Our David

I’ve been moved the past 24 hours reading people’s first experiences with their first David Lynch project, and saddened that I really don’t remember my first. I’m not even sure which film I came to first, although I’m pretty sure it was Mulholland Drive.

I remember working at Home Video Rental, five minutes from my house, and always being drawn to the DVD cover of Mulholland Drive: Laura Harring’s beautiful face, huge. I do not remember the experience watching the movie for the first time, but I do remember immediately after it was over feeling like, sorry if you didn’t understand it but I’m different.

I think people who are drawn to David Lynch do not see his work as challenging, and that to even consider it challenging is silly. David’s refusal to ever “explain” the films makes this sense more potent: there is nothing to even be explained.

David’s insistence that the films are to be experienced in the moment, that they need no analytical interpretation, makes those of us who enjoy them feel like co-conspirators to the work. He invited us in by giving us classical Hollywood markers as a structure for the more opaque incident.

Like his heroes, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Victor Fleming, David aspired to a pure cinematic experience withing a framework of pure entertainment, where the only thing that exists is the duration of the film and what happens on the screen and from the speakers.

David has always felt like a warm blanket to me (a hot cup of coffee?). He is my friend and confidant. We’re contemporaries.¹ He makes me feel like I matter.² I think more than any other director, he has made me feel like I, too, can be a filmmaker; I, too, can be an artist. More than that, he made me feel like I deserve to be whole, through his teaching on meditation and consciousness, and through the content in the films.

Last night, some random Instagram account posted that there would be a vigil at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, prompting someone to reply like, “who even are you.” But we decided to descend on the famous diner and get a milkshake, David’s favorite, and there was a large gathering of mourners. I ran into people I hadn’t spoken to in years, and we saw each other, in the exact manner that David has allowed us to see. I got chocolate.

1. Eagle-eyed readers will recognize this as a line from Mistress America.

2. Eagle-eyed readers will recognize this as a line from The Sopranos.