For me, it began with “Blue Velvet.”
David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece was a scandal, a sensation and the kind of movie that grown-ups lowered their voices and smiled mysteriously when they talked about. I still remember how my Uncle Terry’s eyes would light up when he told me that I simply had to see “Blue Velvet.” Easier said than done when you’re a precocious 11-year-old who isn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies showing at the artsy theaters in town. But my old next-door neighbor Bryan Quinn and I eventually contrived a scheme to get our hands on a VHS tape when the movie was released on home video the following year — as I recall, I smuggled it into my bedroom hidden inside a box of computer printer labels — and we finally got a chance to watch it at a house where he babysat after the kids had gone to bed.
“What the f— was that?” Bryan asked as the closing credits rolled.
“I don’t know,” I said, hitting the rewind button. “But we’re watching it again.”
Just as the movie chronicled star Kyle MacLachlan’s introduction to a violent, sexual underworld lurking beneath the green lawns and picket fences of his sleepy, suburban hometown, “Blue Velvet” was our entree into a frightening and forbidden new world of art cinema made for adults. One of the most brilliant things about the picture is how the story mirrors the audience’s experience — MacLachlan’s squeaky-clean college student discovering his own dirty, voyeuristic tendencies as Lynch teases and tantalizes us with shocking scenes of sadomasochism from which we cannot pull our eyes away. “You’re like me,” says Dennis Hopper’s psychotic rapist Frank Booth, not just to MacLachlan but directly into the camera lens. He’s talking to us, too. He knows we like to watch. It’s a movie about innocence lost, while the act of watching it is itself a loss of innocence. Oh, and it’s also funny as hell.
Look, I’m not saying that every middle school kid should be allowed to see “Blue Velvet,” but watching it at that age blew open a lot of doors in my mind about what art was and what movies could do. (It got us to stop thinking about “Star Wars” right quick.) I still try to go see “Blue Velvet” whenever it screens at one of our local repertory theaters because it’s so much fun to watch with an unsuspecting audience. You’re sitting in a room full of strangers and everyone’s kind of stressed out and turned on and they’re not sure when they’re allowed to laugh. You can almost hear the minds being melted in the auditorium. Almost 40 years later, the movie still feels dangerous, like something we’re not supposed to be seeing.
When an artist who has made such a profound impact on you dies, you’re not just mourning the person, you’re mourning the effect that they had on your life…
When David Lynch died on Jan. 15 of complications from emphysema, the outpouring of grief in the arts community was massive, with an intensity I haven’t seen since Prince or David Bowie. We had heard he wasn’t doing well, but the news still hit like a punch to the gut. When an artist who has made such a profound impact on you dies, you’re not just mourning the person, you’re mourning the effect that they had on your life, the way they helped shape and change the way you see the world. For a lot of people — particularly of my generation — Lynch was our first taste of surrealism, of art that not only didn’t need to correspond to narrative conventions, but often delighted in defying them.
So pronounced and instantly identifiable was Lynch’s style that he was the first director since Federico Fellini whose name became an adjective. The Lynchian aesthetic was oft-parodied and unmistakable — a timeless, saddle shoes Americana full of rockabilly dudes, juvenile delinquents and doomed damsels in distress. Full of goofy humor and dripping with sex, the films positioned forces of light and darkness in constant battle amid decaying industrial landscapes, ethereal music and electrical noise. (The director once said his secret was that he enjoyed photographing factories and nude women equally.) Amid these sad, sordid stories, so earnest was Lynch’s depiction of goodness and decency that it was often mistaken for snark. But funny as the films often were, they were never ironic. Take a look at his friend and constant collaborator Laura Dern’s heroic entrance in “Blue Velvet” — stepping out of the shadows to soaring Shostakovich strings — and it’s obvious this guy was on the side of the angels.
The other rap against Lynch films was they were too weird and didn’t make sense, but I always felt like they were pretty easy to follow, especially emotionally. For all its avant-garde imagery, his 1977 debut “Eraserhead” is first a horror movie about having dinner with your girlfriend’s parents after you’ve knocked her up, then later about the horrible thoughts that creep into your skull when you’re awake all night with a sickly baby who won’t stop crying. But Lynch films connect on an almost subconscious level somewhere that resists wordy explication. While watching them, you sometimes know things without being told, the same way you do in your dreams. He started out as a sculptor and a fine arts painter, and in his movies used time and sound like canvas and clay.
In Lynch’s 2006 book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity,” he explained, “Cinema is a language. It can say things — big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium.”
The pop culture juggernaut of “Twin Peaks” coincided with my freshman year of high school, with the subversive nighttime soap’s hallucinatory dream sequences and oddball nonsequiturs prompting endless hours of speculation and obsession. I’m still close with friends I made while talking about “Twin Peaks” in the kind of obsessive detail so beautifully evoked in writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow.” (Indeed, when I interviewed Schoenbrun last year, they spotted my Laura Palmer T-shirt and we spent a good chunk of our allotted time talking “Twin Peaks.”) The first article I ever wrote for WBUR — 10 years ago this month — was about a “Peaks” retrospective at the Brattle Theatre, noting the then-nascent reevaluation of “Fire Walk with Me.” The controversial 1992 prequel was widely despised by critics and audiences upon initial release, but is now considered one of Lynch’s finest films, especially by younger viewers who roll more easily with its gloomy abstractions. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the two sharpest young film critics I’ve met recently both have “Twin Peaks” tattoos.)
When David Bowie died in 2016, a sentiment shared by many was that “he taught me it was okay to be weird.” David Lynch taught us how to watch weird stuff, how to see films and television as more than mere plot delivery devices and instead embrace the many moods and mysteries they’re capable of conjuring. So it’s fitting that Bowie himself briefly appeared in “Fire Walk with Me” as a former partner of the FBI director played by Lynch. I always got a kick out of the idea of both Davids working as partners, encouraging generations to turn and face the strange. And when Bowie was too sick to reprise the role in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” Lynch transformed the character into a towering, talking steam kettle. Because how else could you replace David Bowie?
Twenty-six years after being ignominiously canceled by ABC and ending with the cruelest cliffhanger of all time, “Twin Peaks” returned in the summer of 2017. And what a summer that was! An 18-hour opus directed entirely by Lynch under conditions of complete creative control, “The Return” appeared in weekly installments on Showtime with no advance reviews, no screeners made available to press, no cast list in the opening credits nor even any teasers touting scenes from the next week’s episode. Every Sunday night was another blind leap into the unknown — a return to appointment television that all of us experienced together at the same time. It was my great privilege to try and keep up with the program for this publication, staying up all night puzzling over a finale that has haunted my nightmares ever since. It was a perfect capstone to a career that began with the first midnight movie and ended with arguably the last communal TV series event.
Before the news broke of Lynch’s death, the Brattle had already booked its annual Superbowl Sunday screenings of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” (The theater calls it “Superb Owl Sunday,” in reference to the film’s forest nightbirds who are not what they seem.) The Harvard Film Archive had likewise already announced “David Lynch: New Dimensions” (Feb. 28-March 1) a weekend series including 35mm screenings of “Eraserhead” and “Fire Walk with Me,” along with visits from Lynch’s longtime producer Sabrina Sutherland and curator Kristine McKenna, who co-authored his wonderful 2018 memoir “Room to Dream.” (The HFA tells me both guests have confirmed they are still planning to attend.)
The Brattle has just scheduled tribute screenings of “Blue Velvet” (Feb. 24-Feb. 26) and “Mulholland Drive” (Feb 26. and Feb. 27) while the Coolidge Corner Theatre has added regular monthly showings of “Eraserhead” to its midnight rotation, where it will continue playing it “for as long as audiences are interested.” The Somerville Theatre is currently preparing a larger Lynch retrospective for April, including screenings of “Mulholland Drive” (April 17) and a double feature of “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart” (April 18), before closing out with a “Twin Peaks” party at the Crystal Ballroom (April 19).
I hope there are some middle schoolers out there plotting to sneak into “Blue Velvet.”
“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” screens at the Brattle Theatre on Sunday, Feb. 9 and at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday, March 1. “Eraserhead” screens at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday, Feb. 28 and at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Saturday, March 8.
