David Lynch sat in a strange seat of power during the 1990s. He had put a tale of psychic terror about a victimized cheerleader addicted to cocaine on network television. He then retconned the notion of Elvis Presley movies to include shocking levels of physical and sexual violence and took it to Cannes. And he syndicated a comic strip that repeated the same three panels with each installment, only the text changing from strip to strip. And all of this in the waning days of the Reagan/Bush conservative revolution.
That comic strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” depicted the titular canine on a taut line in a suburban back yard, growling. The only “action” that occurred is caption bubbles coming from inside the house, often in the form of puns or minor domestic concerns. The dog was angry, but the strip wasn’t. It was absurd. Tethered behind a dream home somewhere in America, however, the dog may have been right to be angry.
The cheerleader story was, of course, Twin Peaks: three seasons of some of the most surreal television the world has ever seen spread across three decades, plus a brutal feature film depicting the incestual rape and eventual murder of the heroine Laura Palmer. It will be the lasting legacy for the filmmaker, visual artist and visionary, who died in January just days before his 79th birthday. (Lynch co-wrote
Twin Peaks with TV veteran Mark Frost, who was an important part of what made the series great.
My concerns here, though, are with Lynch and what the show can tell us about him. I will refer to the show as a part of his cinematic work, without being overly concerned about movies versus television.)
Lynch’s work was extreme unnerving, graphic and confrontational. It understandably divided people. In the days following Lynch’s death, author Rebecca Solnit posted to social media an excerpt from her 2020 memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, calling out the violence toward women in the work of Lynch and others. “In the arts, the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying, so despite the insistence by politicians and news media that the violent crimes were the acts of outliers, the desire was enshrined in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Lars Von Trier, in so many horror movies, so many other films and novels and then video games and graphic novels where a murder in lurid detail or a dead female body was a standard plot device and an aesthetic object.”
Author Courtenay Stallings also took to social media following the news of Lynch’s death. Stallings has written extensively about Lynch’s work, notably the book Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak About Twin Peaks, which addressed the catharsis some victims of sexual violence have found in Lynch’s work (and which I wrote about in the Red Hook Star-Revue in 2020). “David Lynch provides us room to dream,” she wrote. “He’s inspired me to write essays, interview artists and write poems about his work. His work has connected me to some of the best folks around. He has passed on to the cosmos, but we will continue to celebrate him down here on earth.”
In an essay published that same month in the LGBTQ+ cultural journal Them titled “‘Fix Your Hearts or Die’: David Lynch’s Work Has Always Been Deeply, Powerfully Queer,” Lex McMenamin championed Lynch for not just writing a trans character into Twin Peaks but defending her right for acceptance. “Is David Lynch’s work queer or trans?” McMenamin wrote. “Is water wet? From Eraserhead onward,
Lynch was obsessed with the fragmentation of the self and with dreams; with death and sex, faith, shame, abuse; doppelgängers, cross-dressing, hyperfemininity and violence against women.”
Such division of opinion might mean he was onto something. Or it could mean he was shoveling mystic mumbo jumbo at the masses. But Lynch didn’t seek to answer our questions or absolve our sins or assuage our fears. He didn’t seek to put our anxiety and despair on screen. He put his own up there for all to see. His dreams and introspections were there to be questioned and analyzed, things it seems he didn’t always understand himself. But his dread had a lot to do with worries for the fate of humanity as well, and he believed in happy endings.
In an early episode of Twin Peaks, FBI agent Albert Rosenfield speculated matter-of-factly about the evil incarnate at the center of the story that “maybe that’s all that Bob is, the evil that men do.” The foul-tempered Rosenfield announced elsewhere in season one that “I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation.”
And it was hilarious, especially given Miguel Ferrer’s dry-as-bones delivery. But both lines were also genuine exposition. Rosenfield was speaking to the heart of the show, and to the heart of its maker.
In a later episode, town resident and USAF Major Garland Briggs said that his greatest fear in the world is “the possibility that love is not enough.” Briggs and Rosenfield frame the philosophy of the series and of much of Lynch’s work. Unlike most makers of shocking cinema, Lynch believed in the inner goodness of people. His 50-year devotion to transcendental meditation and advocacy for the practice through his David Lynch Foundation speaks to such affirmation.
But people, men especially, do horrible things, things which Lynch depicted unflinchingly in his cinematic work. Bob and the other vicious entities from some other dimension who populated Twin Peaks weren’t a way to let people (men) off the hook. It was Lynch’s attempt to explain something he didn’t understand: why good people do bad things. Did he believe that nonhuman forces were responsible for the evil that men do? Not any more than ancient people believed that the world was balanced on the back of a turtle or that an elephant-headed deity brings us good fortune. Twin Peaks repeatedly referenced spirituality and mythology, Tibetan practices and indigenous American beliefs. Religion and mythology begin as ways to explain what can’t be known. Twin Peaks was Lynch’s attempt to explain the horribly inexplicable.
While Briggs and Rosenfield may, at times, have spoken for Lynch, he had his own character in the show as well. FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole went from comic relief in the first two seasons to leading the investigation (which now stretched across multiple states and killings) in the third. In season three, Lynch (as Cole) says that the incidents under investigation are “something really interesting to think about” and allows that “I hate to admit this, but I don’t understand this situation at all.” Lynch himself was trying to unravel the mystery, not of the fictional crimes but of humanity.
I am, perhaps, hiding behind quotes here, maybe as a way to avoid the fact that I don’t really know what it is I want to say about the loss of one of the most profound storytellers I’ve shared time on this planet with. The Twin Peaks triptych alone is an indulgence in form, crossing genres from soap opera to crime drama to psychological horror while being resolutely like nothing else: charming, profound and frightening. But it is also, I feel, a deeply philosophical fable, a morality play, and something really interesting to think about. The clues to the mystery of Twin Peaks weren’t in the objects, the playing cards and magic rings; the clues were in the characters, as were the clues to understanding Lynch.
He made his final public statement at a September 12 Jazz at Lincoln Center fundraiser for his foundation, announcing the launch of Meditate America, an initiative to promote and support meditation practices for healthcare workers and first responders. He ended the address with the words he regularly used in his talks on meditation: “May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease. May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one. Peace. Jai guru dev.” He wished just as much, I think, for the people he made up.
In Lynch on Lynch, a 1997 book of interviews conducted by Chris Rodley, Lynch is asked to describe the figures depicted in his fairly inscrutable paintings. “You know what dogs are like in a room?” he responds. “They’re bouncing this ball and chewing on stuff and they’re kind of panting and happy. Human beings are supposed to be like that. We should be pretty happy. And I don’t know why we aren’t.”
Even the angriest dog in the world is deserving of happiness and peace. Sadly, the world doesn’t work that way.
