Some Sort of Eulogy For David Lynch

and scattered thoughts on art, tim & eric, death, friendship, etc

Feb 24, 2025

When David Lynch passed away last month, I cried as if a member of my own family had died. I actually cried harder for Lynch’s death than my only two family deaths other than my childhood pet (the deaths of my two grandparents when I was very young1). I always knew that Lynch’s passing would probably be my first and most emotional reaction to a celebrity death, but I didn’t think it would be happening so soon. It’s kind of like what happened with the death of my family’s parrot just a few months prior: I knew it would come someday, I was dreading it, but I thought I would have more time. You always think you’re gonna have more time. Lynch was only a couple years older than my dad, so I thought I’d still get a chance to meet him someday despite his emphysema diagnosis. At best, just shake his hand and tell him his work means a lot to me. Something short and sweet, something he’s heard a million times but is nonetheless true, which is the most important thing. And maybe if I was very lucky, I’d even get to interview him, at some point down the line when I’d finally conducted more than my current two interviews and no longer practically piss and shit myself in fear over having to ask another human being a series of questions.

But I never got to do either of these things, and now David Lynch is dead. And I’d always shunned the idea of really trying to write about him, I guess until right now. Certain artists can feel impossible to write about because of how much they mean to you and how much has already been written on them, and it’s intimidating. In Lynch’s case there is a surplus of longform essays picking away at over fifty years of his impossible puzzle films that do not have any easy or definitive answers, but we’re all still trying to make sense of them anyway. I am also, as I’ve written about at length already, prone to extreme bouts of insecurity over my intellect, and despite my love for Lynch’s very dense and labyrinthine work, writing about it in a coherent way has occasionally felt out of reach for my “intelligence.” At best, I always figured that I could maybe write some sort of personal essay on Lynch’s work to make it unique to me and, above all, less overly analytical and outside of (what I perceive to be) my wheelhouse, but an idea just never came to me. At one point a couple years back, I did lightly analyze a needle drop from Lost Highway for Paste Magazine, which is the only thing I have ever had published on Lynch (and which I don’t think is bad at all, but I don’t believe is quite my best work).

But I guess the best — and maybe worst — time to be forced to write about Lynch is in the wake of his death, because even if it’s bad writing I think it’s important to get it out anyway2. So, I’ll start a bit at the beginning. Lynch came into my life at the same time that another, related and equally influential artist entered my life, and to which I had a similar reaction: Tim and Eric3, introduced to me freshman year of college by an ex-boyfriend who I had little in common with aside from sense of humor.

It’s not hyperbole to say that getting into Lynch and getting into Tim and Eric fundamentally changed how I saw the world. When my college boyfriend showed me “Quilting with Will” from Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, in the lounge underneath my university’s cafeteria building, it felt like my life had suddenly been given new dimension; that the sense of humor I had always possessed but never saw performed or expressed in the art I consumed was finally manifested in just the way that aligned with my tastes. My worldview suddenly had more color than it did before the three minutes it took to watch Will Forte scream about his abusive father while he teaches children how to make quilts. Sincerely: thank you, Dan. If you’re reading this, you were not a great boyfriend, but you did change my life positively, and forever.

The same thing basically happened when I watched Twin Peaks, which I discovered on my own, and probably from Tumblr — the place where I once discovered the bulk of the most influential movies to my teen and college years — and then sought out via streaming on Netflix at the time. I don’t really have as immediate and distinct of a memory of first watching Twin Peaks as I do with Tim and Eric; a singular moment that I can conjure in my mind like a (very boring) scene from a movie. Instead, my love for David Lynch was gradual and sustained, nurtured over a number of years in which I slowly worked my way through his filmography, exploring who he is, learning about him, watching him, reading about his films, cosplaying as his characters (yeah…), flying all the way to Washington to visit filming locations; sharing him with friends, then finding more friends and a community who loves his work, too; even watching some of his films for the first time but not falling in love with them until years later.

But at first — as it was before I found my “cinephile” community through Twitter and film journalism in my mid-twenties — David Lynch, and chiefly Twin Peaks, was kinda just my thing. For a time, I didn’t have anyone to share him with, and I didn’t really want to share him, either. My college friends, none of whom I maintained connection with after graduation, mostly had different tastes than me. In high school and undergad, a lot of my pop culture interests were expressed on Tumblr, alone, through posting and reblogging. I didn’t really like “fandom community,” and found fandoms, especially on Tumblr, to be grating and cringe and embarrassing. So, I was basically just Tweeting and Tumblring out into the void. But I relished in keeping my passions to myself because then they felt like mine and no one else’s — probably some sort of vestigial trait I held onto from being an only child.

But, at the same time, maybe this type of connection to Lynch’s work isn’t just unique to me and the personality that’s been fostered within me through not having any siblings. I couldn’t, and kind of still can’t, articulate why it is that I loved Twin Peaks so much, as I can so easily describe it with Tim and Eric. I guess that’s that overused “Lynchian,” the term once given proper elucidation by David Foster Wallace to describe what Lynch’s films do and how they make us feel, because it’s something beyond words to the extent that a new one had to be created. I think that when you connect with Lynch, it feels special, because it feels like you suddenly understand a language that other people don’t.

Eventually, though, I understood that the point of language is to share it with others. I shared Twin Peaks with a close childhood friend who pretty much took to Lynch’s whole deal immediately; together we’ve seen Blue Velvet on the big screen at the Philadelphia Film Festival, we’ve exchanged Lynch Blu-rays at Christmas, we met Sherilyn Fenn together at a Q&A she did at PhilaMOCA. Like the way I very gradually immersed myself in Lynch’s life and work, I gradually integrated myself into a community of other Lynch-fans and found that maybe those fandom freaks on Tumblr had a point. Maybe it’s more fun to share the things you love with other people, and not hold onto them quite so tight to your chest like a child death-gripping a toy they do not wish to allow someone else a turn with.

Sherilyn Fenn speaking at PhilaMOCA (2018)

However, I do think everyone loves Lynch for different reasons — or at least, reasons they are truly distinct to them. Lynch’s work is incredibly universal; the nature of his themes and the ambiguity of his filmmaking means you can kinda draw whatever you want from it. Lynch himself would prefer that you do. I am positive that the reason I love Lynch and why he connected with me is different from why it connected with each of my friends, and when I mourned Lynch’s loss, which was such a profoundly communal experience, I also knew that I was mourning him in a way that was different from every single other person who loved him and grieved him. Even my dad4 mourned Lynch in his weird little way, not offering condolences but instead consuming and then sending me a deluge of Lynch-related articles, obituaries, and talk show soundbites in the wake of his passing.

As much as Lynch’s work moves me, and as much as I’ve (probably mistakenly) felt that his work was out of reach for my Intellectual Capabilities, it’s never really inspired an essay out of me anyway. I think I’ve been mostly content to not try to intimately understand and pick at everything, even though I do take pleasure in connecting all the cork board pushpins of Twin Peaks, and even reading those companion books by co-creator Mark Frost that everyone likes to dump on but EYE think they are fun to read. Maybe there’s some reluctance in here that stems from my aforementioned writing insecurities, but I think that most of it just has to do with how I naturally approach being a fan of Lynch’s work.

There’s a fantastic Family Guy cutaway gag that’s been shared on social media ad infinitum, in which David Lynch has replaced the Grinch in stealing Christmas. Cartoon Lynch (voiced by the man himself5) tells the confused young boy to whom he presents a severed thumb in a gift box, “Don’t look away, let the fear wash over you.” Truthfully, that is kinda how I feel about engaging with Lynch’s work. I just let it wash over me. There is no urge to unravel what he presents, which becomes lessened when you learn that Lynch’s initial desires to be a painter were translated over into filmmaking. He approaches his films like moving paintings, thematic collages beholden more to their images than to their words or narratives; trafficking in feelings over answers. And then there is that “fear” that Family Guy Lynch mentioned, implicit in the term “Lynchian” as defined by DFW. Inside and outside the text of Lynch’s work is the idea that there are things in this world we cannot fully know or understand. All we can do is make peace with the fact that they are out there. It’s a primal, human desire to make sense of everything (see: QAnon), especially things that terrify us. There are mysteries to this world that belong to both the light and the dark, and the richness of life comes from — like with Lynch’s work — leaving them undisturbed, lest we uncover a severed ear and fall down the rabbit hole.

From a young age, I felt in some respects that the world around me didn’t react to me the way that I hoped it would. I behaved…eccentrically. I was overtly and loudly passionate about things, I laughed at things other kids didn’t find funny, my personality was not easy be around. I was, in short, fucking annoying and weird. I was often a terror to my teachers, who could not handle what one so kindly referred to as my “unbridled enthusiasm.” I’m not trying to say that I “wasn’t like other kids” or that my experience was uncommon, and this more ostracized period of my social upbringing only lasted until middle school, where I quickly found a little enclave of other oddball girls who just happened to not live close enough to my part of the school district where they’d have gone to my elementary school and terrorized the more normal and well-behaved children along with me.

But I think for a long time I have been searching for people and art that understand me, and I think a lot of those who are drawn to David Lynch have, in one way or another, felt similarly. You go through life thinking that the world has to be a certain way, that people have to be a certain way and that art has to be a certain way, until you encounter something or someone that doesn’t just collapse your understanding of how everything “should be,” but it’s what you didn’t realize you’d been looking for. That’s how it felt when I found my friends in middle school, some of whom are still in my life to this day.

Me at the real Double R Diner in North Bend, WA (2018)

After all of this and everything I’ve written here, here is the main thing about Lynch that has struck me through the years of being a fan of his: how unifying his work is. Someone with lesser curiosity or tolerance for more experimental art might feel alienation in the face of something like Lost Highway or Eraserhead, or, in much greater respects, Inland Empire. Yet in spite of these preconceived notions about the impenetrability and inaccessibility of Lynch’s films, he is almost universally beloved. He is influential on countless modern filmmakers and artists, both indie and mainstream. His touch on pop culture is felt in decades of art which pulls from the foundations he laid; sometimes subtle inspiration, sometimes tip-of-the-hat reference, sometimes gauche appropriation; and often lighthearted satire. Legions of filmmakers and artists have been trying their hand at being the next Lynch, but the impossibility of that task lies in the fact that only the man himself saw world the way that Lynch did, and there will never be another person like him.

Still, he’s here. He’s everywhere and in everything. In the fans who loved him, the actors and crew who adored working with him, in the culture he influenced, the artists he inspired, and the filmmakers who will continue to do their best to either pay respects to him or blatantly plagiarize him. He’s still here. I cried to myself the day of his death thinking about how comforting it always was to imagine him at home in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away, in his little workshop every day just creating something. Despite the obstacles and setbacks he had faced in getting new projects off the ground since The Return (and, well, before that, too), he was still out there, still creating. He did not heed setbacks because there was nothing that could stop him from making art that fulfilled him. It consoled me to know that he was alive and undaunted in his passions, making things that could be held and touched and that were crafted by his two hands even if they couldn’t entertain me from the comfort of my living room or in a movie theater.

He’s not out there creating anymore, yet what we have left is the permanence of his spirit and the endurance of his impact, in a filmmaking world that was crumbling around him both literally and figuratively, in filmmakers who are struggling to adapt yet persist in making films anyway. Lynch himself felt the strangulating effects of this changing world in the years before his death. Perhaps we can’t be reliant on the world hopefully changing for the better for us, but continuing to make our art anyway and forcing it to bend to us instead. From the start of his career that’s all Lynch did: made work that was true to him and then changed the course of culture forever. Maybe this is the best way to honor Lynch’s legacy; maybe I’m being way too optimistic. I’m just trying to end all this on a note that feels satisfying, but maybe leaving things unsatisfying and open-ended is a good way to honor Lynch, too.

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