Diane, David Lynch died today.
11:30am, January 16, 2025.
Yet I still need to ask:
“What year is it?”
That is because for those of us who have been with Lynch on his journey to the wonderous, frightening and beautiful places he has taken us, Time is question, not a fact.
Millions of words have been written about Lynch and his work. A lot of them are true, many of them are lies.
For me to throw my own words to this never-ending torrent of analysis, criticism and interpretation seems absurd, but then again, absurdity never worried Mr. Lynch, so out of respect for him I will hurl with vigor.
After all I am a director as well. David Lynch and I are in the same union, the Director’s Guild of America. However, that is where the similarities end. I am a director like Lynch in the same sense that a severed ear is like a whole person.
Nevertheless, I go on, my eye on the proverbial donut and not the whole.
“We’re like the dreamer, who dreams and lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?”
Monica Bellucci, as herself, asks Gordon Cole / David Lynch this question in Gordon / David’s own recurring dream in Paris.
Behind Cole/Lynch on the street is Idem, the legendary art printing studio where Lynch has created many of his own works.
Gordon Cole is a name quoted in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard by the legendary director Cecile B. DeMille, who tells an assistant to call studio executive Gordon Cole and to tell him to stop trying to rent aging silent film star Norma Desmond’s antique car. Norma, played by Gloria Swanson, was herself an aging silent film icon at the time.
Desmond believes the calls from the studio were about her comeback, not her car. Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson’s driver, former husband and now faithful butler in Sunset Boulevard is played by the director Erich Von Stroheim, himself something of a Hollywood legend.
He directed Gloria Swanson in the silent film Queen Kelly. That film was shut down because Stroheim was fired over disagreements over the ending of the script. In the original, Swanson’s character ends up running a brothel somewhere in Africa. In the “Swanson ending,” Swanson’s character dies from suicide and is laid out in a chapel like a saint.
If you are looking for a way to experience David Lynch’s specific cinema universe, you need not go further than this fascinating Russian doll of facts about this one small scene between Bellucci and Cole/Lynch in episode 14 of Twin Peaks: The Return.
Time, space, dimension and reality are always fluid in Lynch’s cinema. There is also a consistent layering of reference, callback, foreshadowing and intricate bibliography to nearly every moment in his films. A consummate intellectual as well as groundbreaking filmmaker, Lynch had an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema history, music, fine art, literature, drama, pop culture, philosophy, spiritual practices, arcane/occult mysticism.
His cinematic vision is a distillation of his personal ambition, which was to transcend all things via the knowing and then discarding of the world as it appeared around him, seeking of a state of consciousness beyond words and description into pure being. Lynch was introduced to Transcendental Meditation when he was nine years old and said he had never missed his twice daily sessions since then.
As we reflect on the way Lynch framed his world for us with his camera, it is worth considering the very act of “looking” as it pertains to cinema.
When we look at a screen upon which moving images are projected, we are not looking at reality, but rather a particular version of a world created for us. It is no accident that Lynch once said: “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz.”
When our cinematic gaze is directed towards a particular image, moment, scene and story we are peering through a looking glass that is being held by someone else.
We should not expect to see ourselves or even anything like us, yet we instinctively search for characters who we can “empathize with,” or “relate to.”
Sometimes we project and reflect our fantasies onto superheroes, sometimes on simple folk, sometimes on strange and fantastic creatures or beings, and sometimes on terrifying or horrible villains. In the end, it is all projection and reflection. The screen is always a portal, a glass that also casts back a transparent reflection of ourselves like the windowpane in your living room.
But who is the person looking back? Don’t trust a reflection, because it is in fact the exact reverse of who you are. Thus, we can never see ourselves in a mirror. Only our opposite.
Here’s the rub: perhaps there is no “authentic” self at all. Perhaps we are, as the Buddhists might say, in a state of “anatta,” or “no-self.” Many philosophers have explored this idea. Perhaps we are the sum of our experiences, environments, information, biases and influences form the moment we are born up to the present. We move through the world in personas, wearing the suitable mask each day that suits our situation. No one can know who re truly are because no one truly is anyone.
The argument against this is the simple fact that if this were so, then who is experiencing this phenomenon of mask wearing? A mask requires a wearer, does it not?
Who is the dreamer?
Lynch’s cinema is a view into a world of characters who are remarkable projections of our view into his world. They are reflections and images of unspoken desires, revulsions, ideals, fantasies and nightmares. In the cinematic experience of David Lynch, “noy hay banda” (as the music stops, the presenter declares “there is no band”) precisely because that is the point. An objective reality is rejected in favor of perceived “realities” that are made manifest by our deepest yearnings. Fears, shame and guilt are submerged under a tectonic crust of denial, which when broken apart, results in eruptions beyond our comprehension.
Lynch’s cinema allows us to break free of any responsibility to the rational, the logical, the inevitable and the “real.” We are invited to experience his world in a state of “awareness” beyond the restrictions of the mundane. This is not for everyone. Most viewers demand that the world in the film frame deliver a logic, order and inevitability we eternally crave in our own realities, but in our hearts know the world will never provide.
We are creatures who insist on making meaning. It is our fundamental human need, beyond food, water and shelter. We must interpret what we experience in some manner that relates to our existence, our survival, our identity. We create “the self” to manufacture a distinct and binary relationship between what we experience and the entity that experiences it. It is the only way our brains can give us answers. If we can let all this go, then we can take in the incredible world Lynch created for us without the obstacle of the mundane.
Thus, the millions of words written about his cinema become mere noise, just like this piece you are reading right now. In this way, he freed the cinema. For that, we should be ever grateful.
We are the dreamer.
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