In the Company of David Lynch’s Art, Our Hearts Expand

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Yesterday, word broke that David Lynch left us. It was fitting that the news was delivered via his Facebook page rather than as a statement from some big-wig news outlet. It felt odd, like the kind of thing a person who posted “weather reports” on Twitter during a global pandemic would certainly do. In that case, it felt apt. It had been rewarding, even in grief, to see my social media pages flooded with memories, affirmations and goodbyes to David. January 16th unraveled similarly to his own work, as a great measure of love—it was a transcendental adieu, bid generously by thousands upon thousands. Culture can often be such a vacuum, but how warm it was to post into the void with the rest of David’s children, to watch ourselves reckon with a kind of earth-shattering vacancy we never hoped would come and find some tribute in it. There was comfort in reading Twin Peaks co-writer Mark Frost’s words last night, that “the man from the other place has gone home.”

But many of us knew our time with Lynch was thinning. Last year, he let the world know that he was permanently housebound due to contracting emphysema from his years of heavy smoking. He’d quit smoking in 2022, after spending nearly 70 years with the habit, but, by 2024, he was on supplemental oxygen just so he could walk across a room. “I don’t regret it, it was important to me,” he told People. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” Perhaps it was his years of meditation that guided him into a place full of such content. But he was always kind in that way, curbing violence and trauma with switches of love, of caring without caution.

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And still, those words written by his family—“It is with deep regret”—puncture upon entry. As I began processing the loss, I began to worry that a part of me was now gone. Discovering David Lynch’s art in my teens helped me come out as queer in my twenties. I arrived at his work in the early throes of 2017, when I was newly 19 years old and nearly done with my first year at college—the same age my mother would have been when she and the rest of her friends gathered around a television set to watch Twin Peaks premiere on ABC, in the very same campus dormitory where I watched it for the first time. I had spent my youthful summers watching Days of Our Lives episodes with her, opening my heart to the melodrama of a touch-too-much soap operas as Rafe Hernandez’s doppelgänger Arnold sought to mar his relationship with Sami. In some ways, I was primed for a picture like Twin Peaks, for the murder-mystery, persona-heavy, existential gravitas of Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer’s tragedy—the story of a do-gooder and a victim; repercussions in the company of love and dreams; a savior complex unmasked by utter strangeness.

But, unlike Seinfeld, Freaks and Geeks and The Brady Bunch, neither of my parents cared a lick about Twin Peaks—casting it aside as one of those lost relic shows of the 1990s, deeming it a “one-season wonder” that ran out of steam after Laura’s killer was identified. Instead, Twin Peaks presented itself to me via a carefully-curated GIF set on Tumblr, of all places. I was sucked in by the show’s aesthetics like a wild and wonderful tractor beam, and I convinced my then-partner to watch it with me; they liked it well enough, but I was plum hooked by Pete Martell’s off-kilter, “wrapped… in plastic” reaction to finding Laura’s corpse washed ashore near his home. I binged the first two seasons on Netflix in only a handful of days, becoming religiously infatuated with the lore and loose ends in-between classes and co-op kitchen shifts. In 30 episodes, David Lynch taught us so much. He said, “Here is a woman so beautiful she will cure a man of his deafness.” He said, “Here is a father and son who look nothing alike but are bound together as one by a harmony unwithheld.” He said, “Here is a trans woman, and you will treat her well or you will get fucked.” He said, “Here is a girl who, despite her beauty and popularity, is wounded and will suffer.” He said, “We can’t bring peace to her fate, but we will try even in consequence.”

That following summer, I paid my way through a Showtime subscription just so I could follow along every Sunday with Twin Peaks: The Return, buying into the same kind of weekly magic that my parents had 10, 15 years prior when shows they loved, like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, ran the weekend gamut on HBO. It felt good to be a part of something like that, to have a show that was just mine and no one else’s in my orbit—just a month after I’d spent all of my work-study savings on a big Twin Peaks tattoo on my upper arm that, to this day, remains my favorite out of the dozens and dozens of images I’ve had pressed into my skin since. And when finale night came that September, I huddled under a blanket, perched my laptop on my chest and imagined myself in Times Square watching Cooper rescue Laura on a jumbotron billboard overlooking Manhattan. Lynch re-wrote the Great American Novel when he finished Twin Peaks in 2017. How lucky we all are to have engaged with it now and always.

Like most of David Lynch’s students, I combed through his filmography like it was a gospel. I started somewhere familiar, in the cut-and-paste brilliance of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, only to quickly move through the nightmares of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. One night, I’d watch Eraserhead and The Elephant Man back-to-back; a future weekend would be spent tracking down a torrent link for Inland Empire. I engaged with Dune because it meant completing my watch-through of his full-length filmography; I fell in love with the cartoony Wild at Heart and the paranoia of Lost Highway because they were less-spoken-of than the films that came before them; and, as the pandemic worsened, I took a quarantine trip through The Straight Story and marveled at Lynch’s depth, at his range.

Thousands upon thousands of writers and thinkers have already spent decades trying to drum up the meaning of Lynch’s work. I’ve read all the articles, and I’ve watched all the hour-long YouTube videos swollen with speculations and Easter eggs. Was the bum by the diner dumpster an embodiment of evil in Mulholland Drive? Your guess is as good as mine. Is Blue Velvet actually about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination? I like what Roger Ebert said about Mulholland Drive, that it “works directly on the emotions” and is “a movie to surrender yourself to.” “If you require logic, see something else,” he wrote. He never curbed to our demands of knowing him. In fact, we know less about him now in absentia than we did when he made films that served as frightening mirrors to the very world we thought we understood.

I have always enjoyed spending time in the margins of Lynch’s work because, even at his most incongruous, you are able to feel something. So much art gets labeled “Lynchian” in 2025, as it’s become a placeholder for surrealism and abstraction—for strangeness and the indescribable constant of misunderstanding that lingers in our existence. I am guilty of it, thanks, in part, to the eighth episode of The Return (the greatest hour in television history). I often think about how, amid the long, sprawling litmus test of ecstatic, doomy and beguiling sequences, the simplicity of a boy walking a girl home from a date breaks through. They kiss, and she finds a face-up penny and hopes for good fortune. Instead, as she falls asleep, her mouth opens and a frog-moth crawls into it and down her throat. Like Stephen King once said, there’s little fun to be had in explanations.

And, of course, Lynch himself was a man of few explanations, possessing this unflinching wit and goofy, endearing mystery. His rescuing of five Woody Woodpecker toys—Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan—at a petrol station in 1981 is an iconic anecdote that resurfaces every six months on social media. He would go down as the greatest of all time if his only accomplishment was writing Michael Cera as a Marlon Brando parody. A true Californian, he went to Bob’s Big Boy every day at 2:30 PM for seven years in a row, ordering “several cups of coffee and one chocolate shake.” In the wake of Inland Empire’s release, he sat on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea with a giant “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” poster of Laura Dern and a live cow. He had an incredible cameo on Family Guy, and his backseat declaration of “I just had two cookies and a Coke” is the poem I hope gets left on my tombstone when it is my time to join him in the other place.

And Lynch just had this proverb about him, as if every word he spoke was more profound than anything anyone else had ever said. And the trick to that is he spoke, with passion and zeal, of the craft of living and the craft of making as if both were intertwined. “I don’t think it was pain that made him so great,” he once said of Vincent Van Gogh. “I think painting brought him whatever happiness he had.” Few artists in my lifetime have honored not just women, but victims of incest and rape in their work quite like him; no one has ever made a better argument for dreams being one of the greatest storytelling vehicles at our disposal. David Lynch, ageless even in death, was above elaboration, but never above imagination. And while Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are two of the greatest horror stories ever told, Lynch’s visions always angled themselves toward what exists beyond terror and beyond fear. It was about, as Cooper said so perfectly, “looking at the world with love.”

And when I finally made it to Twin Peaks in 2017, I saw his critiques of the sinister platitudes and contradictions existing within American institutions. I, too, once passed it off as being strange. But I know now that it remains present-tense and far from make-believe. And yet, as I return to the very show that first gave me the language to feel less alone, I am unable to see anything but Lynch’s proposed solution to the capitalist, masculine and tortured dominations of darkness: love and light, both of which burn and beat on evermore, and both of which are, in fact, enough. Yesterday, someone on X wrote, “It did not occur to me that David Lynch could die, what a strange world we live in.” If these last 24 hours have taught us anything, it’s that his art does not cease impact upon his departure.

But because of how David Lynch wrote the character of Denise in the Twin Peaks universe, I felt safe in all of his films. I cannot say that about many others. Maybe John Waters, or Michelangelo Antonioni. In all of his precious and ambitious, non-sequitur incantations and improbably vulnerable symbols, Lynch gave me and so many others a passage for navigating gender and queerness simply by saying “fix your hearts or die” on national television. I think about the waning hour of The Return, how a disorienting series finale was filled with violence and happenstance and hope, and I think about Dale Cooper saving Laura Palmer in what can only be described as an attempt to rewrite history, as if his purpose in the town of Twin Peaks was not to solve her murder but to prevent it. “Where are we going?” Laura asks. “We’re going home,” Cooper responds.

What comes next is baked into our cultural DNA: words muttered in unsettling pauses; Cooper, in disbelief, asking what year it is; and a much-older Laura looking at her childhood home, hearing her name ache out of the muffled, distorted doldrums, and screaming through the screen. In their shared tulpa, a pitch-black, lifeless, dread-pilled ending—one that will haunt me until my dying day. Distorted as it may be, we always belong someplace else. There are universes within universes waiting on our arrival. Our hearts break, but, miraculously, we remain.

Sitting with this loss, I know now that a part of me is not gone. Because, in David Lynch’s art, you cannot harm the past to brighten the present. But by God, my sweet child, you will be loved beyond comprehension. And that love might not save you, but you will know its meaning even in emptiness. There is a Platters lyric that has always made me think of David: “I’m wearing my heart like a crown.” I am remembering those words again today, and I hope none of us ever compromise our earnestness. May we live without irony and always bask in the blues skies and golden sunshine that exist within us.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.