“I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad but it’s not devastating if you think like that. Otherwise, I don’t see how anybody could ever, once they see someone die, that they’d just disappear forever and that’s what we’re all bound to do. I’m sorry but it just doesn’t make any sense, it’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.” (David Lynch, BBC Culture interview, 2023)
David Lynch dropped his physical body on the 15th of January. Lynch’s birthday came five days later. January 20. Inauguration day. I have succumbed to magical thinking, a belief that Lynch chose his death and birth dates for this moment. Here is why:
The candles went out on Lynch’s cake as Trump returned. Within hours, Trump was issuing executive orders in dizzying numbers, each order as cruel and frightening as the one before it, endangering immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, LGBTQ+ people, birthright citizenship, government DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, medical research, and the planet itself. The U.S. now stands to pull out of the Paris Climate Treaty and the World Health Organization. In what can only be seen as presidential permission for future Trump-loyalist and far-right violence, pardons have been issued to the majority of January 6 defendants including leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Finally, in what must surely come to bite many of his own voters, Trump rescinded Biden’s 2022 order to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security all look less safe.
It was a shock-and-awe inaugural strategy, surely designed to instill fear in targeted groups, most notably immigrants and transgender people. As for those of us not directly impacted, it was a strategy to overwhelm and destabilize witnesses and critics. How could we not end the long inauguration hours in despair?
Enter David Lynch. Or we might say, exit David Lynch. Or we might say enter the exited David Lynch for by his own often-expressed views about mortality, “we’ll all meet again, like the song says.” In the days following Lynch’s death, extending to Inauguration Day and beyond, I kept meeting Lynch again. Yes, there were the expected obituaries, clips of his films, and critical appreciations of a brilliant artist and cineaste. But there was something more. I could not scroll any social media page without encountering Lynch’s words and homespun voice. In interview after interview, he described his creative process, his love of coffee, and the virtues of daydreaming and meditation:
“You dive within, you experience this, you unfold it and you’re unfolding totality. The human has this potential and they have names for this potential: enlightenment, liberation, salvation, fulfilment – huge potential for the human being. And we don’t need to suffer. You enliven this thing and you realise that bliss is our nature. We’re like happy campers, flowing with ideas. We’re like little dogs with tails wagging. It’s not a goofball thing, it’s a beautiful full thing, really, really great.” (David Lynch, Bliss is Our Nature, NFT interview)
Lynch came like a guardian angel in the dark, winging his way into our immediate American nightmare. Bringing dogs with tails wagging. (Yes, I felt the breath of Gladys in those words.) “We don’t need to suffer,” he said. Beings do not need to suffer. Whether we meditate or not, we encounter this sincere belief in Lynch, one he found through an equally sincere engagement with suffering. If Lynch’s films delivered terror, hope, and bliss in equal measure, this was because he dared to look at nightmares, the disturbing or violent undersides of the American Dream:
“If you saw a film and the beginning of the film was peaceful, the middle was peaceful, and the end was peaceful – what kind of story is this? You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.” (David Lynch, The Talks, 2025)
“Stories should have the suffering, not the people.” Not the people, not the storyteller even. Let the story carry the weight. It’s striking how many times Lynch reminds us that by probing suffering in our stories, we relieve suffering in ourselves and others.
And for Lynch, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, a bad dream is a road to a good dream. The story takes us along the road. Lynch once introduced one of his films with a line from the Upanishads: “We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” Moreover, should the protagonist/dreamer, like Dorothy, tumble into another world, this holds no problems for Lynch:
“You know, films are a world within a world. And maybe it’s a world within a world within a world – within another world. It’s a really beautiful thing how lost we are, and we want to get even more lost sometimes.” (See B Kite, “Remain in Light: Mulholland Dr and the Cosmogony of David Lynch,” Sight and Sound, March 2012.)
“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz,” Lynch once remarked. References to the film and/or its myriad obscure influences abound in his work. (For a committed and creative examination of these, see Alexandre O. Philippe’s recent film, Lynch/Oz.) I’ve long known of Lynch’s Oz obsession and that, like my own love of Oz (see Oz at 80: Archive of a Rust Belt Girl), this likely emerged from the repeated annual television broadcasts of the film beginning in 1956. At a screening of Lynch/Oz, Alexander O. Philippe was told by Lynch’s sister of David’s childhood fascination with the film. I was two years old in 1956. Lynch was 10. Postwar children. Denizens of the 1950s. We grew up with Oz. Not Oz the books but early-days-of-television Oz, where the 1939 film found its best home.
Like some of Lynch’s films, The Wizard of Oz frightened me many times in life. It still does. It helped me to wonder or cry anytime I needed - about the meanings of home, leaving home, facing fears and finding courage, friendship, helping others, and that strange lifelong thing called ‘growing up’. It made me marvel at alternative worlds, journeys of identity, evil lurking in the forests and behind curtains, the blurring of dreams and reality. In exactly the way Lynch often described his own process, Dorothy goes to scary places to find her courage and goodness. And she shares these with us. (I might add here that, like Lynch, Judy Garland possessed memorable cadences and tremors in her speaking voice and she gave these wholeheartedly to Dorothy.)
When my History studies led me to write about the post-war suburban dream, it was memories of the Oz broadcasts that informed my initial research questions. I understood that for all I had loved growing up in post-war suburbia, the place and time possessed a dark side. Suburbia held histories that were not happy for everyone. I could no longer love my childhood there without somehow incorporating this knowledge.
Although I knew Lynch held a fascination for the 1950s too, it was only after his recent death that I came across this piece of writing about suburbia:
“That 1950s small-town thing, it’s different, and to catch that mood is important. It’s dreamy, that’s what it is. The 50s mood isn’t completely positive, though, and I always knew there was stuff going on. When I was out after dark and going around on my bike, some houses had lights on inside that were kind of warm, or I knew the people who lived in the house. Other houses, the lights were dim, and with some houses they were almost out and I didn’t know the people who lived there. I’d get a feeling from these houses of stuff going on that wasn’t happy. I didn’t dwell on it, but I knew there were things going on behind those doors and windows.” (David Lynch On the Dark Side of Fifties Suburbia, 2018)
Like Lynch, and from an early age, I “knew there was stuff going on.” In a nutshell, my postgraduate study was a search for that ‘stuff.’ And I found plenty of it. (See Dreaming Suburbia, 2004) If I dug myself into suburban history, Lynch took the wilder path of cinema. He dreamed suburbia/America with subversive daring and artistry beyond my imaginings. The man with the dark vision and kind heart, rather like the Wizard/Professor Marvel himself, gave the fifties kids his gifts over and over. It should come as no surprise then, that there has been such an outpouring of affection for Lynch since his death.
In Burbank, California, a spontaneous shrine has appeared at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. I had no idea that for several years, Lynch was a regular customer imbibing coffee and milkshakes at Bob’s, making notes on napkins, and organizing meetups between actors cast in his films.
"I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think. There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner." (David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity)
For me, how magical again to find that Lynch enjoyed Big Boy milkshakes and the reliable comforts of a diner. My personal memories of Big Boy were set in the context of childhood church attendance and the refusal of faith, a gradual inner toppling of Gods (religious, patriarchal, capitalist). See my earlier post, one prompted by the real-world toppling of a Big Boy monument during a storm in Kalkaska, Michigan, my home state. (See Church, Big Boy, and George Eliot)
What does any of this have to do with Trump and Inauguration Day? You, patient reader, may already be seeing it yourself. It has to do with Lynch’s fearless look into the night and our human potential for violence and cruelty. We too can look with our eyes wide and minds stirred. We can be fearless too.
Yes, a key Lynchian line was, “We live inside a dream.” But Trump is no dream, we know that. Trump is deadly real and we must find real responses to the coming disaster. But it may help us, at times, to view him as a bad dream. Remember Dorothy. Remember a bad dream may set us on the road to a good dream. What we feel, think, say, and do as we face, yes, this most awful of American realities – all this matters. In our resistance, we dream a better dream and strive to make it a reality. “We don’t need to suffer.” And we don’t need to make others suffer.
Maybe you are finding some other set of thoughts to guide you through these early days of the regime. We each do our own work. But I like my magical thoughts that David Lynch chose this dark moment to ‘drop his physical body’ in the knowledge that an outpouring of Lynchian love and wisdom would follow. Our media feeds would fill with his ideas, delivered in that plain, neighborly voice casting its spell. A Jimmy Stewart voice for the end of days.
Here is that voice for anyone who needs it. Lynch as actor. Lynch in Lucky, a late film about aging and mortality. Lynch defending the innocent, his missing tortoise named President Roosevelt. Lynch reminding us to love animals and other beings, care about where they go and what happens to them, yet learn to set them free. Lynch’s character never finds the tortoise. In the end, he resolves to leave his gate open, in gentle acceptance that Roosevelt will make his own choices. A fitting image for our times.
Thanks Amy - I really enjoyed this piece and it added to my scant knowledge of Lynch. Very interesting and timely.