In Memory of DAVID LYNCH

Metamodern Surrealist Spiritual Adept

(This is a very personal and impromptu reflection on the death of David Lynch. It collects several of my impressions of him and several resources for exploring him further. As usual, there is an audio version for paying subscribers).

It is 10:14 am on the morning of January 17th, 2025.

One of my heroes is dead.

Last night my inbox was filling with messages from well-meaning people alerting me to the death of filmmaker, painter, meditation advocate & notoriously well-behaved madman David Lynch. A unique thing has passed out of our world. Thank you, sir.

My relationship with St. David goes way back.

Like a lot of kids in the 1990s, I gravitated to the only interesting show on television: Twin Peaks. Or maybe it was meta-television. The YouTube cinema commentator Maggie Mae Smith regularly notes that Lynch’s projects are covert commentaries on the tropes of the very media in which they are embedded. She might be right. When I first blundered across it, however, I was not interested in high-brow concepts of self-referentiality or ideological critique. I just thought the show was realistic.

I was born into a small town in the Pacific Northwest that was filled with curious quirky characters, intense bursts of goodness, dark green sentient trees & strange haunting mysteries. Based on my own lived experience, Twin Peaks was the only accurate full-spectrum depiction of reality on American television.

Finally, something I could relate to!

And Lynch’s camerawork (like that of Stanley Kubrick and a few others) was refreshingly challenging. It operated as an amplifier of awareness. The poetry of pure focus. A curious and controlled gaze whose sheer force of coherent concentration could peer deeply into the fabric of the world. Too deeply, perhaps. I was captivated by his ability (and desire) to render seemingly ordinary small details into vivid intensities seething with an unnamed excess of the Real.

And this deep focus on ambiguous details (whose salience was seemingly selected by subconscious instinct) amplified those basic chunks of semantic content into haunting hieroglyphs. It made his art magical.

Weaving mood, image, and acoustics together, Lynch fascinated me with his ability to elicit a visceral sense of “too much.” This grouped him in my mind with philosophers like Jacques Lacan (the excessive Real) and writers like H.P. Lovecraft (who described the quivering surplus that mocked every ordinary form of rational perception).

I found out about David Lynch from a CBC radio program that described Twin Peaks as “surrealist.” That term was familiar to me because of Salvador Dali. I found out about Salvador Dali from my father’s illustrated copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. It had a small image featuring a giraffe on fire. A seductive glimpse into a realm that I somehow recognized.

Studying Dali’s art, novels, and essays, I discovered he was not just a painter but rather an authentic mystic with a transcendental cosmology & a special set of self-deranging “perceptual practices” connected with his attempts to live surrealistically. We do not always think of surrealism as a set of practices — but we should.

The Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) is so much better than the first one that we have reason to suspect that Andre Breton’s psychological exercises were actually evolving his own understanding & enriching his worldspace. That radical art moment began in the chaos of automatic writing, random chance, hypnosis, and post-war Dadaist distrust of civilization, sanity, and modern art. Yet it became something much more interesting. An attempt to encounter (and communicate) a socially transformative and uniquely beautiful hyperreality through artful combinations of conscious & unconscious sensemaking. Shamanic Revival 101.

In Lynch’s own book, Catching the Big Fish, he describes tactics for simultaneously undergoing existential development through meditation AND harvesting the deepest, moodiest fragments of subconscious intelligence — which can then be woven into sincere, post-critical, and newly naive meta-art.

Very delightful.

I also found myself, as an adolescent, more or less, located in that alluring overlap between the surreal arts & the spiritual quest. David Lynch was a powerful north star in that hybrid space where he integrated his idiosyncratic nightmare worlds, uncanny everyday heavens, and his increasingly public work on world peace & consciousness expansion.

That terminology comes from his spiritual mentor Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who taught Transcendental Meditation (TM). I classify that method as a type of subtle mantra work. It differs from regular mantra meditation in its orientation. The idea is to put less and less effort into each repetition as you slowly teach your attention to prefer subtler, more primitive, and more liminal instances of the imaginal perception arising in your mind — eventually becoming absorbed in the limit-condition of awareness.

Salvador Dali, of course, was also in the “Venn diagram” intersection between surrealism & spirituality. So were Carl Jung and William Burroughs. Take a look at Adi Da’s strange photography and his weird opera The Mummery. Read Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (or read just about any personal interaction with Gurdjieff). Study the crazy paintings and ferociously weird metaphors of Zen master Hakuin. Read the poetry of the “Mad Dalai Lama” or the peculiar art theories of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Trungpa and Lynch entered my life the same summer. I was reading about the post-Buddhist Shambhala vision when I first overcame my horror at popular American television fads and checked out the show. From the first opening notes of Angelo Badalamenti’s exquisite soundtrack for Twin Peaks, I was hooked.

Both Lynch and Trungpa combined their twin passions for meditation practice & the artwork of “bardo realms" into their focus on the vividness of the natural world. A feeling of enhanced sanity and real magic is available to us through a clear inspection of the sound of the wind in the trees. And the cynical, deconstructive trash heap of the world was utterly compatible with an immense faith in the intrinsic goodness and dignity of beings. Or, to put it another way:

The owls are not what they seem.

The second season of Twin Peaks famously meandered, following interference from TV executives who drove Lynch away from the project. He returned, however, to direct the utterly radical and prophetic final episode. It was incredible. When the prequel film Fire Walk With Me came to town, I went to the mall cinema, hours early, with a friend — to make sure we got good tickets for the first showing and beat the long line-up.

Imagine our surprise when we turned out to be the only people in the theater. Lynch had gone (and not for the first time) into that place where is hard for the conventional public, or conventional movie critics, to follow. A wild, dark, ambiguous, and multidimensional place populated by fractured identities, liminal thresholds, and strange entities who might be psychological, aboriginal, or alien. Maybe all three.

I was one of those people who thought it was worth the effort to follow him. Blue Velvet. Wild at Heart. Lost Highway. Mulholland Drive. These were stories that featured ontological rupture and the dark roots of everyday experience, but that is not what they were “about.” They were about beauty in all things. They were about how closely a coherent mind can inspect the lurid and tragic elemental forces that structure the irrational surface of contemporary life.

The pleasure of these films is not in their “content,” (which you must grow the strength and curiosity to tolerate) but rather in your personal relationship to David Lynch.

In “David Lynch Keeps His Head (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), the novelist & early metamodern theorist David Foster Wallace uses his trip to the set of the filming of Lost Highway to frame his personal exploration of Lynch.

Wallace writes:

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively — i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian […]

For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of this weird irony of the banal has affected the way I see and organize the world. I've noted since 1986 (when Blue Velvet was released) that a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures — grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances ... a class of public-place humans I've privately classed, via Lynch, as "insistently fucked up."

Or, e.g. we've all seen people assume sudden and grotesque facial expressions — like when receiving shocking news, or biting into something that turns out to be foul, or around small kids for no particular reason other than to be weird — but I've determined that a sudden grotesque facial expression won't qualify as a really Lynchian facial expression unless the expression is held for several moments longer than the circumstances could even possibly warrant, until it starts to signify about seventeen different thing at once.

I have argued that Lynch should be classed as Metamodern (if anybody still gives a damn about that word). He believed that art should be vivid, personal, and liminal. He believed that art was a vehicle for transcendence through its coherent inspection of the fracture of the world. He believed that artists did not need to suffer but rather they needed to understand suffering and live beyond it — in the form of living more sincerely with others.

His artworks flow smoothly from extreme humor to extreme horror. From wild action to heartfelt tranquility. From the cosmic to the super-ordinary. Like other artists in the still nascent “metamodern space,” his work is characterized by a personal and emotional, virtue-driven, coherence that combines a sincere-but-critical expression, and rotation, among multiple other genres. To quote his own character, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, in the 17-hour film Twin Peaks: The Return:

“This thing’s turned up to the max!”

Apparently, weirdos can be even weirder if they dress conservatively, eat the same thing every day, speak like it is the 1940s & believe deeply in the possibility of human goodness. BTW here’s the video he made for fellow long-term meditator and 1960s superstar Donovan. I’ve shared it before but this seems an appropriate time to remember the cosmocentric flavors into which Lynch was always feeling.

My two favorite books about David Lynch are probably

(1) The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime by Slavoj Zizek. The Slovenian philosopher takes the quintessential deep dive into the ontological and psychoanalytic implications of Lynch’s film Lost Highway, and

(2) Kristine McKenna’s Room to Dream. It is a combination of Lynch-biography, interviews with people from his personal life, and his own commentaries on their commentaries. Combined with odd additional memory fragments and bits of life advice. It is a pleasure to read or listen to (and Lynch narrates his own sections in the audiobook).

The Lynchian style in cinema is now pervasive. His approach to shot choices, camera angles, moods, acoustics, and the unsettling use of inappropriate retro-pop music, are mainstream among new filmmakers and the hip producers of streaming series. Yet he never really became mainstream.

Or at least he never succumbed to that common softening, mellowing, and domesticated indifference that sometimes afflicts older “great directors.” He continued to be an edgy, idiosyncratic agent of the leading-edge. Sometimes so far ahead that his partial imitators, years later, are still regarded as avant-garde.

For lots of us, Lynch’s work made us feel less alone. He was an inspiration, a teacher, and a comrade.

In Richard Beymer’s amateur documentary, It’s a Beautiful World, he follows Lynch from the foothills of the Himalayas to the southernmost temple in India. Ostensibly they are scouting locations for Lynch’s own documentary about the life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In practice, the film is actually a high-speed chronicle of Lynch visiting ancient sacred sites and meditating seriously in communion with the blessing-presence of deceased saints.

I can now meditate in communion with the blessing-presence of the deceased saint Sri David Keith Lynch. After another cup of hot black coffee, that is.

It’s a beautiful thing.