2026 Feet Under

[Daddymagic]

Insane amount of deaths over the last week. 
 

David Lynch, despite his age shocked me. Proper genius 

[Gus Mears]

A gut punch. A uniquely brilliant director and mind. I remember the first time I watched Twin Peaks and it just about exploded my brain that television can be this gripping and quirky and intriguing - this good. I've still never found anything better. And that's before you get to the films, which from Eraserhead on have never dipped below interesting and were frequently phenomenal.

[Carbomb]

Damn.

[gmoney]

There's not many directors out there who have pioneered a entire style, and been so singularly great at it that anyone who's ever attempted to tread similar ground hasn't ever come close. What an artist. 

Edited January 16, 2025 by gmoney

[Mr_Danger]

Never prolific and at 78 years old and in poor health for a while that was pretty unlikely to change but even so, a world without something new to look forward to from David Lynch is a lot poorer for it.

Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive are sensational and in Twin Peaks you could make an argument that it was the most influential tv show of the last 30 odd years. 

[Chili]

I've seen most of his work but it's Twin Peaks that absolutely floored me. I only got round to finally watching it around 2014 after hearing so much about it's almost mythical legacy and everyone was pretty much spot on (until it gets a bit patchy). I was almost annoyed when it finished that I couldn't wipe it from my mind and start it again to enjoy it. 

Don't know too much in depth about the actual man himself, I'd say eccentric would be a given, but yeah, he has such a defining stamp on his work. Just an astoundingly creative man that I find it difficult to describe.

[davertfnewman]

This is as much a tribute to Angelo Badalamenti as it is David Lynch, but this story of their collaboration creating something legendary is brilliant:

 

[SaitoRyo]

Damn. David Lynch. That's a real shitter. 

A hell of an artist who helped make art that was avant-garde yet somehow accessible for mainstream audiences. A proper one-off who was, by all accounts, brilliant to work with. Has anyone ever spoke out about a terrible experience making a film or TV show (or anything else) with Lynch? I can't recall one. Seemed like a great bloke who was just bursting with creativity and channelled that energy into creating some extraordinary work that was often imitated but never quite duplicated.

As far as personal favourites, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive sit at the top of the list. I love pretty much everything that I've ever seen from him, though. It's amazing that he made stuff like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks, but was also the man behind The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. They're all great for different reasons and he'll be sorely missed. Even if he was never necessary prolific, it's a shame we won't be able to get excited about a forthcoming David Lynch project. 

RIP. 

[Merzbow]

1 hour ago, SaitoRyo said:

avant-garde yet somehow accessible for mainstream audiences.

That was such a great thing about him, you could analyze all the complex themes in his works or you could sit back and let it all just wash over you like a dream and neither way was better than the other, both were meant to be. It makes rewatching a very a different experience every time.

Even the WWE couldn't escape his influence, you just know Vince had no fucking clue though and I'm surprised this storyline ever made it to air. A very rare bit of the company being on the ball, The Return was out just around then.

 

[BomberPat]

I absolutely love David Lynch, I don't think any artist's work has ever reached me so absolutely.

I'm doing a Twin Peaks rewatch at the moment, one episode a week, we've just got the last episode of Series 2 to go. My partner has only seen the first three episodes of The Return, and I can't wait to rewatch it all with her. Even at the time, I always thought of The Return as Lynch creating a grand unifying theory for his own work, the way it tied together so many ideas and images from across his career, and how central to it he made the character of Gordon Cole; it's going to be extremely moving to watch it with that in mind now. 

When I was a kid, my Dad worked in a video rental shop, and briefly became a bit of a film buff with it. The only directors I ever remember him treating with any reverence were Hitchcock, Greenaway, and Lynch. I'm guessing the first time I would have actually encountered the work of David Lynch was the video for Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, because after we got Sky my Mum would watch VH1 all the time and it was always on there, but at some point I must have seen at least the opening sequence of Blue Velvet when I was far too young to have been watching it, because the song playing over that tracking shot of white picket fences was absolutely ingrained in my brain. I still feel that it encapsulates so much of what David Lynch was about; the superficiality of the American dream, how horror is always lurking close to the surface. We definitely watched The Elephant Man together at some point, and my older brother used to crack me up by saying, "You've been very kind" in an impression of John Hurt as Merrick.

From there, David Lynch all but gave me the language to understand film, TV, maybe art as a whole, because I never quite got it before him. I did Media and Film Studies in college, but honestly knew fuck all back then, I was just an awkward goth teenager who liked dark and spooky stuff, and thought that he was getting into "avant-garde" or "experimental" cinema without ever having actually seen anything of the kind. I had heard of Mulholland Drive being this impenetrable mystery, but hadn't got round to watching it. An older mate introduced me to Eraserhead, and it completely blew my mind. I told another friend I had watched it, and he replied, "not all in one sitting?!", as if exposure to it could do you some serious damage. Maybe it could. Over the years I've gone from thinking it's this obtuse and impossible to understand mystery of a film to thinking that it's actually rather straightforward, to thinking that actually it doesn't matter which it is, it's just perfectly constructed and utterly unique, and does everything it set out to do, and you can't ask more of art than that. I most recently saw it, for the first time, in a cinema, a couple of years ago. It was my girlfriend's first time seeing it, and the sound design, through cinema speakers, genuinely unsettled her. She was on edge for the rest of the evening.

From there, it was Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks, which I fell utterly in love with, and must have watched the first series of more than almost any other TV series. I always find something new to appreciate. I haven't necessarily enjoyed everything Lynch has done since - I never quite got on with Inland Empire - but there's nobody whose art I have spent more time with, that has made me think more about it. I went to an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures, and I think they're a vital part of understanding his work, inasmuch as you're meant to understand it. It might be better to say they provide broader context. Because Kyle McLachlan said in his Instagram post that Lynch was more interested in questions than answers, and I think that's exactly how it should be. I think one of the worst decisions was to release the DVD of Mulholland Drive with a list of clues to "understanding" the film, as if it, or any art, should be treated as a problem to be solved. 

[Carbomb]

@Chris B told me that the Prince Charles Cinema is doing Fire Walk With Me this Sunday - I have never been able to see it because, for some reason, no streaming service holds it, and I just couldn't get hold of it on DVD. 

Gonna go see it, then begin my Twin Peaks re-watch, and finally get round to watching the Return - I'd held off on watching it because I hadn't seen FWWM. I'd only seen TP for the first time in 2018, and it's become one of my favourite series, so I wanted to get it right.

[Thunderplex]

Dame Joan Plowright is another one in this very busy list.  Hit 95, so did well.

[Chili]

Something in my brain about Lynch's work is this. Sometimes (a fair bit) in Twin Peaks: The Return, there would be little moments I did not have a single clue how to interpret (insert that Homer Simpson gif) and my mate who absolutely adores him said that it doesn't matter, it's completely how you interpret it, he doesn't NEED to have to explain it etc.

I do ask this though, did Lynch sort of get away with that via his reputation? Because I reckon someone else doing all your questions and allegory would get shit for just making stuff up for the sake of it, but it's funny with Lynch (and I guess his rep) that his stuff that baffles me, I actually think he has a meaning for, be he's allowed to get away with it.

This almost feels it's gone Lynchian in itself ?

[Chris B]

It's not a case of getting away with it, nor is it a case of 'someone else doing all your questions and allegory'. That would suggest he didn't know or care what it meant, when he clearly did - he just cared what it meant to him, but didn't care to always explain that. 

[organizedkaos]

I think he was so authentically himself and so clear about what he's doing that people just accepted that he's an artist expressing himself. Surrealism is somewhat about not allowing all the conscious "does this make sense" "what is this supposed to mean" thoughts to get in the way of the creative process. Somehow in a world where we want to analyse film and TV in this more meta, narratavised way people just seemed OK with Lynch being Lynch. I think the authenticity just meant people who'd watched his stuff couldn't question that it was anything other than an artist putting out the stuff in their head. In a world where much of the "arty" media is quite considered, where pretention can run wild and where everything can get a bit meta about it's artisticness his steadfast dedication to what he perceived to be true shone out.

As Kyle M said, Lynch understood that the questions drove life not the answers. There's no Donnie Darko "read this supplementary material and everything makes perfect sense" thing, or a JJ Abrams puzzle box. The uncertainty is his art and as much as reddit wanted to unlock Twin Peaks season 3 to prove they're the smartest they couldn't... and they still seemed to enjoy the journey.

Also, most of his stuff isn't nearly as obtuse as it originally seems. Rewatches generally make things seem p clear and I'd say most of his major films can be summed up in two sentences. Lynch is like Blake where he accepts that imagination, fantasy and delusions are that but they bleed into real life, that our perception of reality is what governs our experience and so in many of the films characters move in their reality and that can seem a bit nonsense. Eraserhead is a million different dark images and oddness but I believe as soon as you look at it as "Man is very scared of becoming a father" it all clicks pretty simply together.  Our dreams tend to make a lot of sense when considered in the context of what we're thinking and feeling but if you take one tiny individual image from a dream it might not.