Strange Days #16
January 2025 | That Gum You Like
In the summer of 2017, in the midst of watching Twin Peaks for the first time, I thought it would be useful to write a brief timeline of my messy attempts to make sense of the work of David Lynch. I was sticking very close to the conventional when I first encountered his work, and I was pretty closed-minded to anything that strayed too far from straightforward. Lynch’s cinema was the challenge that I needed, and it turned out to be an important hurdle for me. I bounced off his films again and again, trying and failing to find something to hold onto within them. And then, finally, I watched Twin Peaks and it all fell into place.
In the wake of his death, I’m thinking about this chaotic, slightly embarrassing path from incredulity to reverence, and I like the idea of having a record of that journey. And so, in the spirit of celebrating the transformative impact his work has had on me over the past sixteen years or so, I’ve revised and reordered that piece from eight years ago, and added in an epilogue. As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s quite a long piece, covering a lot of ground, but I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed living through it.
My first David Lynch film was Mulholland Drive (2001), which I saw in 2009, just as I was digging into cinema for the first time. At that point, I had no real idea of who Lynch was, and my only context for the film was that it had topped several best of the soon-to-be-ending decade lists, and that it was one of the more recent inclusions in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, a book I was using to organise my nascent cinephilia. I bought Mulholland Drive on DVD and watched it one afternoon, knowing only that I shouldn’t try to understand it. Needless to say, I ignored that advice and had a horrible time, exasperated to the point of ridicule and angry that the canon had failed me. I didn’t know what to do with it, and so I abandoned it entirely. I gave the DVD to my housemate because I didn’t want it anymore and went back to watching much simpler movies that I definitely didn’t need to see before my death. I barely remember any of them.
My second encounter with Lynch came at university in 2012 during a misguided attempt to watch Lost Highway (1997). I don’t know why I sought it out after Mulholland Drive, but I did. More concerning, though, is that I thought it’d be a good idea to watch it the morning after a Red Bull fuelled all-nighter, in which I started, finished, and then handed in my 10,000 word final year dissertation on William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and the New Journalism. And so having not slept for twenty-four hours, eyes still twitching from the caffeine, on edge from having read and re-read Naked Lunch, I watched Lost Highway. At least, I think I did. I have a few appropriately vague and fragmented memories of what happened next: Bill Pullman’s frantic eyes behind the wheel of a car; David Bowie’s I’m Deranged playing through tinny laptop speakers; road markings flying by at high-speed. I woke up and it was dark outside, and the DVD menu was looping on the laptop screen. Everything I remember from the film was in this menu: the road, the car, the music; so I can’t even be sure if I pressed play or not before passing out from exhaustion. A week later I took the DVD back to the library and was charged a late fee.
A few years passed by without incident, and late one night in 2016, after a couple of much simpler encounters with Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), and The Straight Story (1999), I’d built up the confidence to tackle the three-hour goliath of Inland Empire (2006). No Red Bull this time, and no Burroughs either. And it all started well enough. I was enraptured for maybe half an hour, its primitive digital images bowling me over in much the same way as the quest for a band-aid in Jia Zhang-ke’s The World (2004) or the coyotes in Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004). But for whatever reason, be it laziness, tiredness, stupidity, my mind began to wander as soon as any semblance of logic began to fade away. I started to check my phone, and check it again, and by the hour mark I was only half paying attention. I must’ve dozed off at some point, too, because the next thing I remember is being jolted upright by Laura Dern’s horribly distorted face in extreme close-up on my TV screen, some time around 3am. I don’t know if I’ve ever jumped so much in my life.
I started watching Twin Peaks (1990-1991 & 2017) the day after the third episode of the third season aired, having ignored it for years as I maintained a cautious distance from the work of David Lynch. After plucking up the courage to start from the beginning, fuelled by the extraordinary outburst of critical writing instigated by the first two episodes of the new series, I found something very different to what I was expecting. I thought it would be more wholly surreal, with more puzzles, dead ends, dreams; more nightmares. Everything that had scared me away from Lynch in the past. All of these things are there, of course, but used sparingly, and they’re not opaque in the way I’d found before. They’re the horrors that lurk behind the soapy facade, behind the coffee and cherry pies, the smiles and nods and “you bet”s. I think I’d overlooked this element of Lynch’s work, and, of course, it’s the key to the whole thing. The contrast between a too-good-to-be-true idyll and the nightmares that threaten to bleed into it. The ear in the grass. The man behind the diner. It doesn’t matter what they are, or why they’re there. It matters that they exist. That’s the part I was missing, I think, in my rigid desire to fit square pegs into round holes. Nightmares do intrude on waking life. And what then?
And that brings us to today, a week after Lynch’s death, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot. Reading tributes, and anecdotes, and poring over the sounds and images from his works shared in their thousands by grieving cinephiles from all over the world. Late on Saturday night, I watched Inland Empire again, with the intention of just letting it wash over me. Since first watching Twin Peaks, I’ve gone back to Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, and found untold riches within them that I’d completely missed the first time around. But I hadn’t gone back to Inland Empire. It felt like the biggest step into uncharted waters for me, but if I was ever going to get anything out of it, it would be now. Melancholy heavy in the air. And so it proved to be. An incalculably enormous film, like Las Meninas in lo-res video, constantly revealing new angles, new paths, new shadows. A labyrinth of dreams, too high and too wide to comprehend all at once, and an object that (truly) defies explanation. If this journey towards Lynch has taught me anything, it’s that explanations are overrated. I didn’t realise that when I started watching his films but I know it now. And I’m glad that I finally found a way to get there. It’s so much more interesting to be lost in the space between.
Speak soon,
Matt