Lynch

Other people will be able to speak more knowledgeably than me about David Lynch’s career and filmography. I was more a fan of Twin Peaks than of his work as a whole, and perhaps more than that I was a fan of the man himself. We’ve been talking lately about artists who cloak themselves in the appearance of empathy and big-heartedness only to reveal a small-minded covetousness. Lynch was the exact opposite. He was a boomer who made his name by being weird and transgressive, and instead of using that as a license to behave like an asshole at all times, he was fundamentally full of joy and a profound love of his craft. He wasn’t afraid of being earnest or uncool, of looking at the brokenness of the world and sitting with your sadness about it. And he felt no obligation to explain himself or suit his work to any tastes, high or low. (Is there any choice more emblematic of Lynch’s whole career than following up Twin Peaks with Fire Walk With Me, an uncomfortably raw—and deliberately cheesy—primal scream whose brutal notices are a black mark on the entire critical establishment?)

It’s common to say, when a great artist dies, that we won’t see their like again. It’s usually also true, since all artists are unique both in their own right and as a product of their time and place. But it somehow feels even truer in Lynch’s case. That combination of joy and sadness, of a profound love of his craft and a complete lack of self-seriousness, of genuine love of humanity and clear-eyed understanding of its worst excesses, of complete idiosyncrasy that somehow still led to work that millions of people found compelling and empathetic—I just don’t know if we will ever see all those qualities again in a single artist. (I certainly don’t know if the world is currently set up to give the next David Lynch the opportunities that the previous one had.) Truly, a tremendous loss.