David Lynch (1946-2024)

So it turns out David Lynch had a bigger impact on my subconscious than I imagined ten days ago, when he died on January 15.  

The small ads in the Village Voice for midnight showings of Eraserhead (thank you Mel Brooks!) first piqued my curiosity about Lynch, but it wasn't until the release of The Elephant Man that I began tracking the career of this all-too-straight looking dude with a thick head of hair and an ever-present cigarette.

Photo by Pete Weeks (2002)

Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks (both scored by the incomparable Angelo Badalamenti) cemented his reputation as Hollywood's oddest duck, as if Doris Day had been possessed by Charles Manson. But his later films (we'll forget Dune, an anomaly), beginning with Wild at Heart mostly exhausted my patience. I fell asleep multiple times during Mulholland Drive, one of "cinema's" most acclaimed films, although truth be told I'm not that big a fan of Hitchcock's Vertigo, either. Sissy Spacek, my favorite actress, proved a big enough draw to see The Straight Story (lovely) but three hours of Inland Empire? No thank you, I don't need to pay ten bucks for a nap. 

Still, when Steven Spielberg cast him in The Fablemans, it was thrilling to see Lynch wearing John Ford's iconic eye patch, as Hollywood's most commercially successful director paid delicious homage to its most artsy. The insider-baseball tribute even beat the night Lynch received his honorary Oscar (like Hitchcock, whom the Academy also never honored with the real thing!), surrounded by his beaming stars, Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini as the drawling boy from Montana made good.

So I was conflicted about whether or not to include the guy in "People I Loved" until last night when Lynch directed one of my strangest dreams, starring Warren Beatty and Mike Faist.  Faist and I were friends on a road trip.  We ran into mid-career Beatty who had parked his antique car outside a barn.  The three of us were hanging out inside the hay loft intensely-discussing 20th century film history.  I couldn't decide whether or not to ask Beatty about the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles.  When I did, Faist pulled out a gun and shot Beatty in the face before he could answer.  The camera pulled back to reveal that aliens composed of icky grey matter and shaped like leprous cones had been watching us on tall blue monitors with red framed screens.  They were heaving and wailing as their antennae quivered, traumatized by the black & white violence on screen.

More People I Loved:

Gena Rowlands

Shelley Duvall

Roger Corman

Faith Ringgold

Richard Serra

Alexei Navalny

Pee Wee Herman

Glenda Jackson

George Maharis

Tina Turner

Burt Bacharach

Angela Lansbury

Queen Elizabeth II

Sidney Poitier

Joan Didion

Stephen Sondheim

Edward Albee

Muhammad Ali