"Dust is dancing in the space...
A dog and bird are far away...
The sun comes up and down each day...
The river flows out to the sea..."
To write this tribute feels both alarmingly strange and sadly routine. We all knew David Lynch would pass away sooner or later and that there was a decent chance it would be sooner given news of his worsening health and restriction to his house (which he was forced to leave last week as L.A. was consumed by massive wildfires, likely contributing to his passing). Still, this came as a surprise if not a shock. My primary response was a weary sense of deflation. Occasions like this are expected to produce grand, soaring tributes but I did not have the urge to dive right in to the flurry of energy and activity that always accompanies the death of an iconic figure. No doubt in the days, weeks, and months to come, many who had not engaged with Lynch's work for a while or who may be coming to it for the first time will be encouraged to enter his kingdom. For those of us who've remained immersed in this world for a decade or more, it feels less like the beginning of a journey than an end. As Lynch was not a fan of closure, to reach this point feels almost like a form of blasphemy - as I noted
on Twitter earlier today (I also briefly commented on Lynch's passing in a public post
on Patreon).
It is hard to articulate a life in a moment. In a tribute on Bluesky, Mark Frost wrote of his Twin Peaks collaborator, "Words will come later. Only feelings at the moment." I've often thought about what this day would be like when it came, but somehow even with the warning signs this comes too soon to feel like a finale. And yet it is final. So much that was slowly swimming into focus is now fully clarified. Twin Peaks: The Return, or whatever you want to call it, was indeed Lynch's swan song - the grand, ambitious, experimental summation of a long career. Those of us who held out hope that he had more to say weren't wrong, but fate conspired to keep those dreams from coming to fruition. The Covid-disrupted Netflix project Wisteria/Unrecorded Night will remain, sadly, unrecorded forever. Carrie Page's scream outside the Palmer house will remain the final cry of Twin Peaks; whatever was "calling" to him about that ending, as Lynch described in a 2018 question and answer session (saying "the signal has a lot of disturbances"), now cannot ever be received - at least not by us. My draft of the narration for an upcoming video - about the quiet winding-down years after the Showtime series - now reads to me as if it was inevitably leading to this point. The sense that an era was ending was already palpable before Lynch himself was gone.
I'm not used to thinking about David Lynch this way, entirely in the past tense. I suppose none of us are. The bulk of my work on him was created in a long span of almost eleven years from the growing, almost unconscious hype surrounding his return to Twin Peaks to the mountain peak of The Return itself to the long period of anticipation and speculation about what, if anything, he'd do next. Thinking about this work as something that is over still doesn't sit quite right with me. Even back in 2008, when I was first getting into Twin Peaks Lynch had not yet officially "retired" from feature filmmaking - if he ever really would (and yes, another thing his passing solidifies is the absolute symmetry of his feature-length decalogue of theatrical releases). Though that early engagement unfolded long after the show had passed out of pop culture, it was starting to build popularity with a new generation - the Gold Box DVD set had just been released and the streaming deal on Netflix was not far off. Always in my long journey there was the thrill of exciting incompletion, either conceptual (exploring what he'd already left us) or, much of the time, literal. When I viewed and reviewed his entire body of work in the spring of 2014, even before more Twin Peaks had been announced, this filmography still felt like something that was alive and ongoing: a boundless horizon.
I'll have to get used to this more enclosed Lynchverse, and figure out how to remind myself that time was never what bound it anyway so it remains open-ended. That more cosmic understanding, however facilitated by Lynch's work and (more sparingly) his words, does not come naturally me to right now. I was prepared but not ready.
Here is what I wrote on Twitter within an hour or so of learning that David Lynch had passed away:
I think others will have new things to say directly pertaining to David Lynch. I feel, aside from some things I'm still working on, that I mostly already said my part while he was alive. I do have a few reflections on what his life, work, and death mean to me personally though.
I am a bit surprised, but not shocked, at his passing. We seemed to be on this trajectory with recent news but I thought, and hoped (if what he wanted was to continue living and working) that his health was more chronic than failing.
Now that it's come, there's a feeling of...deflation I didn't quite expect. The Return, it's now clear if it wasn't already, was as grand a swan song as an artist could hope for. Yet there was always a feeling of "maybe more...?" for the past 8 years.
In one sense, his career went out with a bang. For those of who followed very closely though, and maybe also who felt - for a variety of reasons - a longing to continue in the Peaks world especially after Part 18's scream, this era which has now ended was more like a long fade.
For Lynch himself, who most of us don't know despite his personality very much being part of the intermedia world he created, it seems from the outside like this process went about as ok as such things - never easy - can go.
He remained creatively engaged even as his contact with the outside world diminished. He lived the art life to the end.
What I feel less sure of is where this leaves the rest of us. So much of my engagement with Lynch's work has been defined by anticipation of what was to come. Not speculation so much (good luck to anyone who played that game) but belief that mysteries would continue to unfold.
Coincidentally, I was moving forward with a number of long-term projects right about now including a video which was to end with a montage of those who'd passed since The Return. I guess I know how that one will end now. Indeed, I guess that is the strongest sense I'm left with right now.
We all know how it will, and did, end. That feels wrong somehow when it comes to David Lynch.
I am also recording and publishing these reflections as a bonus on the Lost in Twin Peaks podcast:
Goodbye, David. You will be missed.
