When news broke in August that iconic artist David Lynch was basically homebound with emphysema, you didn’t have to be a doctor to figure out the end was near. And sure enough, as 2025 continues to frontload it’s sheer shittiness into 3 scant weeks, Lynch has passed away at 78, far too young for a person who never lost his magic touch and weird whimsy.
The internet and what’s left of the social media landscape has been flooded with sadness and perhaps more importantly, wonderful stories and memories of what Lynch and his films have meant to so many. It got me thinking that I don’t think you’d be reading this piece right now if the films and TV of David Lynch hadn’t literally changed the trajectory of my life at a young age.
I was a sensitive little kid and always found myself profoundly moved by sad or touching moments in films and television. I could list the movies and shows that fucked me up, more than other kids (Old Yeller, Puff the Magic Dragon, The Neverending Story, just to name a few), but I distinctly remember being at first very jarred and then overcome with sadness upon watching The Elephant Man (1980) on cable when I was maybe 10 or 11. I don’t know what made me want to watch it aside from an interest in the weird and the macabre but the entirety of the depiction of John Merrick’s (John Hurt) life felt very much akin to the bullying and embarrassment I felt as a kid. Feeling ugly being called weird. Not fitting in but being a good person. When Merrick merely wanted to sleep lying down at the end of the film, a decision that he knows will kill him, I became inconsolable in the aftermath. In my memory, it took a few days to recover.
Yet that moment really didn’t resonate as “Lynchian” until I started thinking about writing this. It was later that his films and shows really got inside my head and changed…everything.
As a rabid video store connoisseur, Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) became a fairly constant “dare” film to watch, or spring upon, fellow teenaged friends. Of course we didn’t get it, we just liked quoting it and being inappropriate and having a kind of weird and secret “in” film we and only we knew about. But in hindsight, isn’t that kind of what a lot of Lynch’s films mean to us cinephiles?
Like you’re in on his secret yet familiar worlds and there’s a bit of a shorthand between us fans, we all know. We all know we don’t know. Then some normie (ie; not cinema obsessive) will cross your path and somehow they know about Lynch and a sort-of….common ground is formed. For as weird and confusing and hip as Lynch and his films are, he still managed to be pretty mainstream which I feel speaks to the unknowable nature of his work. The attraction and repulsion, the wanted to know “What Does It Mean” and forever either falling short or, changing your mind. It’s endlessly intriguing and interesting. It’s fricking art, duh.
Having known of Lynch via Blue Velvet my interest was piqued when ABC started their brilliant marketing campaign around Twin Peaks (1990). I had recently graduated high school and was spending much of my time at a movie theater that doubled as a concert hall called The Phoenix. I had started recording Twin Peaks on my VHS player as I often did with movies and shows and I was enjoying what I’d seen so far. I was already a repeat viewer of things I adored.
One night I left the Phoenix after watching some friends band practice and came home to watch Twin Peaks episode 3 of season 1. Things were moving along at that weird Twin Peaks pace when the unimaginable happened: Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) had a dream. And in that dream, a dancing little person spoke to him and, well, long story short, it shook me to my core.
I had never been so entranced by and completely terrified by a scene in my life. It was like a bad dream I had someone else had and filmed it and now it was on my TV. It made no sense but also seemed to hold not just a secret for Coop and the village of Twin Peaks but also, somehow, just for me. My head was literally ablaze and I was at once confounded and fired up. I was scared shitless. I had nowhere to put what I had just seen into any context. I had no one with me to look at and say, “dude, what the fuck.” The only thing I could think to do was literally run out my house, across a field and down the street about a mile back to the Phoenix to tell my friends what I had just witnessed. It fell on deaf ears but at least I had a place to express it and get it out of my head for a few moments. I had never witnessed something like that and it was incredible.
From there, I was a devout Lynch fan. I wish I could add that his films inspired me to seek other filmmakers like him but, there was no one else like David Lynch. Here are some more quick hits and personal recollections of David Lynch and his films throughout my life. These are all true:
It’s 1990. My mom and I go to see Wild at Heart. Yeah, it was awkward and a very bad choice of a movie to see with your mom. However, compounding an already excruciating movie-going experience, our screening featured a clearly unwell gentleman dressed in some kind of boy scout/confederate army shirt who, about halfway through the film started standing up, marching about 20 rows forward to the screen, saluting it and going back to his seat. This happened throughout the entire final half of the film. No one said anything either.
It’s 1997. I am a volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival and have somehow landed a front row seat for the premiere of Lost Highway. In his opening remarks mere feet from me, Lynch says that he personally brought in a killer sound system so the movie could be played at it’s proper level. The results were earth shattering. The other earth shattering thing in that screening was the appearance of Robert Blake’s “Mystery Man” character and there, in the Egyptian Theater at about 1am with 800 other people, I am once again scared fucking shitless by what seems like a nightmare moment come to life. I’m again in my bedroom, age 18 as the Black Lodge unspools before me.
It’s 2001. I see Mullholland Drive at the now, obscenely defunct Arclight Cinema in Hollywood. Again, I have that feeling of weightless dream terror combined with awe as the film unfolds in perfect cinematic conditions. I can’t get it out of my head. I see it three more times.
It’s 2005 or 2006. Seemingly unable or unwilling to learn a lesson from previous mistakes, I go with my mom to see Inland Empire at a special screening via the California Film Institute in San Rafael. Lynch is there. The film is…pretty fucking weird, even by Lynch standards. But after it’s over, Lynch comes onstage to do his Q and A but….oops…not so fast. The lights dim again and a spotlight flicks on at the side exit. A familiar sounding guitar chord rings out and out walks Chris Isaak in his full Chris Isaak regalia strumming and soon singing Wicked Game, the song from Wild at Heart. Isaak’s drummer Kenny Dale Johnson trails Isaak playing maracas and, as they reach the stage, he hands Lynch the tiniest pair of maracas I’ve ever seen and Lynch joins in on rhythm.
Like everyone, it’s so very sad we’ll probably never see another film by David Lynch. I hold out hope there’s a secret vault somewhere, saved up just so we never have to go without something new from him. But even if that exists, we still have lost the man himself and that’s never coming back. But, the great thing about artists like him is that the work will stand forever. Thank you, David Lynch. Thank you for what you mean to me personally and thank you for sharing it with the world.
– Don R. Lewis (@ThatDonLewis)
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Glen Grefe
Beautiful letter and article Don! We will miss him greatly. 😢🎞️