a Bronx bodega before school. Big, stand up jobs found in arcades. One Monday we didn’t feed Street Fighter our quarters or talk football because we’d both seen this show featuring a little man dancing to creepy jazz in a red-curtained room. What did it mean? What was the story about? Who were these people? I didn’t know then, and I might not now. But those images and words have stayed with me.

The show was Twin Peaks. Its creator had just cracked my skull open.

Courtesy of Vogue, with compliments to Janus Films

David Lynch died on January 15, 2025. He’d been an enthusiastic smoker his entire life and emphysema took him down after 78 glorious, strange, utterly singular years. His death has rocked me in ways I hadn’t expected. Maybe it’s because I grew up fatherless, and all my artistic heroes are/were Men of a Certain Age: Lynch, John Le Carré, James Ellroy. I don’t know.

Many years after I first watched Twin Peaks, I became an avid cinephile and fan of directors: Coppola, Scorsese, Tarkovsky, Mann, Spielberg, Lee, Tarantino, Kurosawa…the list goes on. None of them had the impact on me that Lynch did. Because no one saw the world as he did. And, more importantly, no other visual artist was so committed to producing the visions in his head, as he saw them, without interference from studios or producers. His work defies easy explanation (“I am the Arm, and I talk like this.”) and Lynch famously refused to discuss meaning. His images range from wholesome Americana to horrifying incest to harrowing jump scares to batshit nuclear family insanity. Name me another creative who’s had an adjective named for them. You can’t, because Lynch was a one of one.

If you don’t know his career arc, here’s the TL/DR version: after 1977’s Eraserhead, Mel Brooks—yes, THAT Mel Brooks—tapped Lynch to helm 1980’s The Elephant Man. Eight Academy Award nominations landed Lynch the 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a project he chose over George Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi (think of what that might’ve been). Dune got cut to shit by Universal executives, and bombed big. The movie’s borderline incomprehensible (Patrick Stewart leaps into battle carrying an unexplained Pug) but remains wonderfully specific and strange and faithful to Herbert’s trippy sci-fi novel. I stand for it still.

Dune’s flameout convinced Lynch to never again direct any project over which he didn’t have final cut; the vision had to be his. The man came back with Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, The Straight Story (a G-rated road movie for Disney!), his feature-film capstone Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and the 18-hour, career-defining, epoch-rocking Twin Peaks: The Return. Sprinkled in are the paintings and shorts and songs and the infamous, unmade screenplays Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble. Opinions vary about these projects, but none of them can be described as anything less than the purest version of the man’s vision. And in our bland, reboot and remake-filled media landscape, such fidelity is an incredible achievement.

In the summer of 2017 TP: The Return hit Showtime (you remember cable, right? Right?). Every Sunday night I planted myself in front of the TV, and felt like I was back in the Bronx with my childhood best friend. With The Return, Lynch refused to indulge in easy fan service; much-loved FBI Agent Dale Cooper doesn’t appear until the final two episodes. Over eighteen hours he instead challenged, awed, bewildered, inspired and overjoyed viewers. Every glorious minute made me think. Fans speak with reverence about Episode Eight, its depiction of the Trinity atom bomb test as the birth of modern evil, the chainsmoking, poetry-spewing Woodsmen. Lynch wasn’t just a director; he wrote and painted and made music. His multi-hyphenate talents are evident in every project; next time you watch a Lynch movie, pay close attention to the sound design. It evokes a persistent, invisible dread consistent with his interrogations of the ugliness simmering under the surface of American exceptionalism.

When a bewildered Dale Cooper utters The Return’s final line—“What year is it?”—I think it marked the end of something. Not just of the show, but of an artistic independence being subsumed by Disney/Marvel monsters; by Netflix’s algorithmic decision making; by the attention-span-destroying rise of social media; by the decline of literacy. Coop just wanted to return to a time when one righteous man could change the future. But, like Lynch, Dale was trapped in the past.

Since his death, reports have surfaced that the Los Angeles fires forced Lynch to flee his home. His health took a turn and we lost him. There may be no more Lynchian an image than the man meditating on his deathbed (Lynch was a vocal advocate of transcendental meditation), surrounded by his family while the city he both loved and hated (see Lost Highway/Mulholland/Inland Empire) burned around him. He reached from Missoula, MT to Hollywood to an only child in the Bronx and showed him what was possible.

Thank you, Mr. Lynch.