The Magician Longs to See: An Elegy for David Lynch, ‘Twin Peaks’ Visionary and Hollywood Legend
The Magician Longs to See: An Elegy for David Lynch, ‘Twin Peaks’ Visionary and Hollywood Legend
I first “met” David Lynch when I was around 12 through his technicolor nightmarescape Wild at Heart. I remember watching the film and saying to my mother it was a version of The Wizard of Oz. She told me to stop imagining things. A few years later when I wanted to be an actor and one of the many movie magazines I subscribed to arrived featuring an interview with Mr. Lynch, I’d never felt so vindicated to read his own words linking his horror romance to Vincent Minelli’s classic musical. “The way your head works is God’s own private mystery,” Sailor (Nicholas Cage) says to Lula in Wild at Heart, and that felt like a line tailored about me too. Especially when people around me didn’t appreciate the unique way I recognize the world.
By the mid 1990s I’d also figured out Wild at Heart hadn’t even been my first foray into the Lynchian experience. I’d been obsessed with his 1985 Dune adaptation (and the book because of it) as well as the hauntingly tragic 1980 film The Elephant Man which made me cry and cry. In the meantime I’d also found myself strangely fixated on and profoundly disturbed Blue Velvet’s (1986) psychosexual themes even as I didn’t remotely understand them as a teenager. All I knew is that there was something about David Lynch’s storytelling that spoke to me of outsiders like myself, and ways to find beauty in the ugliest situations as we expose those grotesque truths.
Lynch felt like home long before I found myself in Twin Peaks. But Twin Peaks was the true game changer for me.
I grew up a Third Culture Kid — a fancy term for someone who moved around during their developmental years and was raised in places that weren’t their parents’ home countries. My mother is a white woman from Wisconsin, my father a Tamil and Sinhalese man from Sri Lanka. When I was introduced to Twin Peaks my sense of “home” was relegated to imaginary towns like Derry in the Stephen King-verse. But that little mountain town of Twin Peaks weirdos just hit differently to 19-year-old me. Even though there were few people who looked like me on screen, it still felt like a place I belonged. I devoured the nearby Hollywood Video’s VHS collection of the only two seasons at that time in 1998, and the extraordinary companion prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. For a while when people asked me where I was from I’d say Twin Peaks. They’d think the actual towns in California with that same moniker. I’d be sure to correct them with, “No, David Lynch’s.”
It wouldn’t be until 1999, after my first relationship with an abusive partner that Lynch’s groundbreaking Fire Walk With Me really sunk in. At the time nobody was talking about domestic violence or sexual abuse in such frank and nuanced ways, and Lynch captured the experience perfectly in detailing the final horrifying days before Laura Palmer ended up on the beach, wrapped in plastic. I bonded with so many women over Laura and her ordeal as we swapped our personal horror stories of assault and found community in survivors. Courtenay Stallings’s 2020 Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak About Twin Peaks collected stories from women in the Twin Peaks world, myself included, as we shared how meeting Laura Palmer helped us confront the monsters of our pasts and heal. David Lynch’s creation had become a kind of sanctuary for us, where we could exist alongside the terrible things that had happened to us — and find surprising comfort there among kindred.
But this is not to say that my relationship with David Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular has always been an easy one. With the revival of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 I wrote a series of performative reflections on the third season called “Beyond the Red Room,” from the perspective of a Brown woman living in that very white town. These pieces are heartfelt and vulnerable; they also pull back the red curtain on some harsh truths about racism in the community. A handful of Peakies appreciated my perspective. But the majority showed up with pitchforks and torches to burn me out of town. I lost count of the number of times I was incited to suicide, or threatened with murder. It was an out of body experience to be told by Peakies I needed to conform to their interpretations of the show, or else.
This cultic behavior made no sense in support of a man who blew his own whistle out the side and made the most beautiful music, unlike anything we’d ever heard. Conformity wasn’t David Lynch’s MO. Falling in line wasn’t something he did. Nor was it something I will ever do. But for my own safety, a line had indeed been drawn between me and my imaginary home, one that would make my relationship with not just Twin Peaks but also Lynch himself complicated.
When my friend texted me that Lynch had joined David Bowie in the Stardust Realm on January 15, 2025, I made a sound I’d only made once before last year, after the anesthesia wore off from elbow reconstruction surgery: a primal, guttural, wail of agony that shreds my vocal cords and leaves me breathless in sorrow.
Lynch only made a handful of films in his career, and the small number serves to highlight his incredible influence on the art of cinema. Mulholland Drive remains one of the most brutal and haunting love stories put to screen. Inland Empire is the deconstruction of self after trauma. Lost Highway is the horror of domestic violence told through Lynch’s signature surrealist lens. And while The Straight Story is indeed a straight-forward narrative made for Disney audiences, Lynch’s motifs are ever present for those of us in the know. Eraserhead is a genre of its own entirely.
And each of these films hold a specific and fundamental place in my creation of self that to imagine a world without Lynch in living form is like losing a father I actually love, admire, and who did far more good for me becoming the artist I am than my biological one. I was sure 2025 would be the year I’d finally meet Mr. Lynch in person. So I could tell him how I connected his work to Keanu Reeves through River’s Edge and how my upcoming “critical Reeves theory” hinges on my Brechtian analysis of Twin Peaks and The Return. I wanted to give him my book, shake his hand and tell him how he’s the one who made me. That his gum would always be in style.
Alas, Mr. Lynch has returned to the ether from where he once said his ideas emerged. He’s been an indispensable glowing orb in the firmament of our lives for decades. Now he’s become the very air we breathe. I’m heartbroken he’s gone, but I also feel his transcendental clarity running through me — in my lungs, my heart, my soul. His magic will drift to us from the White Lodge now as the magicians long to see. Rest gently, Mr. Lynch. I’ll see you in 25 years.
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