David is the One

We lost a real one this past week. I commented that David Lynch might have been the truest human to ever make a movie, and that sentiment was later echoed by none other than Kyle MacLachlan in his heart-wrenching tribute to Lynch.

Never in my 50 years have I seen so many loving memorials directed towards an artist, memorials full of love, compassion, kindness, spirituality, and passion. I truly believe that Lynch was an artist on par with any other artist that has ever lived, a talent that comes maybe once every couple of generations. We were truly lucky to be living while he was creating.

Longtime viewers of the Dungeon Dive will know that Lynch was my favorite director of all time. It’s impossible to state in words the impact his art (movies, paintings, cartoons, music, etc.) had on my life. One of my earliest memories is my dad asking his mom to record Elephant Man for him off of HBO. She had HBO while I was growing up, and we didn’t, so she would record movies for us. I remember sneaking glimpses of the movie while my parents were watching it.

Now when I watch Elephant Man, I basically start crying about 15 minutes in, and continue to do so until the credits role. Just thinking about John Hurt’s softly spoken depiction of Marrick makes me choke up. Crazy to think that the world's most devastating and sad movie came from Mel Brooks and David Lynch!

But The Elephant Man really does get right to the heart of what Lynch was all about, and that is love and humanity, and how people with the most love, and people who need the most love, are often the ones that get hurt the most.

The first things I was really old enough to enjoy from Lynch were Dune and Twin Peaks. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Dune – it’s such a wild adaptation. I love Lynch’s portrayal of the spacer guild and how they fold space. So much more inventive and creative than anything in the most recent film version. And while my opinion on the original seasons of Twin Peaks has fallen over the years, I still love it for giving us my two favorite things ever from Lynch – Fire Walk With Me, and The Return.

People will often use the word “Lynchian” to describe something, but the truth is, nothing ever described with this term is truly “Lynchian,” and that’s because too many people are confused about what it means for something to be “Lynchian.” People think of the term, and they think weird and dark. But here’s the thing, here is the true secret about Lynch – while his art was often weird and dark, it was never cynical, never weird just to be weird, and it never glorified depravity. Lynch was always, ALWAYS ultimately concerned with kindness, love, compassion and empathy, and no where is that more apparent than in the wonderful exchange between Major Briggs and his son Bobby in the diner in the Twin Peaks episode "May The Giant Be With You.”

There is a phrase used in Twin Peaks the Return, and that is “Laura is the one.” I think it’s first spoken by the dying Log Lady as she speaks to Hawk on the phone. She tells him “Laura is the one.” And in that show, we learn that Laura is a force of pure love, pure light, pure goodness that was created at the same time as Bob, a force of pure hate, pure dark, and pure evil. Laura was sent to us to save us, but the darkness and evil of the world chewed her up and spat her out, but the spark of Laura can still be stoked into a burning flame, and that flame, when properly attended to, can become the flame that drives away the darkness, but, if left unchecked, the flame can destroy what it is meant to protect.

I think David Lynch was a similar source of light and love.