I never got to meet David Lynch, but he was such an outsized presence in my young life. Dazed and Confused was shooting in the summer of 92, and still all I could think about was the last episode of the original Twin Peaks run and Fire Walk With Me. I saw FWWM several times in the theater, and I remember the first time people walking out, getting audibly angry. This was a part of my life when I was starting to form an oppositional viewpoint. An abusive stepfather, the US war in Iraq, and the growing realization that the only thing that arrested this inner feeling of sadness that was petrifying my heart was a glimpse of some kind of unfamiliar pattern, sight and sound and words, something that felt as if it was coming from an internally consistent place but which did something new and unexpected and maybe even a little frightening. I was becoming aware that these things that excited me, that I was looking for in an attempt to learn, were the same things that made other people angry. The violation of expectations made other people angry and shut them off.
So it was in this spirit that when I did my first interview while we were filming, I told someone at Details magazine that I didn’t have any particular interest in continuing acting unless David Lynch needed a 15 year old for something.
I’m not certain what exactly happened after that. The agent at William Morris who had been speculatively shepherding me (nobody ever seemed to make a commitment back then, they would send you scripts and call you until they suddenly stopped) told me that Jennifer Lynch had read my comment and invited me to a cast screening of Eraserhead (was it a something to do with an anniversary? Maybe a Nuart theater anniversary?) it’s possible that the agent just had tickets and made the Jennifer Lynch bit up, I don’t remember speaking to her directly. Anyway, I got to go, and I met Jack Nance, who I’d see again later on the set of Love and a .45, and Alicia Witt, who had been up for a part in Dazed for a while. Lynch wasn’t there, (was he on a fishing trip? I think that’s what Jack said).
Eraserhead in the theater was a revelation for me then as it must have been to all those midnight movie attendees when it first screened. There are a few sacred, magic scenes in movies for me, and Henry’s neighbor emerging from the dark is one of them, “And it’s so late…”. The mannered way that actors deliver lines in Lynch movies always seemed like a proxy for some unspoken thing, ritualistic, code… in a way he was a perfect director for his unfairly maligned Dune, a story where everything spoken contains several layers of hidden meaning or treachery. Lynch masterfully created the feeling of not understanding the world one is in but being swept away and transfixed by its size and beauty. It’s a phenomenology of childhood, and possibly one of neurodivergence. It gripped and continues to grip me, though I can see its limitations sometimes.
I remember now that I almost did meet Lynch— I saw him at the Toronto film festival in 2001 when I was there with Waking Life but didn’t get to speak to him. Of course the day we were going to show the movie there, it ended up being the day of the 9-11 attacks. Reportedly Lynch rented a car and drove all the way back from Toronto to Los Angeles alone.
There is also something even sadder about this news that feels like a road accident happening in slow motion. An elderly man with emphysema who had been confined to his home because of rampant Covid was forced to evacuate because of wildfires, and now we know he has died. I can only imagine the details of this and it’s so saddening to me. I’ve always dreamed of having an existence where I could have the freedom and means to make things, to have a studio space and materials, to have collaborators I love. In some ways I can’t shake the fear that his death is emblematic of a death of possibilities, a narrowing of what kind of lives are permitted (or even permitted to dream of) that echoes the material death of those possibilities around us.
related: this incredible post eraserhead screening q&a at bampfa , you can see him struggling for the first time with people trying to reduce the film to words and interpretation
