David Lynch has passed away. A sentence that seems to defy the very logic of the world he created – a world where the boundaries between dreams and reality are permeable, where time contracts and expands, where voices echo from beyond the red curtain. We’ve tried to put together a collage of memories about the filmmaker who taught us to see light and darkness differently. Just as the phrase “This is the girl” from Mulholland Drive became a reference in film culture, we chose to explore the many facets of David Lynch alongside his status as a director. “This is the director”: Lynch the painter, Lynch the weatherman, Lynch the musician. Let us explore not only his iconic images but also the small moments that defined his sensibility and humour. Because, as he showed us in his films, death isn’t necessarily an end – and somewhere, his voice still echoes, saying: “Everyone, have a great day!”

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(Dora Leu)

Judy

See Lynch/Oz (2022, dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)

A Violent Yet Flammable World

It’s a pity

Alive sacred and sounding

To appear this way

From across and beyond, oh far beyond

— Au Revoir Simone – A Violent Yet Flammable World (Twin Peaks, 2017, Part 9)

David Lynch was the truest music lover of American cinema. There’s no better proof than Twin Peaks – whether it’s Angelo Badalamenti’s famous theme or the stunning parade of singers and bands closing nearly every part of The Return with a performance at the Roadhouse. These codas from The Return, like all of Lynch’s cinema, are grand gestures of love and enthusiasm for sound, music, and performance. His profound, all-encompassing understanding of music pervades his films – from Betty and Rita’s transcendental experience at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive to Sailor’s chaotic and liberating moshing in Wild at Heart. What cathartic joy, sappy indulgence, and deep, otherworldly sadness does Lynch’s music bring.

X Japan

Here’s something obscure from my Japanese repertoire: a never-released short film/music video Lynch made for the Japanese rock band X Japan and their ballad Longing. Something profoundly Lynchian in the band’s song – a typical melancholic extension – blends with the over-the-topness of the rock star aesthetic, making the project a perfect match. Here, we see Lynch as the director who also gifted us music videos and Calvin Klein ads. As he said in his autobiography Room to Dream about Longing: “Some of the frames are so fuckin’ beautiful you can’t believe it.”

(Ionuț Mareș)

“As if I were seeing a Lynch film for the first time”

My most recent encounter with a David Lynch film was on a cold evening in January 2024, when I rewatched Blue Velvet (in its restored version) for only the third time (or maybe the fourth?), in a small, modest screening room at the then newly reopened Les Cosmos cinema in downtown Strasbourg. There were only a handful of us in the audience (the film had run earlier in the cinema’s larger, more elegant room, likely to a bigger crowd). The basement-level room wasn’t particularly welcoming, and the screen seemed too small. The screening was far from brilliant, but technically good.

I’ve never had a cult-like devotion to any director (only to cinema itself), but it’s hard to avoid the aura that builds around certain names – and Lynch’s aura was immense, as the wave of tributes following the announcement of his death reaffirmed. Yet, oddly, it was as if I were seeing Blue Velvet for the first time. In fact, it felt as though I were seeing a Lynch film for the first time (of course, I had seen his entire filmography, but scattered over the years, at different ages, never systematically). Though familiar from previous viewings and their recurrence in pop culture and cinematic references over the past decades (who doesn’t know about the severed ear found in the grass?), the images and sounds on the screen felt entirely new. The inevitable immersion in Lynch’s insidious (and terrifying) universe was now dominated, even undermined, in my mind by a clarity and detachment that helped me better understand (though not entirely) and truly admire the filmmaker’s mastery. From this came an enhanced aesthetic pleasure. On that cold winter evening, two decades after starting my journey in the world of cinema (and three decades since the dwarf from Twin Peaks unsettled my childhood mind on certain nights), alone in a French city I was visiting for a few days, I discovered, for the umpteenth time, a great filmmaker.

(Anca Vancu)

“Everyone, have a great day!”

Because it’s Lynch, I can’t think of anything more fitting than this idea: David Lynch, this giant of cinema, was perhaps also the most beloved weatherman. In May 2020, during a period of global uncertainty, Lynch began broadcasting daily weather reports from Los Angeles (on local radio and YouTube) for two years. He described the sky, clouds, and daylight with his signature lyricism, sometimes slipping in enigmatic phrases, references to his own dreams, or musings about his plans for the day. “Today I was thinking about…” What followed was a snippet of his mind, often a song title – I could imagine him making his coffee in the morning while thinking of Fade Into You by Mazzy Star, Moon River, or All I Have to Do Is Dream by The Everly Brothers. Perhaps naively, I saw these weather-poems as a small window into his surreal universe and as a reminder to the world – that every day has its charm.

An Enlightening Article

In 1996, writer David Foster Wallace was sent by Premiere magazine onto the Lost Highway set. I love this report, in which Wallace didn’t even interview Lynch (a condition for being allowed on set). It’s impeccably written, playful, and perhaps where I found the best definition of the term “Lynchian”: “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Plus, it has an excellent intro. 

WHAT DAVID LYNCH IS REALLY LIKE

I HAVE NO IDEA. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. You should probably know this up front. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed, because when he’s actually shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true, e.g.: The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree.

The Interview Project

In The Interview Project, each episode is a fragment from the life of an ordinary person that David Lynch and his team met and interviewed during a road trip across the United States. Over 70 days, they travelled 20,000 miles and conducted 121 interviews, released in 2009. It’s like an album comprising the stories of people they met in bars, by the roadside, or while sitting on their porches listening to the rain. We meet Mr. Siebert from Pennsylvania, a former environmental engineer and widower who spends every evening in the basement of his home, working on model trams; Barry, who tends to a museum dedicated to snakes in Fort Davis; Robin, who opens up about his struggles with depression and how he loves listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album while driving. The power of these stories lies in this: no matter how different our paths may be, they all lead us to the same questions.

(Georgiana Mușat)

Bang in the Head

I think I’ve always been drawn to unsettling films, ones that overturn something inside me, long before I was even fully aware of it. I still remember watching Requiem for a Dream on TV at an ungodly hour for an insomniac girl of about 12 or 13, an experience that left me shaken, rattled, and utterly troubled. Since then, I’ve sought out that feeling, stealing it from here and there through films I didn’t fully understand, that frightened me, or kept me awake at night. Reflecting on what Lynch meant to me, it’s undoubtedly connected to what his films stirred in me – sometimes physical sensations, vertigo, terror, the feeling that this man knew what evil looked like, had seen it, had drawn it, but also how much light there was in him, and so on.

The communicating vessels in his films, both astral and earthly, and the fluid way he communicates through them, like a fish swimming through the ether, never predictable, never modest – that was Lynch.

When I saw Mulholland Drive, the ceiling lamp literally fell on my head. I was in high school, and I was at home. It was nighttime, and I was expecting the jump scare moment. What I didn’t expect was that halfway through, in the deafening silence of the film, something would actually fall – my bedroom lamp detached from the rickety ceiling, clumsily repaired by my father, and hit me in the head. I take everything as a sign; I don’t know why. I felt watched in some way – beyond some hypothetical ‘peeping tom’. It was as if someone had drilled into my skull and found my deepest fears. And I don’t think anyone else has ever done that to me except Lynch. The communicating vessels in his films, both astral and earthly, and the fluid way he communicates through them, like a fish swimming through the ether, never predictable, never modest – that was Lynch.

(Victor Morozov)

A few days ago, when I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Hollywood Sign in Inland Empire (2006), I was struck by the eerie synchronicity of fate: the death of David Lynch, the man who dragged into the light the latent energies of these spaces inscribed with the history of cinema like a procession of spectres, coinciding with a massive fire and the imminent reinstatement of Donald Trump. Fire Walk With Me: this cinema, so intimately tied to fire (see the flame opening this torrid journey across nineties America that is Wild at Heart), finds itself bordered by a society where it’s increasingly hard to breathe.

I’ve always been fascinated by his oeuvre’s ability to unite otherwise irreconcilable factions of fans. In that sense, yes, Lynch was probably, until the day of his death, the most important filmmaker of our time.

My cinephilia was built at the opposite end of Lynch’s prized world – through ascetic accumulation, not cineclub debates. In recent years, I’ve rarely revisited that world after working through most of his films and concluding that, at least at that point in my life, they weren’t “for me.” But I’ve always been fascinated by his oeuvre’s ability to unite otherwise irreconcilable factions of fans. In that sense, yes, Lynch was probably, until the day of his death, the most important filmmaker of our time.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a film bursting with passion, starring Isabelle Huppert as a living torch disintegrating frame by frame, but not before consuming everything around her. Werner Schroeter’s Malina (1991) is a film that plays with Lynchian “elements” in an absolutely non-Lynchian way: from the increasingly blurred line between dream and reality to the metaphor of fire, a woman leads us through a surrealist-camp arsenal, losing herself as she approaches an ever-purer intensity. Starting from an entirely different point, Inland Empire, the only Lynch film I can stand by now (the rest have faded from memory – only the images remain), arrived at a similar destination.

(Laurențiu Paraschiv)

Silencio

I first saw Mulholland Drive on a sweltering summer evening, just before starting university. Stubborn enough to think I could handle another film, exhausted enough to not fully grasp what was happening on screen. My mistake to think that the drowsiness I inevitably found myself in after less than half an hour was the only thing at fault. But the film’s atmosphere, shaken by this state of mine, left an even stronger impression – few films lingered with me as much that summer, and it was a busy summer!

The breakthrough happened when the two protagonists arrived at Club Silencio. The camera takes you by the hand and leaves you no choice: it quite literally drags you in after them. I still remember how the few minutes with Rebekah Del Rio singing moved me deeply and woke me up completely (along with Betty/Diane – poor timing, or perhaps not?). Over time, I’ve rewatched Mulholland Drive countless times, and though many other aspects fascinate me now (always new ones), the Silencio scene still moves me in ways few other film scenes ever have. I still don’t understand why, nor do I try to anymore; I’m just grateful. One day, I’d like to visit the real Silencio in Paris, though without Llorando playing, I doubt it will feel the same (despite Deborah Levy’s contrary opinion in her book Real Estate).

David Lynch the musician is just as fascinating as David Lynch the filmmaker. The song he composed with Lykke Li, I’m Waiting Here, is a meditation with eyes wide open. Six minutes of dreaming, of calm, of the promise that sadness will end and everything will be alright in the world. Maybe not today, but someday soon.

I’m Waiting Here

David Lynch the musician is just as fascinating as David Lynch the filmmaker. The song he composed with Lykke Li, I’m Waiting Here, paired with this pure Americana video, is a meditation with eyes wide open. Six minutes of dreaming, of calm, of the promise that sadness will end and everything will be alright in the world. Maybe not today, but someday soon.

Bowie

I still remember the morning David Bowie died; a friend who adored him couldn’t fathom how David Bowie could die. That David Bowie? Bowie, who always managed to reinvent himself no matter what – how could death stop him from creating a new persona? Bowie, who somehow seemed above everyone else, an extraterrestrial who didn’t abide by the same rules as the rest of us? And if back then I tried to find answers or explanations, now I’m the one who needs someone to help me understand, because I can’t stop asking myself the same thing: how can David Lynch die?

Redacție

An article written by the magazine's team