Poetry Month 1: A Recitation of "Porphyria's Lover"

As with February of last year, it's Poetry Month again on the blog. This month is dedicated to the Victorian poet/playwright Robert Browning, who was a master of the dramatic monologue.

Browning's 1836 poem "Porphyria's Lover" is a twisted, psychological masterpiece and one of my favorite poems. Included in his collection Dramatic Lyrics (1842), it is now considered one of the finest Romantic poems of the Victorian Age.

I invite you now into a dark room on a rainy night and into the mind of madness, which is what romantic love is after all, isn't it?

The Art from the Artist: A Primer and Plea

Note: This is probably an essay designed for everyone to hate equally, but I felt compelled. What am I to do in response to the madness I see? I write. So here goes…Thanks to Julie for the edits—Ya did great,, kiddo...

I’m a bad person. No, really. If I were to open the world’s compasses of moralism, I wouldn’t make the grade on any level—not by any religious, civic, or national yardstick. Guess what? Neither would you. Nor would any of us, which is why I have been shouting to anyone who would listen since late 2016 to use their outrage effectively and eloquently rather than throwing stones at people who do awful things (even celebrities, who are broken people, just like me and you) because one day, boomerang-wise, something you said, something you did, will come back to bite you square in the patoot and you may be the next to be jettisoned from society.

This subject came up for me again (nearly a decade of this is exhausting) while I was scrolling through my Facebook feed doing what you all do—seeing who gained weight, who lost, who finally got married, who divorced, and—during a politically charged year—to see who I should unfollow so I don’t have to listen to the mewling, puking wretches of either so-called progressives or so-called conservatives. I feel a bit of Allen Ginsberg in his opening lines of “Howl” where I see direct and irreversible proof that these words are as true of my time as they were of his:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

One of my Facebook “friends,” someone who I was very close to in elementary school, has grown up to be one of the allegedly do-gooding Spanish Inquisitors of our age—making sure all undesirables get the rack regardless of sometimes complicated cases where one doesn’t have to do much research to raise a stink; instead, they simply don’t read any other side of a situation than their own—typically in the guise of fighting for allegedly (and really) oppressed members of our society.

The post that gave you this rant, brought to you by Meta. "We suck. That's the Meta Way."

She shared a post from Francesco Marciuliano, the creator of the syndicated comics Sally Forth and Judge Parker, commenting on the recent fracas over the alleged exploits of British author Neil Gaiman who, I will admit I’ve never read, but I’ve been aware millions of people are both enlightened and moved by his work. Marciuliano wrote, “No, you don’t have to separate the artist from their work. That’s a bull**** line used to excuse the monstrous. Or to put it another way, I’m not reading The Sandman and I’m not missing out at all.” Boy, I hope Francesco has no skeletons in his closet.

"No, you don't have to separate the artist from their work. That's a bull**** line used to excuse the monstrous."

This quote is a curious and almost unbelievably dumb remark from someone who, apparently, earns their living by writing. On the one hand, it is true: one does not have to separate the artist from their work. You actually can go on living, take that stance, and throw out classical writers such as Lewis Carroll and Louisa May Alcott and contemporaries like Orson Scott Card and J. K. Rowling because they are evil and you are supporting their platforms.

Now, let’s sally forth into his second sentence. I can almost assure you, God as my witness, that the first person who said, “I choose to separate the art from the artist” never had it in mind in any sense to excuse monstrous behavior, but then again, it is also not everyone’s prerogative to be the judge of everybody else simply because you have cut your own cloth to fit the times’ fashions (which are nefarious, if you haven’t noticed).

On this blog, I have come to the defense of two artists for whom the question of the art and the artist are complex and deserve attention. I defended opera composer Richard Wagner, arguing the beauty and sheer vision of works like The Ring of the Nibelung and Tristan and Isolde outweigh a man who shared the antisemitic feelings of the vast majority of his countryfolk. How could he not? German literature is not founded on Martin Luther, but his work and thoughts pervaded that culture for many years and, though Luther himself did a noble thing by giving the Scriptures back to the believers, he also spent the last years of his life choking on the vitriol he spewed at his Jewish brothers and sisters. You can read the article here if you wish to see if I successfully showed how one can have two, separate thoughts at one time and not lose sleep over it.

That—accepting two or more separate truths coexisting in one’s mind and yet choosing not to ditch what was great because there was something rotten in the state of Nuremberg—to me, denotes intelligence. I could have written an essay in which I spent more time mourning Wagner’s horrible antisemitism and there would have been much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, but the effect would be a fart bubble in the air. I don’t want to write or talk like everyone else, and I most certainly do not wish to show everyone how good I am, because I’m not. Most of the whiners who do such things actually enjoy the smell of their own brand and South Park did an excellent job sending up such do-gooding chappies in their episode “Smug Alert!”

I have also defended Woody Allen due to overhearing an actual conversation between Mia Farrow and some actors in New York many years ago in which she admitted she implanted a false memory in Dylan Farrow’s head that in itself has been an act of more horrific abuse to her daughter than if she actually had been sexually abused in the way she has described (the timeline never works, so it’s fruitless to examine her “memory”). This latter essay enjoyed some heavy traffic on the site, but no one really took me to task except privately and, even then, they were offering a sensible suggestion on how to soften my tone regarding survivors of abuse who, unfortunately, are very much among us. [I should note here I have as much pity and respect for victims of actual crimes as any sensible human being; it seems stupid to say that, but I suppose you must in 2025]. To me, these two essays encapsulate my thoughts rather well and are even more quaintly written than this piece so as not to hurt too many grown-up baby’s feelings. But that softening is out in this essay, I’m afraid.

"I should note here I have as much pity and respect for victims of actual crimes as any sensible human being; it seems stupid to say that, but I suppose you must in 2025."

It’s alright if people call me an angry white man. I am. But I’m not angry because I think white people are being criticized. In fact, in my prose-poem “Not I But Also,” I criticized Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, and other white women who high-jacked the Me Too movement, which was intended for women of color. By the time Taylor Swift booted Garrison Keillor off her precious radio and Aziz Ansari had to apologize for absolutely nothing, the Me Too movement became, to me, another lily white, blinkered feminist cause that continues to steer attention away from victimized women of color (Bill Burr did a spot-on job with this on Saturday Night Live a few years ago as well). It could have been noble and some of the voices were noble and genuine and heartbreaking, but with Cosby out of prison and the Time’s Up board being dismantled because they were lining their own pockets instead of helping victims proves to me what was good of Me Too came to nothing.

Finally, we come to Marciuliano’s last sentence: “I’m not reading The Sandman and I’m not missing out at all.” I hate to bring a little country wisdom to the proceedings as well as intellectual argument, but how would he know if he were missing out on anything? And, in addition to this, how would we know what great novels Sherman Alexie could have continued writing? How would we know what remarkable acting Kevin Spacey could still be giving us? Despite their flaws (and they—and we—all have many), these are people we are unlikely to ever hear from again. And the claimants against them? Yes, they have a voice now except, in the case of everyone I’ve mentioned so far in this piece, some have been proven false, faulty, and/or jumping on a bandwagon. Worse yet, in the case of Harvey Weinstein (who most certainly did deserve everything he got), many of the named and anonymous victims waited until their NDAs expired to finally point out the injustice. One could argue he was too powerful for anyone to tell the story beforehand, but do we actually know that? What if someone had said something earlier, maybe one of those “good men” who worked for him? If you think this view could only be uttered by a man, check out Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia, two of the greatest (if polarizing) feminist writers, now shamed by their “sisters.”

The Androgyne. The Australian.

This “cancel culture” (really, “cult”) has ruled the roost for nearly ten years now and there are apparently those who just can’t let it go. Again, this is not to say those victimized shouldn’t be free to speak about their experiences, but I can only focus on that concept of “separating the art from the artist” because folks’ refusal to try or even think about such matters with complexity is a thing of the past. So, that led me to this academic exercise, extolling the virtues of independent and complex thinking among those of us who are not straddled to a relatively few smart-sounding English words like toxic, inclusivity, and intersectionality that give one an air of intelligence where none can be found.

In the Wagner essay (a kind of written response to Stephen Fry’s brilliant documentary Wagner and Me), I ended up siding with one scholar who could know and understand on the one hand that Wagner was a great artist and, on the other hand, that he was as all of us are, a broken and pitiful human being. It is not so much that madness is associated with genius (although that happens), it’s that no matter how far any of us climb, we’re just folks who are prone to the biases of the ages in which we are born. This scholar knew how to think—giving serious weight to two opposite ideas and allowing them to live in his mental universe, side by side. He did not, in the end, as so many of my generation and younger do, spat out “do-gooding” hate to be on the side of the au current sexual hysteria du jour. Read your history—America has a sex crisis every thirty years or so. In the early 90s, there was something called political correctness, and it was kind of a latent HIV-like virus ready to jumpstart. Today, that has metastasized into full-blown AIDS (Asinine Individuals Dumbing Society, if you like). These are the same folks who think listening to Wagner commits violence against Jews or words kill more powerfully than a semi-automatic.

As the final nail in my coffin, I offer Scripture. As a Christian, which I suppose is my only label (my generation used to detest labels and now screams, “You better get my label right or I’ll destroy you!!!”), I can only go to what represents morality to me. And, if you’re going to go off on a long tangent about how the Bible is full of rotten, horrible things—go for it. It is the single most misread and misunderstood book in the world. Read Rob Bell’s What is the Bible? or, if you want to do some serious reading, read the actual books as separate works by multiple authors in specific contexts and then come back and we’ll tussle.

Here's Proverbs 6:16-19 in the New Living Translation, an immensely readable equivalency translation:

“There are six things the LORD hates—

no, seven things he detests:

haughty eyes,

      a lying tongue,

      hands that kill the innocent,

 a heart that plots evil,

      feet that race to do wrong,

 a false witness who pours out lies,

      a person who sows discord in a

family.”

Now, why this verse and about this topic? Because it encapsulates both the ribald, voluminous evil men and women do (the Weinsteins, the Asia Argentos, the Danny Mastersons, the Brett Ratners, the R. Kellys) and their eager imprisoners. It seems appropriate that the first thing God hates, or detests, is haughty eyes. What is haughtiness? An old-fashioned word that conjures to the mind images of looking down your nose at others, using condescending speech, holier-than-thou-ness in essence. These are the eyes of those who have had no more of assault of women (as if, unfortunately, that ever will stop), who have had no more of legal red tape (though, if they paid attention to the law, Cosby would still be in jail, so they kind of shot their wad in that instance), who can stand society’s ills no more!

I pity these people because, to me, people are people. All equally broken, all equally capable of goodness and evil. Hypocritical is a good word for these folks. These people do often have lying tongues/false witness or cannot accept apologies or forgive people who have served their time (the cases of Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Luc Besson, Louis CK, Anthony Anderson, David O. Russell, Garth Brooks, Christian Bale, Al Franken, Marlon Brando, James Franco, William Hurt, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Russell Crowe, Alexander Payne, Gary Oldman, Michael Fassbender, David Hamilton, Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Depp, Jeffrey Tambor, Charlie Rose, Elie Wiesel, Harold Bloom, Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicholas Cage, I could go on, but you get my drift).

As for those who hurt the innocent, plot evil, race to do wrong, they have their comeuppance too: Sean Combs, Chris Brown, Ron Jeremy, Armie Hammer, Ansel Elgort, Scott Rudin, Mel Gibson, T. I., Bryan Singer, James Brown, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Joss Whedon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gene Simmons, Mickey Rourke, Ozzy Osbourne, Richard Pryor, Steven Seagal, Robin Thicke…You actually could get lost in both these lists because some were charged, some were not, some were guilty, some were innocent, some were products of the late-60s-early-70s (not a squalid argument—there was once an actual but failed attempt at true sexual liberation in this country), some are alive and some are dead. They are, save a few, all men, though, and a shocking number of Jewish people too—perpetual scapegoats during “inquisitions.” And, getting back to the central theme, there are people on both lists whose work I admire while not admiring them and admire them without liking their work and every complicated issue in-between).

But, as for Proverbs, that last verse—“a person who sows discord in a family”—that is to all of us in this mess of a situation. The human family is a family. We are more enamored of our so-called communities now (though there is no such thing as no one ethnic or social group thinks alike and never will), but we are still a family. The saints and the sinners, the birth-givers and the murderers. Some people do deserve to be removed from our society, but we are still all humans and fall short of (sometimes) any glory.

I leave you with two stanzas from a hymn that has become more and more popular nowadays in mainstream churches, “For Everyone Born, A Place at the Table.” Written in the mid-90s by Shirley Erena Murray, it is now in a baker’s dozen of denominational hymnbooks.

“For everyone born,

a place at the table,

for everyone born,

clean water and bread,

a shelter, a space,

a safe place for growing,

for everyone born,

a star overhead.”

A beautiful sentiment. But one stanza you might not find so beautiful appears in verse 4. Let it melt in your mouth a moment:

“For just and unjust,

a place at the table,

abuser, abused,

with need to forgive,

in anger, in hurt,

a mindset of mercy,

for just and unjust,

a new way to live.”

The emphasis, of course, was added.

For every overprivileged adolescent (in our country, the ages of 11 through 39) who’s ever posted about speaking “truth to power” should sing this. Daily. Do the protestors of today have something to teach us? Yes, it is not that I don’t wish to grow or learn myself, but there is a point when someone of a mature age should put their foot down and help people realize that the protestors of today are so dissimilar from the protestors of the late 1960s that they might as well come from different dimensions in space.

For everyone born, less talk and more compassion. That goes for Me Too and (me too).

David Lynch. Artist. 1946-2025.

David Lynch. Artist.

David Lynch was an artist from Missoula, Montana. He wrote and directed the films Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway (co-written by Barry Gilford), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (co-written with Robert Engels, based on the series by Lynch and Mark Frost), Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Dune (based upon Frank Herbert’s novel), The Elephant Man (co-written by Christophe De Vore and Eric Bergren, based on Frederick Treves’ The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity), and Eraserhead. He also directed the film The Straight Story. For television, he created Hotel Room (with Monty Montgomery) and On the Air and Twin Peaks (with Frost).

His short films include What Did Jack Do?, Idem Paris, Lady Blue Shanghai, Absurda, Darkened Room, Premonition Following an Evil Deed, The Cowboy and the Frenchman, The Amputee, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Online, he created the web series Rabbits and DumbLand. He created music videos for Nine Inch Nails, Interpol, Moby, X Japan, and Chris Isaak and directed the concert films Duran Duran: Unstaged and Industrial Symphony, No. 1.

In addition to occasionally serving as his own editor, composer, art director, special effects designer, cinematographer, animator, and sound designer, he acted on many occasions, his credits including The Fabelmans, Robot Chicken, Louie, Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, DumbLand, and Twin Peaks in each of its variations. He also produced the studio albums Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream in addition to musical collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti, Chrystabell, and Dean Hurley.

His painting and photography were exhibited in Copenhagen, New York, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Los Angeles, Poland, Philadelphia, London, Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico.

He passed away during the wildfires in Los Angeles, California, in January 2025.

*****

I’m in mourning. Seriously. And I’m tired of my heart breaking over these great artists we’re losing who remind me of a different time, almost a different world. In this case, it is one who created his own unique universe of dark beauty. I hope this does you justice, Mr. Lynch.

*****

I’ll never forget taking a stack of library-owned VHS tapes back to my apartment adjacent to Bennington College. While working as a library assistant at the Crossett Library at the liberal arts school, I had come across a complete collection of the first season of Twin Peaks along with the “European” version of the Pilot. So few people believed in Twin Peaks (originally titled, with writer Mark Frost, Northwest Passage) that the great American artist David Lynch had to prepare a “straight-to-video,” “closed-end” movie for overseas distribution—just in case the series was not picked up. It was picked up—and became a national phenomenon. After I digested the first season, I borrowed the 2nd season’s VHS tapes through interlibrary loan as quickly as snail mail could deliver.

The Black Lodge.

I’ll never forget watching the Twin Peaks pilot. It was in the dead of winter in a small Vermont hamlet, and very late at night; I was alone and frightened to death. I followed Lynch’s vision into the Black Lodge, a red-curtained dreamscape where The Man from Another Place speaks both forwards and backwards, dances, and introduces a Laura Palmer-like clone who whispers a secret to Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper that would not be revealed until well into the second season. As this was a closed-end version, I simply let it take me and consume me. I could ponder the meaning, but that was never the point with Lynch’s art and the fact he didn’t explain his films drove his detractors (particularly Roger Ebert) mad and, in the end, even they had to accede that David Lynch, along with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese (and throw in Spielberg and Lucas if you must) was the greatest living American filmmaker. And he is gone. And I feel as though the world should mourn first and then celebrate, with a piece of cherry pie and a damn fine cup of coffee, the work of this authentic American genius.

Back to the Black Lodge: Kyle MacLachlan, an early Lynch collaborator, sat looking as if twenty-five years of cobwebs had plastered him in his seat as if he had been frozen in time. Sheryl Lee’s haunting Laura Palmer (or her doppelganger) confuses Agent Cooper, the only one who can speak forward, while shadows of owls pass overhead and, with the most unique television score perhaps ever, it ended as soon as it came. I woke up in a cold sweat—several hours later; exhilarated and riven. The only other thing I remember is that I clung, terrified, to my girlfriend when she came home until the sun, what little ever of it set on our corner of the Northeast Kingdom, finally rose.

By the time I got around to watching the next episode, Lara Flynn Boyle’s character Donna explained Twin Peaks—the whole thing. In these few lines, she encapsulated the essence of what it was: a masterpiece featuring the best and funniest of humanity with the darkest realms of human (or supernatural) imagination. Reflecting on her last 24-hour period (in which she has lost her best friend and fallen in love), she says, “I know I should be sad, and I am, part of me is. But it’s like…it’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream...and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.” That’s what Twin Peaks is. That’s David Lynch’s work summed up in a nutshell. Now that he’s gone, who do we have beside Scorsese & Coppola? Catherine Breillat, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson? No matter your pick, there’s now no one like David Lynch.

SIX MEN GETTING SICK (SIX TIMES). Well, just once in this case.

In the above biography, I called him an artist, not simply a filmmaker. As a young man, at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynch was a painter. He was a painter then and he never stopped painting or producing gorgeous, though explicitly erotic fine art photography. It seems, in the end, he would have been happy if he could have lived as a painter. But it was in Philadelphia where Lynch looked at one of his paintings and deigned that it would move, not unlike Michaelangelo deliberately destroying one of his sculptures with a chisel and begging it to speak! The result was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) his film debut. Whether the image was moving or stagnant, the sound score deafening or silently or deadly, Lynch became the foremost filmmaker of his time in rapid succession though he would fight critics all his life and, at one time, felt he had sold out. There were amazing years and lean years—the life of a public artist whose own persona in web shows and on late night television—finally endeared him to the nation—or, at least, those of us who still care about art.

ERASERHEAD.

Eraserhead is one of those late-night movies that finally find their niche audience. With what would be a long-time collaborator, Jack Nance, Eraserhead was the movie in the ‘70s that filmmakers, if not audiences en masse, were watching; Stanley Kubrick being one such admirer. In some ways, it is a distillation of all his work in one moribund puzzle (though Twin Peaks is an elevated work of art). Bits and pieces of that puzzle were given to us from time to time, from masterpiece to masterpiece. We would find Eraserhead’s odd, lightning-striped floor again in his magnum opus. We would see a master of sight, sound, and silence grow and grow into perfection, whether he worked on filmstock or through digital means.

On the set with another legend.

An unlikely Hollywood producer would bankroll Lynch’s next project—a biopic of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”—starring Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, and Lesley Dunlop. That producer was Mel Brooks, husband of Bancroft, who did not wish a serious movie to be held back by his name in the credits. The result was, perhaps, Lynch’s most sentimental movie though perhaps a “movie of sentiment” would be a better term because I would not want to denigrate a masterpiece, though it bears little resemblance to his other works except in the otherworldliness and fever dreams, which would become a staple of Lynchian art.

The mid-1980s were the best and worst of times for Lynch. With European film impresario Dino de Laurentiis, he wrote and directed the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi allegory Dune and the intensely personal Blue Velvet, which was the first Lynch film to set a vision for the rest of his career—a woman in trouble, maturation for a protagonist who first senses the violence of the world and appreciates its beauty more at the same time. Dune was a colossal failure, and the only film Lynch apologized for. Blue Velvet was the film that put him on the map.

DUNE. In 1 parts.

Although Mr. Lynch might not want me to, I think more and more people are coming round to the notion that Dune has exquisite moments even if it doesn’t, in Hollywood terms, work. The director was furious that an “Extended Edition,” made for television and air travel, would include scenes he had cut from the film. So, he took his director credit as the infamous Alan Smithee and screenwriter credit Judas (Iscariot) (John Wilkes) Booth. Nevertheless, this version, released on DVD many years ago now gives one insight as to what interested Lynch in Herbert’s universe which was, even with phenomenal special effects, just too large to be filmed in 1984. Lynch felt he sold out, releasing a product without final cut to fill an audience hungry for science fiction after everyone wanted their own Star Wars clone. Though there is some great weird stuff in it, it was his Waterloo. Interest has finally grown with the release of a recent, Oscar-nominated film that took two films what Lynch took actually just fine and with a little more humor.

BLUE VELVET.

Casting the fresh-faced MacLachlan out of Yakima, Washington, giving Dennis Hopper the role of a lifetime that led to a major screen comeback, and the appearance of Lynch’s then-partner, model Isabella Rossellini as the lounge singer who croons the Bobby Vinton classic. An unsettling look at the dark side of suburbia, Blue Velvet has done nothing but improve over countless viewings. One doesn’t soon forget its images, neither the scene where Dean Stockwell lip synchs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” perhaps the most surreal moment in a major American release in that era. There is, of course, the lovely Laura Dern, who would become frequent collaborator to Lynch and who would be his final film heroine with Inland Empire.

While most extolled its virtues, poor old Ebert—a hero of mine—just got his Bue Velvet review wrong in print and on television. He would continue to get it wrong all the way through until the late-90s Straight Story—he didn’t even like The Elephant Man!—but, thankfully, before he passed away, he caught up to America’s finest film surrealist.

Diane?

It is surprising, perhaps, that a filmmaker’s finest work was a television series, but Mulholland Drive aside, the cultural phenomenon of the original two-season run of Twin Peaks was not only a popular and critical success, but an artistic one. From the beginning, the pilot introduced a revolution of cinematic style that made every television show at the time look hopelessly old-fashioned. This was partly due to the contributions of composer Angelo Badalamenti and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (father of Zoey). It has been said many times that, without Twin Peaks, there would have been no second golden age of television. Twin Peaks allowed quirkier, darker shows that led to a renaissance principally spurn by HBO with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, but also mainstream shows like Picket Fences. It equally inspired ground-breaking (but horribly overlooked) series like FOX’s Profit and even video games where the creators of The 7th Guest received their inspiration for mood.

The Muse. Decimated.

According to Lynch, Laura Palmer’s killer was never to be revealed though co-creator Frost disagrees with this somewhat. Back in that day, usually a murder case on a TV show would be resolved within the hour. When it was not resolved at the end of season one, the public became dissatisfied, eventually leading the producers to reveal the secret mid-way through Season 2. Though those revelation episodes are some of the finest in the original series, there was nowhere to go after that. Frost went off to begin work on the film Storyville and Lynch, disgusted with television, went to make Wild at Heart. Between the revelation and the original series finale, there were many dark days for Twin Peaks.

Love me tender and wild at heart.

Lynch won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart, a film that is oft-forgot as one of his greatest works to this day. A neon-punk noir, not unlike Oliver Stone’s later U-Turn, the film is inspired by influences as diverse as Elvis Presley, The Wizard of Oz, Marlon Brando’s character (with the snakeskin jacket) in Sydney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (based on the Tennessee Williams play Orpheus Descending), and the dual nature of beauty and violence, good and evil—Lynch’s creative sandbox. It also gives us, perhaps, Nicolas Cage’s most daring performance and I would fight for that despite his Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas. We all know he is fearless, but that fearlessness was never used to its full potential until this breakthrough. Sadly neglected on its release, there are those of us who are in the know and our lives are better for it.

The Muse. Reconciling.

But Laura Palmer, Lynch’s most perfect creation, was still his muse. He came back to rescue the 2nd Season Twin Peaks with a frightening and masterful finale and, when its cancellation was assured, went into pre-production on a film based on the series. Without Frost (who wanted a sequel rather than a prequel), Lynch collaborated with one of the series’ best writers, Robert Engels, on a Twin Peaks film subtitled Fire Walk with Me. Rather than tie up the series’ loose ends, which was expected, the film delved into the dark final days of Palmer’s dual life—as both the charitable Homecoming Queen and the coke-addicted victim of the ultimate evil. Over time, finally, the film has received the recognition it deserves, but to say that the contemporary response was vicious would be an understatement. Some fans of the series got nothing wrapped up and were, therefore, upset. Some fans disliked that the film took all the soap opera out and focused on the nightmare visions of the Black Lodge. Critics, who had let Lynch fly too high with Blue Velvet and his mainstream success, got their revenge for a film they were not intelligent enough or ready to understand.

The Twin Peaks film is, indeed, a polarizing one. But it could also be said to be a perfect polarization. Its principal themes—incest and sexual abuse—is not an easy one to digest and the myriad symbols and poetic flourishes don’t make it a popcorn movie. Then again, it is not fully an art film, but it leans in that direction. Unlike some of Lynch’s other films with their moments of dreamy. happiness, there is little of that. This is a deeply serious film and perhaps more unsettling than the average fare. It requires all your senses and organs working in harmony to see its beauty and appreciate its strangeness. It might even be better than Blue Velvet, but perhaps not as great as Twin Peaks: The Return, which we will come back to later.

LOST HIGHWAY.

Lynch left Cannes, where Fire Walked with Me was booed and did not release another film for five years. But, as an artist, he was fearless. In that interim, he would brew up the films that were, in my opinion, the high of his career. His next project would continue into the dark world of “not-knowing.” This is not as common in film as in the theatre, where the audience has the final word on the play’s meaning. Lynch did not make his films to be understood, but to be experienced. Barry Gilford, whose work inspired Wild at Heart, and Lynch provided us Lost Highway, a film so opaque to some as to have no meaning whatsoever. It was not, however, an outright failure—it was an interesting one that was introducing us to a Lynch who was done with linear, narrative filmmaking. The frightening screen return of Robert Blake was enough to make Lost Highway a film that many puzzle over, not knowing the joy was the journey. In the early 2000s, it was adapted into an opera by Olga Neuwirth and Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek.

Just a straight story. They all were.

In a left turn unlike in any filmography, Lynch went from R-rated nightmare-scapes to a G-rated Disney film with The Straight Story, a true story about a man who drives his lawnmower across the Midwest. A glorious send-off to Richard Farnsworth’s career, here was an easy critical darling, even with Roger Ebert, who finally gave a thumbs up to Lynch. But The Straight Story is not an anomaly, except where ratings are concerned. Though a surrealist, and a dark one at that, Lynch loved life, people, and the simple American plains where he was raised. Until his death, his business card didn’t mention master painter, master filmmaker, or anything of the kind. It simply read: “David Lynch. Eagle Scout. Missoula, Montana.”

The twists and turns of MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Lynch’s last two films (I don’t like using that word last) were Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, films so inevitably entwined it is perhaps best to speak of them together. Both seem to be an expression of the terrors of identity. Not the identity crisis happening in our current culture, but the real truth of our broken lives, seated so precariously over a fence of good/understanding and evil/psychological horror. Mulholland Drive is the best looking of the two (Ebert finally threw up a “Mea Maxima Culpa” and “got” a Lynch film) and perhaps the most thought-provoking. Inland Empire was the result of Lynch getting into digital rather than celluloid film and carrying out many artistic expressions as such online like the animated series DumbLand and a curious short called Rabbits, which was eventually enveloped into Empire.

Both films are about Los Angeles in a general way and are named after familiar places to locals. Both feature the typical Lynchian damsel in distress, though they are not and are never pushovers and seem to have the only potential for sanity though, like many, they will succumb. Both are experimental, but with an eye toward mass audiences with high-profile actors like Naomi Watts, Justin Theroux, and even old Lynch favorites like Grace Zabriskie, who played Laura Palmer’s tortured mother, and whose performance in Inland Empire is deliciously unsettling. 

Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE sitcom, RABBITS.

But, even with talents like Zabriskie, Empire didn’t achieve mainstream success, partly because of its length and partly because of its density, and the usual moaning from some critics who felt Lynch was just toying with them. I hope now is the time to seriously consider Inland Empire for the American canon. It is an epic descent into the Maelstrom with grand humor, but you must work at it. I happen to find the story straightforward, and I take a lot of it at a face value most can’t see. Lynch did say in many interviews his films always tell a definite story—you just must unlock the clues to get it—but he much more appreciated that audiences have their own interpretations, and he would not never have robbed them of that, except when the executives at ABC told him to.  

The Muse. Beatified.

And, finally, it just so happened that the coup de theatre of his career was due to a miracle. Twin Peaks fans had, by the early 21st century, kept the show alive through online forums and were even holding yearly festivals for it in the Pacific Northwest. I can honestly the say the only great thing to come out of this age of reboots is the result of such fandom: Twin Peaks: The Return, an eighteen-hour film posing as a television series that finally returns, or does it(?), to the world of Twin Peaks—something the fans had waited for twenty-five years. Showtime produced this “final” season with Mark Frost coming back to co-write. However, collaborators they were, Twin Peaks: The Return is Lynch’s last great artistic statement. While the original series broke new ground, it will be many years before we understand the depth of the third season. It is, quite simply, the Mona Lisa or the Salvator Mundi of TV shows. I’ve always said, until Twin Peaks, there was never a great television show like there were great novels or plays or poems. You didn’t go back and watch them to gain new insight. But the eighth episode of Season 3 will be argued about as long as fans will live (and number grows every year). That one episode is Lynch’s finest artistic statement, and I would never dare tell you why I think so, because it would spoil it for you. I was just glad I was alive to see it.

To say Lynch will be missed is the understatement of the century. I use no hyperbole when I say there is not anyone working now who was better, more demanding or more loving of his audience, certainly no one more daring. Not every filmmaker developed their own style like Lynch, but then again few had such bravery, indeed few had that much humanity. From his artwork to the coffee he sold through his website to the films he gave us and the lives he touched, the world was happier with David Lynch in it, dreaming his dreamy dreams.

David Lynch. Eagle Scout. Missoula, Montana.