David Lynch is gone. The man who could summon nightmares from coffee cups and carve raw nerves into film reels has left the room. There’s an empty booth at the diner now, a red curtain swaying softly in a non-existent breeze, and somewhere in the woods, a man with no face is screaming in reverse.
Did Lynch influence me? He was the patron saint of the fragmented. His worlds were surreal maps of places I knew intimately: the cloying, pastel surface of Americana split wide open to reveal its seedy underbelly. I envied how Lynch laid bare the illusion, wrapping it in plastic like a beautiful corpse. That juxtaposition of innocence and menace, the way he made even the lightest touch feel like a scalpel. Yeah, you could say it shaped me.
I was not a cool kid at school. Not even close. The kind of kid who drifted around the edges of the schoolyard like a ghost with a Walkman full of static. I kept myself to myself. As a result, finding stuff that resonated with me was hard. Finding something -anything – back then was like trying to tune a radio in a thunderstorm. Nothing ever landed. Nothing ever stuck.
Then when I was 14, I met my first girlfriend and she had an older brother (who, tbh, I probably had more of a crush on than I did on my girlfriend). The older brother, let’s call him Ez, was a brooding loner who didn’t give a single shit what anyone thought about him. He didn’t talk to me much, but that only added to his mystique. Ez was into cool stuff. He left a trail of fascinating breadcrumbs behind. Comics, LPs, and VHS tapes. He’d leave for the night, mumble something to his parents about having set the VHS to record a late-night film, and I’d immediately jot the title down in my notebook. That’s how I found out about Eraserhead.
I first watched it on some rotting old furniture in someone else’s’ living room, and the experience left me vibrating. That soundscape. The industrial groans and baby wails still play in my head like an unholy lullaby. It was extra scary as the girlfriend and me were beginning to do grownup stuff, and it was horrifying, beautiful, and incomprehensible. And now, all these years later, as a father myself, the dread is sharper. I haven’t rewatched it since my own kid was born. I’m not sure I could. Lynch made fatherhood feel like the scariest job on the planet, and he wasn’t wrong.
His work bled into my own vision: disjointed stories strung together like mismatched organs in a scrapyard surgery. Cut-ups and non-linear narratives made palatable with just a dash of cherry pie.
Another big love was The Elephant Man. They actually played that at my school one day, not sure why. My friends and I were already obsessed with John Merrick. Who wouldn’t be? A man broken and shunned by the world but somehow still full of grace. It felt like Lynch understood Merrick in a way no one else could. That moment when Anthony Hopkins tears up, right as the camera pulls into the most perfect, devastating close-up. He develops a tear in his eye at the exact moment the camera finds its resting frame, for the world’s best and most artistic closeup and the most emotive shot in cinema history. Lynch was a strange man in a strange world. His choice to tell Merrick’s story made so much sense, even if it didn’t on paper. He got it. The loneliness. The beauty buried under all the ugliness.
Although slightly before my time, I bought the box set of Twin Peaks on DVD. Fuck me, that was television turned inside out. Watching it with a new romantic partner (who had no older brothers) felt like stepping into a fever dream. I watched the whole first season on DVD one weird, lonely Christmas, and it became this kitschy, creepy mirror of my life. It was full of darkness, humour, and sadness I didn’t yet have the words for. It’s forever tied to the memory of another love, another loss, another chapter that ended too soon.
Mulholland Drive came out when I was working at a cinema. I swear, you could spot the Lynch fans a mile away. They moved differently, saw differently. Freaks like me. That’s the magic of Lynch, though: a man who stood on the pinnacle of Hollywood, a true icon of the mainstream, but who never stopped being the oddball, the outlier, the guy with his own fucking rules. He had this wild kindness, this weird humour, and a way of spinning stories about unease and existential dread into pure, undeniable art. You could call it allegorical, but why bother? It just was. It didn’t need to be analysed, it just needed to be.
I could go on and on. Lost Highway. Blue Velvet. Fucking Dune even, although wasn’t sure if I should mention it. Lynch was a master of carving paths where dialogue, time, and human connection could dissolve into dream logic. Lynch taught me to celebrate the uncomfortable, to linger in the strange and squirming. Because that’s where the magic happens.
So goodbye, David. I hope there’s a red curtain up there, somewhere, waiting for you. I hope it hides a projector and a cutting room. And I hope, just maybe, there’s a backward-talking giant sitting beside you, helping you figure out how to make the next reel even stranger than the last. Though sadly, in this godless world, he’s probably just dead and that’s it. I can’t claim I’ll ever see through his eyes, but I did learn how to look at the cracks a little closer.