David Lynch has died. He was 78 and, as Variety notes, suffered from emphysema in his last years. If you’d like the facts of his life, every other culture-related publication will give you that. Usually, I would as well, but Lynch’s passing is different, and an A-to-Z recitation of his biography and filmography feels underwhelming compared to the loss. Those details are what we console ourselves when confronted with the opaque beyond: A memento of the corporeal as solace as we see our ends reflected in the dead.
Lynch devoted his career to exploring the boundaries of unreality. His on-screen landscapes are tableaus of emotion wrapped in surrealism, and to quibble with David Foster Wallace, what separates the “Lynchian” from the merely surreal is the fact that Lynch meant every single thing he said. He rejected irony in most cases: One cannot have the seamy underbelly of Blue Velvet’s nightmare without Laura Dern’s dream about the Robins being set free, nor can one have The Black Lodge without the casual kindness of those in Twin Peaks itself.
Yet Lynch made his works to reward all levels of viewer engagement — the arthouse hand reaching across the aisle to the casual viewer or the obsessive members of Usenet groups, picking apart the positions of coffee mugs in the mise-en-scene.
This forthright earnestness is what no Lynch imitator has been able to claim — he was more than an aesthetic. He was a true-blue American maker of meaning, acknowledging our abyssal qualities (the Los Angeles of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are chasms of hopes and dreams where identity goes to die) while dreaming of its spiritual liberation through the bizarrely good. He acknowledged the existence of evil and conjured up nightmares — dark nights of the soul that one could never escape — but presented his audience with ways towards empathetic enlightenment. Such is the power of dreams.
They were never burdens, either: If no one would fund his films, he’d paint, write, or mess around with digital animation — anything to continue his life’s work, even if they were YouTube weather reports. Ultimately, I hope Lynch lives on as an inspiration for the American artist, capable of conjuring the sublime through their medium without ceding an inch to the expectations of all outside the frame, ducking and weaving while rope-a-doping the passage of time.
If not, we may have lost the final American “auteur,” at least in a culture-spanning sense. I don’t think that’s the case, and I don’t believe he did, either. There’s a reason Spielberg cast him as John Ford in The Fabelmans: He, the elder statesman, would pass the torch to new generations, who would create different works than their predecessors but do so in their honor.
Though his physical presence and specific contributions to culture are irreplaceable, this is how he will endure: As an incandescent influence on future generations.
May he rest in peace.