16/365: David Lynch
and where are all the mavericks.
David Lynch is dead at 78. It flashes up on my lock screen. Such a perfunctory sentence but sometimes there’s nothing other than the facts. Sometimes, I dream of the opening sequence of Lost Highway. The dream matches the film exactly, as if my dream mind knows Lynch needs no embellishment. No elaboration. No hesitation. No deviation. Even in sleep, it would be sacrilege to change him. Instagram mourns in unison, stories first, as if afraid to report the news, we are used to death hoaxes by now, and what more fitting to Lynch than a hoax. How many people become an adjective in their lifetime? I can think of only a handful, we have Kafkaesque and we have Derridean (or I have, I’m not sure how much company I have with this) and we have Lynchian. Spellcheck does not query any of these words, they have become gospel. I described the Mike Kelley retrospective Lynchian to a stranger recently, he knew immediately what I meant. Kelley turns visual tricks, Lynch did (how dare the past tense be invoked here) too, because he knows (and my tense slips), and existed to remind us, that reality is a trick of the light.
For a long time, Lynch lived at the periphery of my vision. There were the films I wanted to watch and then there were the films I was allowed to watch and because I was a very good Christian and because I was afraid of demons and Lynch’s name was often mentioned in the same breath as them, and sometimes even from the hallowed heights of the Kingdom Hall platform, I didn’t watch any of his films growing up. I remember a friend once telling me about Blue Velvet. Her and her husband had gone to see it at the cinema, something that could’ve earnt them a prolonged interview with the elders, as she ran down the plot, the visuals, the everything, enraptured still, it seemed to me the only thing I wanted to see.
When the BFI had its Lynch season a couple of years ago, I sat in the dark, still marginally afraid of demons and the corrupting influence of what I might be about to encounter. Corrupt me it did. His uncompromising vision. The fact that only he could make the films. That singularity. His desire to mine narrow but deep, like I wrote about yesterday.
His films were not of this world and in being so, they took us out our ordinary worlds, presenting the possibility that under the very thin surface, lurked something else. In Picturing America, Greil Marcus provides an insight into Twin Peaks that anyone concerned with the rural and its potential for horror will understand, as well as the necessity of situating the doppelganger within the home - something I did instinctively in Ava Anna Ada but better understood after reading this essay.
A friend I did not expect to enjoy him, texts. We talk about his vision and the unlikelihood of anyone with similar making it today, without say a patron or a sugar daddy, or perhaps Only Fans are now the true patrons of art. I am writing a book about Louise Bourgeois. I worry about artists like this, who barely found a home in their lifetimes, or who did but would struggle now in the days of remakes, easy comps, AI, cosy art or art as a political mandate. I don’t know sometimes how to square vision with money. Food. Bills. A tension between the two and not the kind of tension that lends itself to good art. Certainly not great art. All artists are babies. We need someone to look after us while we make things. It is hard to do both.
I do not want to eulogise him as one of the last of the mavericks. And yet. There is a booth in my favourite bar in London and on that booth is a plaque to the memory Andrew Weatherall, and on that plaque it says something like, to the dreamers and the mavericks, I have photos on my phone but amongst 41,000 to choose from, I don’t know where - and I think of this now, that it is not enough to toast them as they go really, but better to try and invoke what spirit of theirs we can, for as long as we can, for as long as it lasts.