David Lynch Has Gone

Photo from TV: David Lynch in *Fire Walks With Me* (1992). One of many points of inspiration for my ‘charachter’ in the *Twin Peaks Was 3*0 program performed by Decibel in 2023.

David Lynch has gone (1946-2025). Lover of coffee, music, films, painting, transcendental meditation and cigarettes - the latter got him in the end. He had smoked since he was 8, and that he died so soon after evacuating his home due the LA Wildfires (1) is oddly Lynchian.

Dreamer, film maker, experimenter, performer, musician, composer, director, designer, painter, weatherman, father, author, poet, photographer, philanthropist: not many people in recent history can say they had an adjective based on thier name.

It is hard to overestimate the impact the art of David Lynch had on me and many of colleagues. The theatre where I worked had red velvet seats and the Twin Peaks (1990) sound track on repeat as house music - it became indelible. Eraserhead (1977) changed the way I thought about movies, soundtracks and singing. Blue Velvet (1986) taught me how the strange and surreal can somehow mainstream, Wild at Heart (1990) was fun, Elephant Man (1980) was emotional, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) blew up narrative, Lost Highway (2001) was instantly iconic as was it’s sound track, I don’t want to talk about Dune (1984).

These films use music in exciting ways. Importantly it was often written by Lynch himself, or in collaboration others such as key composer Angelo Badalamenti. Master of the synth pad but also the crude band - see his collaboration with Lynch in Thought Gang (1993/2018) - Badalamenti’s soundtracks defined many of Lynch’s films. Yet that Blue Velvet was born of the 1963 Bobby Vitton version of the song (2) pays testament to the importance of music to everything Lynch does. Not just the composition of the song or it’s lyrics; but the hue, the approach, the energy.

His detailed engagement with song is at the centre of so much of his work - as lyricist or even songwriter. The placement of songs in the films is always remarkable, as is the way Lynch captures responses to and interactions with them as part of the action. Think of the lady in the radiator, Laurel Near, emerging singing In Heaven in Eraserhead, Dean Stockwell lip synching to Roy Orbinson’s In Dreams during Blue Velvet on a shallow stage with an uncomfortably close Denis Hopper emoting, Jimmy Scott’s flash appearances singing Sycamore Tree in the iconic red, black and white Twin Peaks set, Nicholas Cage singing Elvis’s version of Jerry Leiber’s Love Me in Wild at Heart with the metal band doing soft rock behind him and the screaming fans, Julee Cruise’s dreamy Questions in a World of Blue in Fire Walks with Me (1992) with the Laura Palmer character tearing up. These settings highlight the blurred dimensions of his sets, his embrace of the dark, the puzzle, the texture, the pattern, the mysterious.

I wasn’t as much a hardcore fan of the old or new Twin Peaks series’ as many of friends (and you know how you are). But I tried to capture the impact of Lynch’s artistry on my own artmaking in the Decibel program Twin Peaks Was 30, which I directed and performed in at PICA in 2023. I took ideas from the 1992 film, Fire Walks With Me and together with designer Jen Hector, producer Tristen Parr, Decibel and guests (see a few examples below). I attempted to capture the surreal magic of his, Badalamenti and Cruise’s music, as well as new work inspired by it, in a surreal setting of reference and reverence. This involved developing a a kind of ‘cabaret character’ in a suit and multiple ties haranguing audience members in between numbers.

Performing in *Twin Peaks Was 30,* citing lines from different parts of *Fire Walk With Me,* with my masked assistant providing light and Decibel performing in the backgound. Note the head set as per the Lynch photo above. Photo by Edify Media.

A true surrealist, Lynch didn’t stop experimenting. His bizarre weather reports in the 2000s, that Crazy Clown Time album and related music videos (2011), the Netflix short What did Jack Do (2020) where he plays an detective interrogating a crime committing monkey that breaks out into song - and many more. It didn’t always work, and there are some moments where it’s hard to watch, but isn’t that part of the attraction? It’s not all perfect, and after all, experimentation means permission to fail. As a champion of experimentation myself, I honour Lynch’s commitment to his own lifelong pursuit, creating alternate worlds and his own other style in doing so. Ideas are like fish (3). Little fish in the shallows, but the big fish in the depths - and thats where the abstraction is.

My condolences to close ones and relatives. He will live on in his work and influence.

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(1) David Lynch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch. Accessed 17 Janurary 2025.
(2) David Lynch and Chris Rodley (2005). Lynch on Lynch (revised ed.). New York: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-22018-2.
(3) David Lynch (2016). Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Tarcher.