I guess it’s time for me to write some sort of tribute to David Lynch.

The latest, and ongoing, trend on socials (mostly, on FB, to a lesser extent on Twitter) is a claim that any attempt of yours to put something out when a famous person dies is to “jump on the bandwagon of grief,” trying to collect as many self-gratifying points as possible, simply because you cannot be sincere and all you are doing is meticulously ticking boxes of validation. Not trying to disregard this particular ethos (you cannot convince a bunch of middle-aged strangers on the Internet of anything: prove me wrong), I will, however, keep in mind that everything I write in public spaces is still my own subjective reaction, and I, and only I, can judge exactly how visceral it might be.

But I digress, and here comes nothing but my own ramblings mixed up with fragmentary memories, mostly of “Twin Peaks.” 

Lynch’s universe and his ambience meant the world to me: they still do. Funny how by writing it, I can simultaneously confess that I haven’t even watched all his movies: “Inland Empire” and “Lost Highway” are still waiting in their DVDs, sitting in the drawers next to my evergreen succulents. Weird, I know. Yet it doesn’t prevent me from feeling as if Lynch was a man whom I knew personally, and whose mentorship of sorts (how to live fully by turning your grievances and resentment into wanderings through liminal spaces) was that of the coolest and most eccentric supervisor ever.

Paradoxically, Lynch’s macabre is wholesome: the drapes in the Black Lodge, that place of ongoing grief and calamity, are balanced out by the taste of the freshly brewed damn good coffee and cherry pie; the owls that are not what they seem, the residents of the outer world—Bob, Mike, the Doppelgängers, the Man from Another Place, the Tremonds/Chalfonds and many others are alive but constrained, albeit scarcely, by sacrificial kindness of Laura, Annie and, later, by Cooper himself. The Pacific Northwest portrayed by Lynch isn’t “pure evil,” as some would tell you: don’t listen to them. It’s a land of hardship and suffering, corrupted by the wicked, yet it’s full of redemptive powers that are available even for the misfits; those powers are more important and grander than everything else.

Lynch was a trickster, but in a naïve extraordinaire way. In an interview, Guillermo del Toro said something along the lines that Lynch was serious towards simplicity, which wasn’t “meta” for him: is it even possible for a man of his creative powers? Was he “ever” even cynical in his adulthood? Apparently, you can bear love, angst and curiosity in equal proportions, but I am not exactly sure how many of us, me included, have all three in our possession. He did. He said once,

“I think new screenwriters are too worried it has all been said before. Sure, it has, but not by you.”

And here, it was said yet again, by me: while mourning you, we will treasure your art, each and every one of us. And one day sadness will surely end. Rest in peace.