1989 - Don’t let yourself be hurt this time
Julee Cruise, ‘Falling’
David Lynch died, and now I don’t know where the next brilliant idea is coming from. Same as when David Bowie passed away, a dimension without David Lynch feels even more of a dimension devoid of winning creativity and powerful expression.
I’ve not seen more of his films than I have seen, but I’d never seen and heard art like David Lynch’s before. I’ve long dreamt of being able to just plug my brain into a computer first thing on a morning, and watch it conjure up all this semi-sleepy strangeness direct from the frayed strands of telegraph wire connecting my conscious mind to my unconscious.
In his finest work, Lynch doesn’t even need that computer to pull off that process so magnificently – and my strands of telegraph wire are his full-blown, 24/7 call centre, communicating clever ideas, projecting the most beautiful imagery onto screens big and small; his dreams, come true.
It took me a while to accept his argument, and that of most artists, that art should speak for itself. It also took repeated viewings of Empire Records – about a million miles from a David Lynch film, obviously, but bear with me. In one scene, we watch aspiring artist AJ carefully gluing coins to the floor. When ‘Warren Beatty’ asks him what the hell for, AJ tells him “I don’t feel that I need to explain my art to you”.
On one of the many, many David Lynch videos doing the rounds this week, he says “the film is the thing”. On another, he wonders why he has to do so much talking after he’s made a film – “the film is the talk”. I did a bit of the old film studies at uni (Eraserhead was in there) and the worst part for me was when a film had finished saying its piece at a screening, and I was supposed to get into groups and thrash out some semblance of a meaning – or worse, try to capture it in the written word. The film really was the thing, and the art really should’ve spoken for itself.
But hey, what else is a film studies degree for?
****
‘Twin Peaks’ is, of course, the reason yer da’s favourite programmes exist. Peak TV, made long before that pretentious name for it came along. I watched both seasons of the original within a few confused sittings in the mid-2000s, when it had finally got to a DVD release (albeit an Australian import). Right from the start as the theme tune floated into my living room, I was transported. The ‘Twin Peaks’ theme is, of course again, an instrumental of a song co-written by Lynch and his musical maestro, Angelo Badalamenti, and sung from atop the welcoming, floating clouds of a dream by Julee Cruise.
There’s so many feelings swimming within each surge of the strings – hope and hopelessness, a beautiful bleakness. You can look up the back story yourself, but one detail appeals to me – Cruise, a trained showtunes singer, a Broadway “belter”, had to work hard to access the soft-spoken, whispered tones that Badalamenti and Lynch wanted to draw from her.
‘Twin Peaks’ was and is a damn fine TV show. Over the two seasons of its original incarnation, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost struck on a never-before-seen blend of offbeat humour, bleak beauty and philosophies of life and death, captured within an ostensibly routine murder-mystery show in the kind of small-town setting that Lynch gets under the skin of so effectively. Single frames became iconic – Palmer in plastic, BOB at the bottom of the bed. Lynch pulled down these ideas from the ether seemingly at will, splashing the viewing audience in different shades of shock and suspense for twenty-odd episodes, as he brought an entire town to a quiet, desperate life through the death of one of its own.
The 2017 revival series was a different beast altogether – safe to do its own thing now that Peak TV had happened. The artifices of network timeslot TV were gone; ideas previously reduced or omitted completely for time and budget now had room to breathe. I’ve only watched it once but I do remember the explosive origin story behind Episode Eight being my own definition of Peak Peak TV – Don Draper, Walter White, Tony Soprano, your boys took a hell of a beating.
But for me, the real art came somewhere in between. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me acts as a prequel and sequel to the TV series, wrapping up (basically none of the) loose ends and furthering the myth that would keep us hanging on for another 20-odd years.
Believe me, I was not ready for Fire Walk With Me. The shift in tone from TV is unpleasantly jarring, as the events leading up to Laura Palmer’s death play out in all their visceral, violent detail. I can count on one finger the number of films I’ve ever seen that have left me feeling physically unsettled and affected. As the film goes, I was entertained by Bowie’s manic New Orleans affect, and amused with Lynch’s onscreen performance. But the film slowly builds the suspense, then the okay-fine-I’ll-use-the-phrase Lynchian unease creeps in and sits on your lap until the big moments hit, and they hit hard.
The reveal of Laura’s abuser, and her death by their hand. Considering the plethora of supernatural elements at play throughout, it’s the realness that hits you hardest by the end. At that point it’s barely even a piece of cinema, more just a shocking sequence of visual art and disturbing sound design that completely floored me.
After all this time, I’m not sure I even like the film, but I cannot deny how compelling it is, how it grabbed me. How moving it is. As a piece of art there are few things that have ever moved me like that. And it’s testament to David Lynch and his ability to tell bleak, beautiful stories through his art, including the bleak, beautiful music he made with Angelo Badalamenti.
I just finished reading another beautiful tribute from Laura Dern, and it made me think about Lynch’s one-of-a-kind talent for letting the light shine in on ideas. Giving them their own living, breathing space and treating them as welcome visitors. You need to fill the room with light so that you can see everything, shadows included.
It makes me want to work harder to channel those ideas – read more books, see more art, try to just sit with myself and search for those little tidbits of inspiration. Lynch spoke so glowingly of ideas, of art, and of bringing out the best in his creative partners, his equals. His warmth and positivity made him the perfect conduit for those flashes of inspiration, light and dark alike. I admire that, and I will miss that.