Thanks a Million, David...

How the work of David Lynch helped shape my love of film.

By: Josh McCormack 

I’m sure plenty of people with film blogs are already/have already posted their feelings about the great David Lynch passing earlier today, and I doubt anything I’m about to to type out will be much different from the countless pieces that are already circulating at this very moment. But when an artist has such an effect on you and your personal life, it’s hard to keep these feelings to yourself when they pass. So just bear with me. I’m not gonna be checking for grammatical errors on this one…although the few people that read my blog probably know I rarely succeed at doing that in the first place.

I first encountered the work of David Lynch when my dad told me to watch “The Elephant Man” back when I was freshman or sophomore in high school. The film worked on me as it had countless others; A beautifully well made, gorgeously shot and impeccably acted period drama that had me fighting back tears in its final, heartbreaking moments. But as Lynch aficionados often discuss, “The Elephant Man” is something of an outlier in Lynch’s work and while I loved it as its own isolated film, I didn’t become obsessed with the dreamlike world of Lynch until just a little bit later.

In all honesty, my dad tried showing me the pilot of “Twin Peaks” soon after recommending “The Elephant Man”, but I wasn’t vibing with it yet. So much so that I remember asking him to turn it off before the initial episode reached its end.

Several months later, my dad (on one of his regularly scheduled father/son movie nights) told me we were going to be watching a film that had a profound impact on him at my age; 1986’s “Blue Velvet”. In the years after watching “The Elephant Man”, I had developed an interest in Lynch as any budding film buff would. Though I had only seen one of his films and just about thirty minutes of his television work, Lynch’s unique personality had already begun to worm its way into my consciousness thanks to isolated interview clips that appeared on my youtube feed or through other filmmakers I admired talking about how much his work had inspired them. All of this to say, at 17-years-old and a Junior in high school, I was finally ready to explore the cinematic dreams of The Man with the Gray Elevated Hair.

My dad put in the “Blue Velvet” DVD and it proved to be one of those transformative films that film fans always long for.

I remember everything about watching “Blue Velvet” for the first time. I remember how the vivid blue colors of the opening credits immediately transfixed me and how I was already searching for some sort of hidden clue in that opening montage that begins with the white picket fence and ends with the beetles swarming underground. I remember my dad laughing when Kyle Maclachlan did the infamous “chicken walk” to try and swoon Laura Dern, just as much as I remember him asking if I was “okay” after witnessing the harrowing introduction of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth.

Most of all, I remember going to bed that night with a distinct feeling that I had watched a film I loved, but one that I could only share with a select few. Lynch’s films were, understandably, not for everyone and to fall in love with his work felt as though you were falling in with a unique club of adventurous cinephiles. It was an intoxicating prospect that there was now more work from this master filmmaker that I could discover for myself.

“Blue Velvet” led me to “Eraserhead” which finally led me back to “Twin Peaks”, the show I had initially given up on. Alone in my bedroom as a senior in high school, I began to reenter the mysterious world of “Twin Peaks” and like so many others, I fell down the rabbit hole.

As someone who doesn’t often binge TV shows, this nearly 30-year-old series became an obsession. I plowed through the iconic first season and the divisive second season in a matter of days, at one point even watching an entire episode on my laptop in class when I was supposed to be taking notes.

By the time I got to college in Asheville, North Carolina in 2016, I found the Appalachian mountains bore a striking resemblance to the landscapes of Washington state as I saw them in the show. I began to drink black coffee as if I was Agent Dale Cooper and if anyone saw me walking around campus with earbuds on, it was probably safe to say that they were blasting the crooning tunes of Angelo Badalamenti’s heart wrenching score.

Admittedly, I might not be the best guy to bring along if you want a chance to win at “Twin Peaks” trivia. I’m not an expert on all the lore (especially as we get into the chaos that was season 2) or the names of each side character that appeared, but I can safely say that no other piece of media that I’ve consumed in my adulthood has had a bigger impact on me than “Twin Peaks”.

Of course I would go on to watch his masterpieces like “Mulholland Drive” or “Fire Walk With Me” careful as not to take in all of his work at once, leaving room for discovery over the years.

I was also lucky that Lynch’s last substantial piece of work, the 18-episode “Twin Peaks: The Return”, happened to drop just as I was deep into my Lynch education in 2017. Television critics have already begun to mythologize what it was like watching that show as it aired a mere eight years ago and I can understand why. With no previews of what was to come in the upcoming episodes, each episode proved to be an equal parts beautiful and baffling viewing experience that never failed to surprise or blind side me.

I hope I never forget visiting home when the infamous eighth episode aired. I remember myself sitting on the floor as if I was watching a Saturday morning cartoon, my dad leaning over in his chair with a mix of awe and confusion plastered on his face, and my mom getting up from the couch around ten minutes into the episode and boldly, but sarcastically proclaiming, “Clearly I’m not as cool as you guys. I don’t like this. I’m going to bed.”

Like I said, Lynch wasn’t for everybody.

While it’s heartbreaking that Lynch is no longer here to create more movies and TV shows for us to enjoy, there’s something so fitting about “The Return” being his last cinematic work. It’s 18 hours of completely unfiltered Lynch madness and its final statement is a question. “Twin Peaks” began asking us “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” and it ends with our usually confident Dale Cooper staring into the void and asking “What Year is This?”. Whether or not Lynch had any plans to come back to that world will likely never be known, but there’s something so beautifully Lynchian about leaving us in the dark.

In recent years I’ve become a Lynch completionist. Watching major blind spots like “Wild at Heart”, taking in underrated gems like “The Straight Story” (a real departure from some of his work, but one of my personal favorites) and pondering over his more inscrutable works like “Lost Highway” or “Inland Empire”. It’s safe to say that no other artist, let alone filmmaker, has occupied my head space in the past decade like Lynch has.

I don’t tend to write things like this when notable artists pass away. I tend to think it’s disingenuous. After all, no matter how much I’ve watched or read about Lynch, I didn’t know the man. Even amongst his fanbase, I wouldn’t consider myself one of the great experts of his entire body of work, which goes beyond film and television and into different mediums like paintings and music.

Yet, when I read the news of his passing a few hours back, I was surprised when I found myself holding back tears. It’s the first time an artist who was instrumental in shaping my tastes and point of view has died. Some felt that way with Bowie, others felt it with Robin Williams, but the loss of Lynch is something that will stick with me for a while, even though I never met him in person.

Through his art, however, I was inspired. Inspired to write, to be unafraid in chasing ideas and to explore more abstract cinematic art. While I owe the works of Spielberg and Lucas for providing me the foundation for my love of film, Lynch challenged my perceptions of the art form and his films opened me up to the endless avenues of thought that cinema can offer at its best.

I’m forever grateful to have lived in a time when David Lynch was making movies.

Thanks a million, David.