#philamoca

JG Thirlwell will be performing his Silver Mantis project at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia on June 13 2026. Tickets are available here

This year only just begun but boy does this one hurt! Visionary of film, TV, art, and music David Lynch has died at 78. The news was announced via Lynch's Facebook page (is it is, in fact, not true - I'll be taking this down). Last year it was announced that he was homebound, but open to directing remotely.

Lynch in the red room

I discovered his work around 1990 when Twin Peaks became a national phenomenon and I discovered a lot of his other work. He was truly an artist in every sense of the word. He often felt that he said so much with his work that it was hard to talk about it in interviews afterwards as the film was the final statement. In 2015, I had a screening at PhilaMOCA near where he lived during his time in Philly and they had a mural of him outside.

Eraserhead mural outside PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia

In the mid-60s, Lynch actually did a year in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where his roommate was actually Pete Wolf, pre-J. Geils Band. Imagine the conversations the two of them must've had!?! He eventually made his way to art school in Philadelphia. To say that environment had an impact on his work would be an understatement. I have a copy of The Short Films of David Lynch compilation, which contains a lot of his early short films made between 1967 and 1974. Even then, he was developing a unique visual style. But he truly announced himself with his feature film debut 1977's Eraserhead. It became a huge cult film, playing midnight screenings for years to come. It also influenced musicians like The Pixies and Talking Heads. I picked up a bootleg circa 2000 that was dubbed from a Japanese laserdisc, so much of my viewing experience with it is with subtitles. I lent that to a number of friends in college too. Now it is available from Criterion, but at the time, it was quite a find to score a copy and not have to go to Harvard Square at midnight to see it. I can’t even say I fully get or understand this film, but one thing is clear: you can’t turn away from it!

Isabella Rossellini being directed by Lynch on Blue Velvet

In the 80s, he got bigger canvases and directed Elephant Man and the adaptation of Dune. The later tends to get a bad wrap because of the amount he had to pack into one movie, whereas Denis Vileneuve had the luxury of splitting it into two movies. But credit where it's due, Lynch tried to make a three hour film and the studio cut it down, but the final film had its moments. Around this time, Lynch was actually offered the chance to direct Return of the Jedi and declined. Can you imagine that? But in 1986, his magnum opus was Blue Velvet released. It is almost like a greatest hits of Lynch elements: film noir, femme fatale, surrealism, gruesome imagery set against pleasant imagery, and excellent use of music. It’s a combination of a great story and screenplay combined with Lynch’s trademark bizarre style (”want to see the chicken walk?”). But the entire cast is pitch perfect and Lynch pushed the envelope further than 99% of most directors in the 80s. This is one of my 15 favorite films of all time. In 2021, I returned to movie theaters for the first time in over a year and I saw Blue Velvet at Coolidge Corner Theatre. A very special occasion with a very special movie!

me at the Twin Peaks’ red room set at the 2019 Rock and Shock. 

Lynch collaborated with Mark Frost to create TV's Twin Peaks (ABC 1990-1991), one of the greatest and edgiest network TV shows ever.  The constant theme in Blue Velvet of there being more than meets the eye in the seemingly perfect suburban community is something he expanded on with Twin Peaks. The series became a cultural phenomenon. Everyone wanted to know “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” in 1990. I, myself, did not actually start watching the series until the fall, and then I caught up on all the episodes I missed and I was hooked. I remember reading the books they came out with like the Laura Palmer Diaries. The series came to a bizarre end in June 1991. After the series ended, Lynch did a prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Fans of the series were frustrated that this prequel, about the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life, didn’t tie up any loose ends. It more or less was a movie made up the pieces that came into play from the series and from the book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. But that doesn’t mean it was bad, by any means. A lot of fans either didn’t get it or didn’t care now that they knew who the killer Bob was from the series. I dug it. It had all of Lynch’s trademark surrealism and a great performance from Sheryl Lee. In 2017, Lynch and much of the cast reunited for the Showtime limited series Twin Peaks. The series got even weirder and more bizarre when it went to cable. I named it one of my Top 10 TV Shows of the 2010s.

Bill Pullman and Lynch on Lost Highway

He brought his style to the 1990 road movie Wild at Heart, which was awesome! In 1997, he returned to film noir with Lost Highway. When this was released, I was recuperating from illness and when I felt well enough I went into NYC and saw this at the Chelsea Cinema. The story of this seemingly normal couple played by Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette whose lives are shaken when a mysterious VHS tape of their house shows up one day. Things get weirder when a mystery man played by Robert Blake (with no eyebrows I might add) approaches Pullman at a party and says he is at their house right now. From there it delves knee-deep into Lynchian surrealism and modern film noir. It features a killer score from Trent Reznor too. It is definitely out there and not for everyone. But the more people I talk to over the years have hailed this as one of Lynch’s best. Then Lynch did a complete left turn with The Straight Story, a G-rated simple film about a man traveling across country on a tractor. A beautiful film that's unlike any others of his.

Naomi Watts and Lynch on Mulholland Drive

In the 00s, Lynch turned his attention to the dark side of Hollywood with another noir Mulholland Drive. Even more than the movie itself, I recall seeing it at the movies with a friend and his friend and afterwards us talking over drinks trying to make sense of what we just saw. Great movie, but tons of Lynch WTFery! Today, it is hailed as one of the greatest of this century. In 2006, he continued the themes of Hollywood's dark side with the underrated Inland Empire. He also broke the internet with his daily weather reports, where he read the day's weather in his unique voice.

Lynch as John Ford in The Fabelmans

Lynch's acting also deserves a mention. He did small parts in his own films, notably as FBI Chief Gordon Cole on Twin Peaks. In 2017, I interviewed John Carroll Lynch (no relation) about casting David Lynch in his directorial film Lucky and he said "It was entirely his love of Harry Dean Stanton." He also stole the entire film in Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, where Lynch played director John Ford. That John Ford scene is one of the greatest movie scenes with a filmmaker ever and Lynch brought it!

There have been a number of documentaries exploring the various interpretations and theories of Lynch's work including Blue Velvet Revisited and Lynch/Oz.

Lynch cover stories in EW and Rolling Stone

For me, he was one of the first directors that influenced me. As a teen, I gleaned over books, articles and interviews about him. It was one of the first times, I noticed that a director was on the cover of magazines, not just the cast. But more than that, it was his body of work. There was pure WTFery in his movies and it seemed like there was no story and it was a bunch of crazy stuff, but his movies were very well constructed, they were just structured in such a way to have some crazy out-there surrealism within those stories.

He was nominated for Oscars for directing Elephant Man (also nominated for writing), Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, but he only won an Honorary Award in 2020. Putting him in that club of directors like Hitchcock and Kubrick who also never won Oscars for directing. Lynch also recorded music (some were his own soundtracks) and his art work was exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

Philadelphia's one redeeming quality is that there's a venue with a Don Dracula mural.

New Post has been publisned on ERASERHOOD:

Six Degrees of H. H. Ogre

a mixed media piece i made way back when. 2009? 2010? have i been making art that long??? this was for a gallery show at PhilaMOCA in philadelphia, when they first started doing their Eraserhood Forever shows? I put a few pieces in over the years, but this one is special because the gallery bought it from me, and (while i dont know this for certain) i think they had it up on display when David Lynch dropped by.

This was a shadowbox i got from a thrift store, and i printed out the eraserhead baby and mounted it inside the shadowbox. (cant remember if i made it dimensional at all) I scrawled the Fresh Prince joke with a paint marker on the striped backer board.