01/18/2025
With gratitude to the Maestro; the Eagle Scout from Missoula.
It’s heartening to know that, even in his final months, [David] Lynch remained committed to the art that sustained both his own zeal for life and meant so much to so many of us. When news of his poor health circulated last summer, sparking rumors of his retirement, Lynch pushed back forcefully: “I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire.” By all accounts, he never did. Though he was always best known as a filmmaker, his lifelong devotion to art took many other forms. He painted, produced music, and created furniture. He wrote a long-running comic strip called “The Angriest Dog in the World,” hosted a series of self-produced weather reports, and advocated passionately for transcendental meditation, which he practiced for decades and credited for much of his apparently indefatigable creative energy in his book “Catching the Big Fish.”
“Ideas are like fish,” Lynch wrote. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” His work was frequently shaped by his openness to the world and his uncommon willingness to adapt, in real time, whenever a good idea struck him. Frank Silva, the actor who would go on to play Twin Peaks’ fearsome Killer Bob, was merely a set dresser when Lynch spontaneously asked him to crouch at the foot of a bed while filming the show’s pilot, with no idea if or when he’d used the footage. “Mulholland Drive”—a standout masterwork in a career peppered with masterworks, voted the best film of the 21st century in a 2016 BBC critics' poll—was repurposed from a television pilot that had been ordered and then rejected by ABC. The completed film went on to earn him his final Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
Lynch’s open-hearted, intensely personal style of filmmaking and chipper, upbeat approach to life proved contagious, and it’s hard to find a modern filmmaker who doesn’t cite him as a major influence. Lesli Linka Glatter, the president of the DGA, tells a story about her time working with Lynch during the first season of “Twin Peaks.” The show’s pilot contains a scene in which a large stuffed deer’s head sat atop a conference-room table—“It fell down,” a teller explains, without further comment—and she wanted to know why. The answer, Lynch explained, was simply that it had been there when he’d walked onto the set that morning. “Something cracked open for me," said Glatter. "Be sure you're open to the deer head on the table, be open to life, and magic can happen."
It’s as good a lesson as any to take away from one of the most remarkable filmmakers in history, even as we grieve Lynch and the art he won’t be around to make anymore. But as Lynch himself noted, he would never have had even a fraction of the time he needed for all the stories he could have told. In the final paragraph of his 500-page memoir “Room to Dream,”Lynch concluded that all that writing had hardly scratched the surface. “Man, that’s just the tip of the iceberg; there’s so much more, so many more stories,” he wrote. “You could do an entire book on a single day and still not capture everything. It’s impossible to really tell the story of somebody’s life, and the most we can hope to convey here is a very abstract ‘Rosebud.’ Ultimately, each life is a mystery until we each solve the mystery, and that’s where we are all headed whether we know it or not.”—From a piece in GQ by Scott Meslow.
Photograph via Everett Collection.
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