David Lynch

It was my first ever date in college. I was a sophomore. Freshman year I hadn’t tested the scene. I was too obsessed with writing poems and watching French New Wave films at the film library. This was Ann Arbor, Michigan. Super hippie vibe. Super frat vibe. Super Jewish American Princess vibe. I loved it. For the first two years I was obsessed with the place (then of course I needed a bigger scene, a bigger city, etc etc).

I was a film and literature major. There was this guy in the art history department who wore Versace and Dior and basically screamed faggot. Everyone clocked him on campus. I was intrigued by anyone willing to be that bold. This was 2004. Before the gay mainstream moment or at the very beginning. Before the pathetic trappings of woke culture. Before my adult life really! I didn’t know what I was doing. (And I still don’t! Thank god.)

It was also before phones and the internet took over our brains. So walking back from my film production class one day this art history faggot asked me out, on the street, as we were walking opposite ways on State Street. I said sure. And since we were in front of the State theater and I’m forward, I said why don’t we see Blue Velvet here next week at midnight. What’s Blue Velvet, he asked. You’ll see, I said.

My best friends were lesbians. They knew David Lynch films well. We shared a lot of things culturally and a big one was watching Twin Peaks when we were very little. My grandmother used to watch it and she knew I was too young but was so pulled by it herself, we would watch the reruns together and of course it had an effect on me.

I immediately understood that one key element of art making was mystery and to be haunted by something. To not fully understand why you are feeling the way you are and to feel it. And live in that space of what is this, why, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.

Don’t take him to see Blue Velvet on a first date, all the dykes said. It’s such a test! No way, I said. First of all, it’s one of Lynch’s best films and perhaps his most “mainstream” whatever that means. My favorite is Lost Highway but it was too early for it to be screened in the cult way Blue Velvet was back then. I’m sure Lost Highway is being screened somewhere tonight. It should be.

Don’t test people! The dykes were all about easing into something. I just didn’t have the time. I still don’t. He’ll get it or he won’t, I said. It’s provocative, sure. It’s carnal. And strange. Perverse. Romantic. Beautiful and ugly.

Blue Velvet was the first David Lynch film I saw after Twin Peaks on television. It’s just memorable because there is a part of your brain—my brain—that lit up and was touched in that place where one thinks: oh. Art can do that. Okay. Noted.

I ended up dating that boy for four years. We were in college. It’s wild to me it lasted so long because really it should have lasted maybe 3 years shorter. Who cares! You have a lot of time to waste when you’re young anyway. We recently reconnected in London and he was like, I still remember seeing Blue Velvet together when I barely knew you. Ten minutes in I knew I would have to go on a second date. Thank you, David Lynch. I certainly can’t take credit for the film or vision but I’ve always had taste. And so has Lynch.

I took another boyfriend to IFC to see a midnight screening of Mulholland Drive a few years ago, somewhere in the pandemic when we were all just starting to do stuff. The theater was empty. A few people maybe. Masked. I didn’t wear a mask. I just don’t have time to live in fear. And neither did Lynch, or his characters, or his movies.

David Lynch’s work is an enlargement of cinema. His films swim among the American giants like Kubrick, Allen, Scorsese—the list is short but there are others. He is an auteur (a director with a distinctive style, as we were taught in film school; someone who, if you were to walk into a theater halfway through a film, within 2 minutes you would know it was a David Lynch film; that’s auteur style in film theory).

He also challenges the great European directors before him. He is quintessentially American. Which is to say fearless. His films are unafraid to push aesthetic boundaries and social ones, too. Every queer kid knows that. But Lynch never fell into the trappings of identity. He believed, as every great artist does, in aesthetics over everything.

I have asked myself before why Lynch films are the ones I like to show romantic prospects early on. Some of it is fun, for sure. Seeing how people will react to some twisted scene or dialogue. But Lynch’s cinema is a true luxuriating in the imagination. It celebrates the human spirit, fucked up as it is. Fucked up being one of the things to celebrate (he’s certainly hinted at that).

Farewell to a legend. If anyone wants to go on a date in the future you better believe I’m pulling out the Lynch filmography again. I can still hear my girlfriends saying, don’t test him, don’t test him.

As soon as I hear the phrase don’t, I’m doing it. That’s the spirit Lynch taught me along with so many other artists in the culture. Not so many really. They are rare these kind of people. They don’t come around often. Especially in the current ass kissing, corporate behaving, office culture that has been ushered into the arts by academia, politics, wokeness, etc.

Fuck everything but real art and real artists. David Lynch forever.

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