Remembering David Lynch: A Master of Mystery

Steven Spielberg knew what he was doing when he cast David Lynch as John Ford The Fabelman family; already in 2022 the director had become, like Ford, bigger than his films, a living monument to the cinema. Seeing Lynch in conversation back in 2007 at London’s BFI Southbank, before the release of Inland KingdomI was keenly aware of that fact, writing that “watching him address a packed house, with the silver pompadour, the black suit, and the buttoned, tieless shirt, made me feel like a witness to history, as if see Picasso, Churchill or Fred Astaire.”

The Elephant Man Producer Mel Brooks later went one better when I spoke with him in 2008. When I described their first meeting at Bob’s Big Boy Diner in Burbank—because Lynch only ate there, usually for a late lunch at 2.30pm – Brooks said: “He just looked. like Charles Lindbergh when he flew across the Atlantic. He had a white shirt buttoned up and a leather jacket like the one Jimmy Stewart wore when he played Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis.”

When I met Lynch earlier in the day, it worried me at the time that he was one of the few remaining holdouts when it came to smoking, which, I’d heard, dictated his travel plans. Even John Waters – who claimed that he had smoked so much that he was a cigarette – had long since given up. (“That’s the only thing the government ever told me that was true,” he later said. “That do kill you.”) But the smoking ban was still six months away, and Lynch had turned it into a fascinating art form; he could light a cigarette without you even noticing, put it in his mouth and talk for five minutes straight without flicking it or sending a millimeter of ash into the air.

Part of the reason for the distraction was the voice, the cheerful, familiar banter that could alternately tell you everything and nothing, his avuncular tone contrasting with the spectacular darkness his films could so unsettlingly and effortlessly achieve. The first time I met him, around the time of The straight story in 1999 I asked what kinds of messages he left on his answering machine. A good one, he said, was, “We’re at the gun shop right now, we’ll get back to you.”

Indeed, the reason the Lynch myth will endure is that he knew the value of mystery, and in interviews his reticence—or whatever the opposite of bloviating is—was a form of fan service. When I spoke to Lynch beforehand Twin Peaks: The Returnasked the show’s publicist that there should be no questions about characters — or plot. Well, that is pretty funny for a play that was supposed to be a curtain raiser, and Lynch smashed my attempts to figure out, well, anything. “It’s completely under wraps, Damon, you know that,” he thoroughly enjoyed saying. “You have a good sense of humor about it though.”

The funny thing is, I wasn’t an immediate fan. i loved Eraser head when it first came to Britain in the early 80s, but mostly saw it as a bellwether for the post-punk spirit that would follow in the wake of The Sex Pistols. I didn’t even notice that Dunewhich I hated and was taken to by some friends who also somehow thought I liked Return of the Jediwas by the same director. But Blue velvet was a life changer; my first week in London I saw it in a West End cinema called the Lumiere (of course it’s now a hotel). It arrived in the UK as a success with the scandalits ticket sales surprised even its producer—Dino De Laurentiis—who called Lynch after the first test screening to tell him, “David! Is disaster.”

A few years later, I interviewed the late Julee Cruise, who recorded Blue velvet‘s final song “Mysteries of Love” (which was originally supposed to be The Cocteau Twins’ version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”). Cruise gave me a rare portal into Lynch’s mind that I have never forgotten; I asked her about the song “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” and she said in a deeply Lynchian way that she thought it was “sort of for Isabella”, meaning his partner at the time Isabella Rossellini. That “kind of something” was so very much in the spirit of their work together. A similar insight came from Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, who told me while promoting her film Supervision that her normally laid-back father was horrified when she got some random Chinese calligraphy tattooed on, I think, her forearm: “How do you know what that means?!” he said. (That translated as something about eggs and good luck if I remember correctly.)

I wasn’t big on Wild at heart but loved the pilot too Twin Peaks and most of the first series. I admired but didn’t always fully love his work after that, I even tried hard with the early 90s TV show On the Airuntil I saw the astonishing Mulholland Drive in Cannes 2001, at a press screening that is etched in my memory because my friend Shari got into a fight for seats with a crazy journalist. The ushers took his passport and threw him out, but by then the room was full, so they brought out a couple of deck chairs – something I’ve never seen since – and we sat in the back. Every time Naomi Watts and Laura Harring said “Mulholland Drive” in hushed tones, Shari nudged me and whispered, “It’s like they’re saying ‘Oxford Street.'” Almost 25 years later, it has lost none of its power as hallucinogenic Hollywood -noir, a Sunset Blvd for the 21st century.

The next movie, the delirious one Inland Kingdom-a “companion piece” to Mulholland Drivehe said, preferring it to my description of it as its “evil twin” – seemed to take forever, but looking back it was only five years. With Laura Dern as an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown, it brought a new kind of freedom and energy; Lynch was inspired by the digital revolution and not quite as opposed to home theater if it was good enough. “I think the ultimate is the shared experience in the great dark room,” he said. “Big picture, big sound. A cough at the right or wrong time, a spilled bag of popcorn, someone walking in front of the screen, these things break it and it’s a nightmare, so it’s the ultimate: the big room. But now you can have a big screen and good sound at home and you can turn off the lights and you can prepare all your things and watch it and go into that world.”

That might explain why Lynch put so much effort into the extraordinary Twin Peaks: The Returnan astonishing show that its cineaste admirers championed as an 18-hour film. People often talk about Lynch’s work strictly in terms of its impact—the extremes he was willing to go to and the confronting strangeness of his imagery. However, this was a showcase for his ability to create atmosphere: moods that no one, even now, has found the words to describe.

Indeed, for all his film’s eccentricities –Blue velvet‘s freaky Frank Booth huffing, well, whatever it is, Lost Highway‘s spine-tingling Mystery Man, or Wild at heart‘s Sailor kung fu kicking in a snakeskin jacket – Lynch wasn’t trying to be controversial. In fact, quite the opposite; as he proved in 1999 with his family-friendly hit The straight storywhere an 80-year-old man makes a 240-kilometer journey to visit his brother on a 5 km/h John Deere tractor.

“What people say about my films is that they are experimental,” he said. I say The straight story was my most experimental. When I read the script—which I didn’t write—I read it and I felt these things and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a beautiful feeling. How do you get that feeling in the cinemas?’ ‘Too much time you see people crying on the screen, but you don’t feel like crying yourself. When you have something that brings a real feeling in there, that’s the power of cinema.”