Rest in Peace, You Angel
To say that he was my favorite filmmaker would be an understatement. It’s no exaggeration that for me personally, the fact that I got to be alive for 35 years on this planet while David Lynch walked the earth and made art is only akin to sharing oxygen with a literal prophet. I make film because of him. I meditate because of him. I feel safe in my skin as a queer woman with a ton of trauma because of the art that he made. I’ve often joked that I discovered his filmography because as a horny teenager, I frequented Mr Skin dot com and saw the Mulholland Drive girl-on-girl scene and immediately went to Best Buy and bought the DVD. And it’s true. I did that. But it wasn’t just testosterone poisoned lust guiding me. It was love you see on the faces of those two women in that sequence. I had never seen anything like it. It was like…seeing possibility for the first time. That’s what his art has always represented for me. Love and possibility. As artists, we can make something that is the whole chicken dinner. Humorous, terrifying, disgusting, beautiful, slutty, loving, weird as fuck, more grounded than a Saturday Evening Post article.
When I saw Fire Walk With Me for the first time in college, I was so upset. Not because I didn’t like the film, but because I finally understood why “Twin Peaks” mattered so much to me and it devastated me. It wasn’t because I love donuts and coffee and nicotine and pie and 60s rock and sexy boys and dreamy girls and weirdo art with giants, dwarves, witches, and owls. It wasn’t because I grew up with an art teacher mom who taught me the importance of Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, and those sexy ladies painted on the sides of WWII planes. A dad who showed me “Roy Orbison’s Black and White Night” on PBS when I was fifteen. I was devastated after watching FWWM - watching Laura Palmer live her final days - because I finally realized that I loved “Twin Peaks” because *I* was Laura. I was a traumatized and abused woman with a fractured identity, trapped in a spiralling cycle of pain and suffering. I had buried it all under comedy and irony and booze and opiates and I couldn’t for a second imagine that the angels were ever going to save me. Seeing Laura smiling at the end of the movie. With her angel. It was the first time I wondered if there was a chance my soul could be saved. A possibility. Maybe there was a universal cosmic love that could save me. Maybe there was an angel.
I am gutted. I can’t stop crying. Not since Louise told me and Alice in our Edgy Dolls of Trans Cinema Text thread. When she told me I dropped what I was doing and meditated immediately. I meditate every day for 40 minutes because of you, David. You saved my life. I remember in May of 2022. I was nowhere near done with The People’s Joker and had to have it done for TIFF by the end of that Summer. Spun out on ketamine and shrooms all the time. No idea how I was ever going to finish that movie, let alone not lose my goddamn mind on drugs, keyframes, and render fails in the process. I opened up Youtube and saw a suggested video where you talked about getting into Transcendental Meditation while you were finishing Eraserhead. It was like when Dorothy sees color. I suddenly knew the thing that was going to save my life. The thing that was going to help finish my art. That would help me find sobriety and clarity again.
“Pure consciousness.”
I could listen to you say that phrase on loop for an eternity. I gave myself the birthday gift of TM classes that afternoon. It did save my life. Your art saved my life. You taught me to trust my intuition. To be me, unapologetically. To heal.
You were my angel. You always were.
I am forever indebted to the art you made, the wisdom and spirituality you shared, the mark you left on this planet. If I am even 1% the artist and prophetic beacon of love and possibility you were, my life will have had some damn purpose and I will have done more good than I ever would have been able to do without you. I will love you forever and I will miss you every day.
A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene. - David Lynch, 1946-2025
