So... Alright - My Homage to David Lynch

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

The world lost a unique creative force recently, and Geoff spends a good hour reminiscing and honoring one of his absolute heroes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like so worried about my sister. You're engaged! You cannot marry a murderer! I was sick, but I am healing. Returning to W Network and StacTV. The West Side River is back! If you're not killing these people, then who is? That's what I want to know.

Starring Kaylee Cuoco and Chris Messina. The only investigating I'm doing these days is who shit their pants. Killer messaged you yesterday? This is so dangerous. I gotta get out of this. Based on a true story. New season premieres tonight at nine Eastern and Pacific. Only on W, stream on Stack TV. Clear your schedule for U time

with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks. Savor the new small and mighty Cortado. Cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio or shake up your mood with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Whatever you choose, your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks. So I got up to do my research this morning and went to the coffee shop as I do. Hunker down and dove into the subject I thought I was going to record and

got pretty I got it all done. It was great. And then when I was finished, I thought, let me check in on those on those emails for the podcast. And I was immediately overcome with dozens of emails from you all. Just checking in on me because you knew David Lynch died and that you know how important he was to me as a creator. And it was just a lot of really kind words people said and just genuine kindness from strangers,

which kind of blew me away in two parts. One, because I didn't expect that much kindness from you. And two, because, because I forgot he died. I think this is maybe a sign that I haven't, this is so silly because he's just somebody, he's just a figure I admired and looked up to in my life tremendously.

I've never met him. I never will now. You know, just some hero worship on my end, but I just think it's really odd that I hope I'm not going to be at loss for words today or too jumbly going through this. I don't think this will be the most structured homage to David Lynch you've ever heard, but or that you will hear. But yeah, I, it's like the second I found out, well, I found out a bunch in the court over the course of one day. And then after that, it's like the information completely left my body.

I was completely numbed by it. I mean, I did break down and cry, cry twice throughout the day, but not like just out of the blue. It was weird. And it was over in a couple of seconds. And it's almost like he didn't die there for the last couple of days until I opened up my emails and it came rushing back. And I realized I just sat down at a coffee shop and did an entire episodes worth of research Knowing in the back of my mind that this is what I'm doing this week the second he died

I knew this is what I would record this week and I Set that into my mind, but man and our brains are wild aren't they I genuinely When I open up my inbox, it was like seeing that he died for the first time again and I just I don't know how it left my brain for the course of four or five days. Truly wild how our subconscious copes with things. So I came home and here we are. I don't exactly know where to start. I kind of want to talk about the life of David Lynch.

I want to talk about his early life a little bit. I want to talk about why I think he was important culturally, but I also want to talk about why he... But I also want to talk about why he I also want to talk about why he's important to me Okay, wow This that was all cut out. I'm sure but Completely and totally didn't expect it, but I broke down in the middle recording that for a second. So had to take a few minutes I

Want to talk about why he's important to me? So I guess instead of beginning where David's life began I'll begin Where my life with David began I Became aware of David Lynch in, I believe the ninth grade. It was 1989 and Twin Peaks aired on television. My mother was interested in it. She always kind of liked weird or, I don't know,

avant-garde or maybe slightly esoteric stuff and so I sat down to watch it with her one night and I was immediately hooked as was by the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. But that wasn't it to me. I mean, that was a big part of it. It was an immediately engaging story. If you're not super familiar with Twin Peaks, I'll go into a little bit of detail. I don't wanna be over explaining everything throughout the course of this, but I also don't want to be so inside baseball, nobody that's, you

know, not super familiar with it, which can follow it. So I'll just say Twin Peaks was a two series television show that ran in 89 and 90 91 somewhere on there. And the whole purpose of it was the FBI gets sent to a local town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate the murder of a high school student named Laura Palmer, played by Cheryl Lee. And the show starts off, well, it actually starts off with Kyle McLaughlin as Agent Dale Cooper driving to Twin Peaks

or the area to investigate. And he's talking on a tape recorder to his, I guess, secretary or assistant, Diane. You never see Diane, but you talk to her a talking on a tape recorder to his, I guess, secretary or assistant Diane. You never see Diane, but you talk to her a lot through that tape recorder throughout the course of Twin Peaks. And then it cuts to Pete Martell, just a really lovable man going fishing for the day. And he discovers the body of Laura Palmer

and calls it into the police station to Sheriff Harry Truman and utters what became very famous lines. Dead wrapped in plastic in his like Pacific Northwest kind of drawl he has his weird cadence of speaking. He he also I think in that episode or maybe the second episode has another classic line where he and his wife have a weird relationship. And you'll see, I don't wanna spoil too much, but he goes to make coffee and he comes out

and he's like, he's holding a fish. He's like, there's a fish in my percolator. And he was this, I'm getting off on a side story now, but there's actually a documentary about the actor that played Peeve Martell. His name is Jack Nance. It's a documentary called, You Don't Know Jack. It's fantastic. You should watch it.

He's dead now too, unfortunately. He's been dead for many years. He fell in the, I think a gas station bathroom and hit his head on a counter and then went home and died slowly after. But he had a really phenomenal and tragic and interesting life. And he was very good friends with David Lynch.

They met, I assume at the American Film Institute when Lynch was there. And he had a role in every Lynch film up until he died. And he didn't always have a huge role, but every role he had was memorable. His largest role in the David Lynch universe would of course be as the titular character in Eraserhead. He was also a really fun character in Wild at Heart that I love a lot. He's got this whole thing where he's like they're sitting around a fire talking and he's like this creepy dude that's like in a motel and he's like you've never seen my dog but if I talk about it, I'm butchering this line by the way, I haven't watched this in years, he goes, you'll see a picture of my dog in your head. And you have to watch it.

Then he played a by. Well he was in everything. He was in everything. But he was great in Twin Peaks, as Pete Martell is one of my favorite roles he had. And then the the mystery of Twin Peaks begins. Who killed Laura Palmer? The country was hooked. They wanted to know the answer.

David Lynch never wanted to answer the question. He wanted the murder of Laura Palmer to always be out there, never fully solved. The network camera was ABC or CBS. I think it was ABC insisted that they solve that they had to solve the murder of Laura Palmer at the end of season one. So he did. And because of that, season two struggled a little bit until it found its footing right at the end before it was canceled. But regardless, that wasn't all that drew me to David Lynch.

What drew me to Twin Peaks and David Lynch was I didn't know he was at the time. Was. His command. me to David Lynch, what drew me to Twin Peaks and David Lynch was I didn't know he was at the time was his command, his complete and total command through his medium of the senses. precisely in the characters were such beautifully crafted and casted archetypes of these iconic roles we have in storytelling and all the men were just like rugged and gorgeous and idealized. And the women were so classically beautiful and the colors were so vibrant. And it was so full of style. It was this tiny town in the Pacific Northwest, this little shit hole of a town in the Pacific Northwest.

But the waitresses looked like movie stars at the diner and that's not in a Hollywood way, it's in more of a, I don't know how else to describe it, in this town was, the town of Twin Peaks was, it was like it existed outside of time in some way, it had its own rhythm and its own style and it was imbued into everything from the furniture to the streetlights to the owls to the streetlights, to the owls, to the schools, to the buildings, to the backgrounds, to every

second of film, David Lynch chewed up the ambiance and the style and the sound. I'd never experienced sound design like I experienced in Twin Peaks. It was haunting and it moved the story along in ways and it bridged gaps and it created these emotions in me that I would be like caught on these waves and it would just be like David Lynch was taking me somewhere. I didn't understand any of it and I didn't care. I wanted to understand it, but I also just wanted to be on the ride, you know? And every week I began to look forward to it more and more because each week was more interesting

and fascinating than the last. And then the show got canceled. And I went about my business. I was bummed that it was over. I loved every second of it. It was awesome. It heavily influenced me. I don't think in super conscious ways at the time,

but as I was able to digest and understand my fandom for him later in life. And as I aged, I was able to understand the things, I was slowly able to understand the things that I was responding to and that I was really liking in these shows and in his productions and what that meant and how they were influencing me, if that makes sense. Then about a year after it was cancelled, the movie Twin Peaks Fire Walk with me came out in theaters. I couldn't believe it. I

was going to get more time in that world. I was blown away by it. I waited till it was at the dollar theater because it was all I could afford. And then I drove myself 16 or 17. I just got my car I drove there. I was very excited. I went into a largely empty theater I think there were maybe two or three people at the very front. I was sitting in the middle of the back I felt like had like 80% of the theater to myself. I sat down to watch Fire Walk with me Two things happened one. I saw Fire Walk with me it Two things happened. One, I saw Fire Walk with me. It affected me in ways that still do to this day. The scenes of Laura Palmer's death, Laura Palmer and Renette Pulaski's

deaths are some of the most haunting I've experienced in media and I still think about it a lot. It's so brutally. He did such a good job of portraying just utter pain and sadness and just regret and hopelessness. and you just, your heart absolutely shatters for these people in this moment. And it was, it was brilliant storytelling. He also had a great, he also brought in new characters, Kiefer Sutherland, who was fucking awesome in it. And Chris Isaacs, who was awesome in it.

And oh my God, David Bowie plays an FBI agent in it. Like it's fucking crazy. It's a crazy movie and it would be completely and totally inaccessible to anybody who hasn't seen Twin Peaks, which is why it was a commercial failure. However, the second thing that happened is a guy came and sat down in my row,

five minutes after the movie started, in, I don't know, maybe 10 rows over, eight rows over. And I thought, well, that sucks. five minutes after the movie started in I don't know maybe ten rows over eight rows over and I thought well that sucks I had most of the theater to myself and then I didn't pay much attention to him, but then at some point I Looked over and I realized he was jacking off and a guy just sat there and played with himself eight seats from me in the theater and I Learned a little bit about myself that day. I was like I just sat there and played with himself eight seats from me in the theater. And. I learned a little bit about myself that day. I was like,

I don't know what this says about me, probably nothing healthy, but I was like, fuck this guy, I'm not moving. I came to watch this movie. I'm not going to get run off by him and creeped out by him. And and so I just. Watched the movie through it. Then at some point, I guess the guy finished and he just finished watching the movie. I don't even remember leaving or anything.

We didn't interact or anything. I just said, I learned at 16 or 17 that people really do masturbate in movie theaters. I thought that was just a trope. It's not weird, right? Really weird. Yeah, so then at this point, I'm wanting to learn more about David Lynch.

Wild at Heart has already come out. It came out in 1990. It launched at Cannes Film Festival where it won the Palm d'Or, which is like best film, right? It was considered brilliant there. They absolutely loved it. If you've never seen it, it's Nick Cage and Laura Dern.

And it's based on a novel called The Adventures of Sailor and Lula. I believe that's what the novel's called, something along those lines. Got a phenomenal, phenomenal villain in Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe. Just dripping of style very similarly to Twin Peaks. So eventually, you know, this is how we had to do things back then. I went to the the

blockbuster or whatever it was, local movie rental, and I rented Wild at Heart. And I came home and I was blown away by the wild at heart it had all these weird references to to The Wizard of Oz which I would discover permeated throughout David Lynch's career was obsessed with it and It had Nicolas Cage being what I thought was the coolest dude ever and it had them to this day. I I Assert this yeah, I, I, I assert this. God, I'm gonna get off on so many tangents here. Wild at Heart to me is tied with Blue Velvet,

another David Lynch film we'll talk about in a second, for greatest first two to three minutes of a movie of all time. Best introduction to a film ever. In Blue Velvet, it starts in this town, I think it's like Lumberton, North Carolina, maybe, or Virginia, and it's all these sweeping, very wholesome shots of this idealistic,

American, picturesque, wholesome town. One gets the impression this is very much what David Lynch's upbringing was when he was a child, or if not, it's definitely what he aspired it to be because he has this way of capturing 1950s and 1960s American, at least what was presented as wholesome in this really interesting, fun way. Anyway, so it's this, all these establishing shots of this town and it cuts into these neighborhoods where people are washing or washing their cars and Watering their grass and stuff and it zooms in on this guy, which is actually the main character's dad, which is played by Colin McLaughlin again

Grabbing his neck falling over has a stroke He's riding on the ground in pain while the dog is yipping at the at the water faucet and it just zooms in under this beautiful green grass and into it deeper and deeper into it and you just see these ants and bugs and grubby things crawling all over and you just you get the sense immediately he is immediately telling you this looks perfect and beautiful but underneath it all is dark and and beautiful, but underneath it all is dark and evil and scary and grimy and not what it seems. And it's just beneath the surface.

And then a story unfolds that tells that tale in a brilliant manner. I think that there's a mystery in that, that young Colin McLaughlin sets out to solve. I don't wanna spoil that mystery, but it's an homage to a Fellini film that I love called Amacord, which is phenomenal. It's like a throwaway moment and that film becomes like,

I don't know if it was intentional, I assume so because it's a unique thing, but it becomes a thread for Kyle McLaughlin to pull with Laura Dern at his side and they discover this incredible mystery surrounding Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini. Phenomenal film. It was, Rolling Stone voted at the best film of the 1980s

and I definitely have to agree. Anyway, so I bring Wild at Heart home and first off, I think it's brilliant and then I'm reading about it in, God, where did we read about stuff? I guess in magazines, right? Newspapers and shit. And at I'm reading about it in God, where did we read about stuff, I guess, in magazines, right, newspapers and shit. And at some point, I become aware that it was like a failure. I'm starting to get the sense that people at

large aren't appreciating this guy in the same way I am if Twin Peaks could get canceled. If Fire Walk with me could fail. If the next thing I discover wild at heart, which is a couple of years old at this point, that failed, at least in the US, I'm starting to see a pattern. And at this point, I'm starting to get into film too. So I'm getting film magazines when I can and I'm reading about him. And you're starting to get to that point of your fandom where you're starting to like try to dive into stuff, you know, and consume what you can.

And so I'm starting to learn about him in fits and spurts as I can. Wanna dive more in. At some point I joined the army, everything goes on hold. You're in the army for like the first year you're in the army, you're just going through basic training and you're advanced individual training and moving across country or across the world to your first duty station, processing, going

through all that, discovering, there's not a lot of time to watch David Lynch for the first for about a year there in my life. So then I come up for air, you know, after I've developed a routine and I've got a home and I've got a job and I'm like, I've got a life and friends and I pick back up, I go and I rent Blue Velvet. No, I think I'd seen Blue Velvet at this point, it's not in high school. I go and I rent Eraserhead and The Elephant Man because I think they're the only two things out at that time.

And I like Elephant Man a lot. I think it's nominated for like eight Academy Awards. It's a good movie, but I raise her head. His first film, which took him four years to film in a abandoned horse stable on some land that the American Film Institute owned where he essentially filmed a shot of night and they had to stop production three or four or five times for significant amounts of time While they had to get more money because the American Film Institute couldn't give him enough money

To fund the whole thing. He had to borrow money from his dad. I think he uh, he took on a lot of jobs Anyway, I want to get distracted with the racer head. I see a racer head for the first time and In a racer head. I see a racer head for the first time and in a racer head, I see very clearly Twin Peaks represented visually and thematically over and over again. And I start to get the idea. I start to understand that what this guy is doing isn't just making movies and telling stories. He is a true artist in every sense of the word. And he is using film as a medium.

And it's only one of the mediums that he used later in life. He becomes prolific in a lot of ways. He's using this medium to evolve his art and he is consumed with certain themes in his life, God knows from what or why. And his films are about processing in or displaying or showing a lot of these themes over and over again, working through them, and they weave in and out of everything he does. And I think that appealed to me so strongly because I grew up at a time when Stephen King was the king.

Like he's huge now, of course, everybody loves Stephen King. And he's had a million successes. He's written 50 books since I stopped reading him. But in when I was in high school, that was when it was like fucking Firestarter, Kujo, The Stand, you know, Pet Sematary, the fucking Skeleton Crew, Eyes of the Dragon, it, you know, all of these stories are huge

and he's in the process of writing them all. And so one of the things that I loved about him was that he put breadcrumbs across all of his books so that everything existed in a larger universe. I think it's what I ended up liking about comic books too. I love universes. It's what appeals to me about George R. R. Martin. I love a larger universe. I think it's what I ended up liking about comic books too. I love universes. It's what appeals to me about George R.R. Martin. I love a living world.

That's what I love about sandbox video games. That I love the idea of a complete universe and that all of the books that you invest your time to read in all, he makes the effort to make them all make sense within each other. And if you read, I don't know, the talisman, and then you read the Tommyknockers, there are connections and you're like,

oh, fuck that character and that does that. Oh, and that's the fucking gas station where they stopped and did, and you're like, holy shit. It's like fan service, it's what becomes fan service in some ways, but it's these little breadcrumbs that. When you're reading, you feel like you're a part of a larger thing and you feel like you're getting something, you're getting some larger point

outside of just the the novel that you're in the way we'd reading. And David Lynch's art was like that, I think, and I was picking up on that in real time. In my early 20s. David Lynch was largely quiet from 1991 or 92, I guess, when Fire Walk with Me came out. He didn't really do, he did some like TV episode directing gigs and he did some like commercial gigs, that kind of stuff.

He was, a lot of people don't know on those but he directed a lot of television commercials he had a lot of product commercials Adidas a lot of like YSL and Gucci maybe not Gucci but like Chanel a lot of like high-end Luxury brands hired him to do really wild stuff But it wasn't until Actually actually in 1995 But it wasn't until... Actually... Actually... In 1995...

A... Little... Collection of short films came out called Lumiere at Compagnie. And it was to celebrate a hundred years of film. I believe this is a... Forty international directors were asked to make a short film using the original camera invented by the Lumiere brothers, right? So they had like Max von Seidow, Spike Lee,

Wim Wenders, a ton of international directors, mostly international directors. And of course, David Lynch, he had a one minute movie. Everybody made a one minute film. David Lynch's was called Premonition Following an Evil Deed. I read about this documentary or this thing when it was coming out, was able to get my hands.

I think I ordered it at the mall. Was able to get my hands on the VHS. So this is the first David Lynch thing, new David Lynch thing I'd seen in a while. And oh, I guess at some point I had seen Dune too. I liked Dune, not my favorite thing in the VHS. This is the first David Lynch thing, new David Lynch thing I'd seen in a while. And, oh, I guess at some point I had seen Dune too. I liked Dune. Not my favorite thing in the world, not my least favorite. I don't think it was nearly as bad as everybody panned it to be, but I get it. It wasn't David Lynch clearly wasn't happy with it. And it's it's worth watching, but it's not one I go back to over and over again. It was so you

can see where it ranks in my view of the overall Lynch works I didn't even remember to talk about it in this period so anyway, David Lynch makes this one-minute film as the these other 39 international directors, I watched every goddamn one of them and David Lynch's was Light years ahead of everyone else's. He told an entire and complete gripping story in 60 seconds and that made me love him that much more. So a couple of years go by, I've got twin peaks on VHS at this point

and I'm watching it over and over and over again. I end up getting moved from the first Cavalry division where I'm stationed on Fort at Fort what's Fort Kavazos now in Colleen, Texas. I get transferred to the newspaper, the Fort Hood Sentinel, and I become a section editor, the leisure section editor at the newspaper. It was a kind of a promotion without pay, you know, kind of a responsibility promotion. It was a much higher profile gig. It was a kind of a promotion without pay, you know, kind of a responsibility promotion. It was a much higher profile gig. It was exciting. I got to be a section head at a newspaper. I loved doing layout and design in journalism school. This was really my first opportunity

to get back to it. And I really, really enjoyed the time I got to spend doing that. But in that period, one of the other section editors, I think it was a sports editor, was another guy named Jeff, actually. We were the two Jeffs. He was a J Jeff, I was a G Jeff. He was a goth kid, and I was a punk kid. We were the same age, we liked similar music, a lot of the same themes, and then we discovered that we both liked David Lynch.

And I discovered that there were people out there who liked David Lynch as much, if not more than I did. Jeff knew so much about David Lynch. We would have, we would go to lunch and we would just have these discussions about Twin Peaks. And then we would go back to work and on breaks, we'd have these discussions about Twin Peaks. And we just kept talking about what Twin Peaks meant to us

and our theories and trying to figure it out. And at this point we're on the internet and early internet was all about, like, at least for me, it was all about message boards about film. It was about misfits lyrics because there were never liner notes on any of the misfits albums, so you didn't know what the fuck they were singing.

And it was about finding unpublished screenplays. Other Jeff was so into David Lynch that he was on these message boards. I was just starting to get into like View Askew and that kind of stuff, but he knew where all these David Lynch message boards were and I started to get into that. Then he turned me onto unproduced screenplays. David Lynch had unproduced screenplays. I didn't know that that was

a thing. And so I read Ronnie rocket. And then I read once saliva bubble. These are two movies that David Lynch never made that he always wanted to. And I felt I couldn't believe that I had access to these and it just deepened and enriched my fandom even more. And Jeff and I bonded over it to such a degree that I introduced him to my at the time wife's my first wife's sister. They deepened and enriched my fandom even more. And Jeff and I bonded over it to such a degree that I introduced him to my, at the time, my first wife's sister, they fell in love, they got married.

He moved in, we became roommates. And from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. every day, we talked about David Lynch and Twin Peaks. And we watched it together and we talked about it together. And when Lost Highway came out in 1997, we drove down to Austin and watched it at the Arbor Cinema together. And it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. And I loved Lost Highway so much. It was such an extension and evolution of where David Lynch began. And I could see his vision continuing. And we became

obsessed with Lost Highway and the way we were about Twin Peaks because it was this amazing of where David Lynch began and I could see his vision continuing and we became obsessed with Lost Highway and the way we were about Twin Peaks because it was this amazing story about Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette and is, are these, is Bill Pullman split into two personalities and which is real and you know, they have all these moments like it starts with these, this family in this gorgeous fucking home with this immaculately designed furniture which I'll get to in a second. And it's this like Bill Pullman is like sax player and he's got this sexy wife Patricia Arquette and and they start getting these tapes in the mail and the tapes are of somebody filming them in their sleep like

in their house but it's like from high up where a human wouldn't be able to walk and this is before cell phones and show right So somebody had to get into their house, hold a camera high and go through the house and film it and then film them sleeping. And it's all about like the breakdown of their marriage and he feels very inadequate and unable to please her. And he's kind of spiraling and then this happens and the cops seem to not believe him.

And this just mystery unfolds and unfolds and suddenly he's different people. And then the mystery man shows up and he is played by Robert Blake, who is terrifying in like I don't even know how to describe an old dude with Eddie Munster hair in tight clothing with white face paint being scary, but it's the scariest fucking thing you'll ever see. And it is this, the whole movie is like a mind fuck and it gave us so much to talk about. And our friendship really just

revolved so deeply around music, showing each other different kinds of music from our, you know, from our various scenes, but really just discussing David Lynch and the themes and the style and the acting performances and the decisions he makes and just being so deeply in love with it. And then I read in an interview with David Lynch,

because we had all these theories about what Lost Highway meant and then I read in an interview with David Lynch, because we had all these theories about what lost highway meant and then I read in an interview with David Lynch that the best explanation he could give for lost highway was it was an explanation of a condition people have called psychogenic subterfuge, right? And psychogenic subterfuge is a type, I'm gonna just look up the definition for you. Psychogenic subterfuge is a type of deception

that involves pretending to have psychological condition or symptom. It can include malingering, which is sometimes intentionally falsifies symptoms to gain an advantage. And that made me look at Lost Highway in a totally different way. A few years later, Mulholland Drive comes out,

which is an equally brilliant film and which is really interesting. And I learned a lot, discovered that I learned a lot from David Lynch in this way. And this would be where I'd like, I get into the things that I learned from David Lynch. Essentially, the same film was Lost Highway. And when I talk about how David Lynch is, his art is an evolution and everything builds on top of itself. Mulholland Drive is very clearly another story of psychogenic subterfuge where a person has done something so horrible they cannot accept or deal with or come to terms with it.

And so they retreat into a fantasy of their own making to try to make themselves the protagonist and not the antagonist. And then it all crumbles around them as the walls break down. And it's brilliant. Naomi Watts is in it. It is brilliant. The interesting thing about Mulholland Drive is that it was intended to be a television show. It was shot as a television show.

It was going to be a television show. It was it was initially going to be the next show by ABC. And they decided in the wake of I think school shootings, honestly, were a big thing, and they thought Mulholland Drive was violent, too violent. And so they didn't pick it up. David Lynch went back, filmed a couple more scenes and then cut it into a film. The film was brilliant. The work he did to turn what he was setting up to be the next Twin Peaks

into a two hour film is an unbelievable work of directing and editing. And he should be very proud of it. However, I think I read a lot of interviews with him around the time and he was like, that's it. I'm done. I'm not doing this shit with TV again. He's just like, the thing about David Lynch

is that he did not deal well with other people having control over his vision, right? Which totally makes sense. David Lynch is an auteur in every sense of the word. You know, he should be the dictionary definition of auteur. I was mentioning how the furniture in Lost Highway was cool and sleek and sexy. Part of that reason it was

is because David Lynch couldn't find a home and furniture that gave the right vibe that he wanted. So he built most of the furniture, the end tables, the coffee tables. He built most of that shit himself for the film because he just couldn't find something that worked to express his vision. And that's what I mean about the guy being an auteur. He controlled every element of what they did. There's a scene one day where they had to film an exterior in Lost Highway and it's raining, and then the rain went away and they had to keep filming.

And so on the fly, David Lynch created a shot where guys are attacking each other with garden hoses to make it make sense. He's just, he's fucking awesome and clever. And also I haven't mentioned this at any point. He's hilarious. David Lynch is hilarious. He's hilarious as an actor.

He's hilarious as a writer. He's hilarious as a director. Everything he does is beautiful and terrifying and poignant. He surfs emotions like no one I've ever seen. It reminds me in some ways of the book Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, where you'll read a passage that has you laughing your ass off.

You can't believe how funny it is. And then two seconds later, you're crying and sobbing uncontrollably because the characters just died in a brutal way. And it's this like the stark contrast between the humor and the horror. David Lynch did that exceptionally well too. That's how the world works.

And he shows it and it's a part of the way he tells stories. And I'm just vomiting compliments to David Lynch right now. His career continues. The next film he makes is The Straight Story, which was based on a true story starring harry dean stanton and it is The story of a man a man who's getting old his brother's close to death

And he wants to set things right and he wants to go visit him But he lives like three states over so he hops on his lawnmower like his riding lawnmower and he wants to go visit him, but he lives like three states over. So he hops on his lawnmower, like his riding lawnmower, and he drives all the way to his brother's house. And it's a story about redemption. It's a story about adventure. It is in many ways very different from anything he's ever done. Richard Farnsworth is in it.

Sissy Spacek is in it. Harry Dean Stanton is in it. It is poignant and beautiful story about hope and forgiveness. I think it was a Disney movie, actually. It still manages to have some. I mean, it feels like David Lynch through and through. It feels like the Americana of David Lynch on display. You know, it feels like that Americana of David Lynch on display, you know

It feels like the the true heartfelt David Lynch on display. There are some interesting Kind of I wouldn't say scary but unsettling scenes at night when he's hunkering down that uh Lynch plays a lot with sound and it's an awesome movie. It's a departure from everything else. He's ever done, but it's an awesome movie After that lynch is at this point really into the internet and he's ever done, but it's an awesome movie. After that, Lynch is at this point really into the internet and he's doing all kinds of weird little online videos and I'm trying to keep up and he's doing weather reports and shit and but I'm not I'm pretty busy in my life. And you know, at this point, I'm this is early 2000s.

I'm close to having a kid if I haven't had Millie already and I have a company and you know How life gets in the way inland Empire comes out. It's his next film Supposed to be really good. It's long. I go to see it and It does nothing for me I watch it one more time about a year later still does nothing for me I Don't even remember the film now. I guess that begins kind of the quiet period of my fandom of David Lynch from when Inland Empire comes out until the new Twin Peaks series, which came out in 2017, probably when the Inland Empire come out, 2006. So about 11 years, I don't really consume any new David

Lynch. Most of the stuff he's doing is online. He's doing like weird shorts and stuff, directing a lot of television commercials and shit. I think I watched Twin Peaks start to finish once in that period one more time the last time I watch it. Then 2017 comes, Twin Peaks comes back, I get very excited about it. We start to watch it and then my life kind of falls apart in the middle of it. I go through a separation and a divorce and I had to put Twin Peaks on the back burner and I always intended to come back to it. But at this point, I haven't really been consuming

David Lynch on a daily basis like I had, you know, you can only have so many conversations, so many impassioned conversations about the meaning of Twin Peaks or Mole Hole and Drive or Lost Highway with your friends, you know? And I just hit a different phase in my life where I'm just not, I don't consume fandom in a way that I did when I was younger and had more time and less responsibility and less things in my life to focus on. And it doesn't change my love of David Lynch. It doesn't change my reverence for him. It just quiets it a little bit because he's not producing a lot in the traditional way that I consumed it.

What he is doing and what he's been doing his entire career is creating art in the way that makes sense to him, which I love. He becomes quite a prolific photographer and releases multiple photography books. As everybody I'm sure knows, David Lynch is a champion of transcendental meditation, something that I have no interest in. Really funny though, that the two biggest influences in my life are David Lynch and Howard Stern,

and they are both devout TM supporters and practitioners. Howard does Transcendental Meditation every day, David Lynch does it every day. They both say it's integral to their creative process. I've never tried it. I've never attempted it. It's never appealed to me in any way whatsoever. Maybe someday I should do it. If the two most important people creatively to me in my life swear by it, it probably tells me something. But we tend to be stubborn and set in our ways, don't we? Anyway, my point being here is that David Lynch

starts doing a lot of stuff that I don't follow him to. He gets into music, he does a lot of really cool music. Like I said, he's doing a lot of like weird stuff on his website his weather reports And I love that he's expressing himself creatively. I love that he has outlets that you know For whatever reason he's not doing film and television in this period. So he's found other ways to express himself And I think that's great. I at that point And I think that's great. I at that point I'm probably far busier expressing myself than trying to follow other people other people's expression and

Which is something that happens when you turn creativity into a full-time job All this to say nothing Dulls my love or affection or admiration or the influence he's had on me in this period of my life from let's say 2002 or so until until he dies. The vast majority of my fandom is frontloaded in the front nine of my of my life. But his influence I feel every day. And that's not hyperbole. I learned so much from him. I learned, well, I'll tell you one thing I learned. I learned I'm not David Lynch. I learned I don't wanna be an auteur.

Well, I guess in my dumbed down way. I learned I don't want to make film. I learned I don't have that eye, that attention to detail, that. Brilliant spark that he has to control it all and to manage it and to see it and to make it all make sense in this larger picture. I don't have that. I learned he helped steer me in the direction that I was meant to go, which is more the Howard Stern route, which is talking and off the cuff humor and conversation and letting chance be a big part of it and going unscripted and not knowing where things are headed.

And I learned that that's more of my speed doesn't change how much I appreciated what David did, I think that he is the most important, most talented creator I have run across in my lifetime. And I genuinely mean that from the bottom of my heart. If you go and look at his earliest works, Six Men Getting Sick, The Alphabet, and The Grandmother, these little art projects he did in film schools, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about his career,

his early, like how he came to become David Lynch, because in a minute, because I think that that's a part of what I learned from him and inspiration. Can see at 18 and 19 and 20 years old, a talent that is light years ahead of his contemporaries. It's so evident when I watch The Alphabet and the Grandmother, it's insane. And you can watch those videos on YouTube right now,

probably if you want. When I was younger, there was a VHS I could rent from Vulcan Video or I Love Video, I think they both had it, that had like the short works of David Lynch on it. I think it might not have been a legit copy and you could go into the cult section and you could rent it. And every couple of months I would rent it

just to watch those over and over again. And I just, I thought that there was so much brilliance. He was able to create and set a tone and a mood and create tension and intrigue and disgust and horror and hope and confusion and fear. And he was able to do these things in these little two and three minute vignettes, you know, which is insane to me.

It's what he did with that one minute film on the Lemure at compagny compilation He he has this command over storytelling And I think it's because he controls every aspect of the storytelling and I get the impression that he doesn't prize Anyone aspect over the other I think he sees that they all work harmoniously when when applied properly. And that's the genius and the brilliance of him. I also love another thing that I learned from David Lynch that has meant a tremendous amount to me in my life

is that no matter how serious the situation is or appears, there's humor in it. David Lynch was brilliant at weaving humor deftly into things. I have some minor routines, I would say, traditions. My wife would probably call OCD that I don't talk about. I think I'm influenced by David Lynch in a lot of ways in that. David Lynch was famous because every day at, I want to say about 2 p.m. he would go to the Bob's Big Boy

by his house and drink a chocolate shake and work on notes and then he would have meetings people would come and work on creative notes with him and he had this routine where every day he went and got his chocolate shake at Bob's Big Boy and it is the most David Lynch thing I can imagine it is the most wholesome thing but I love the repetition of it. I love the consistency of it. It just appeals to me. I love the ritual of it. I feel like you create significance

when you do things this way. And I just love the way his brain worked in those ways. I love the rules he gave himself to follow. I learned not to be affected by others because of him. I really did. I really did. I read so many interviews and articles throughout my life. And so much of it was about how affected he was by the critics and producers and the networks and how he let it affect and depress him. He didn't make stuff for a while after Twin Peaks

because of his experience getting the show canceled. And then he finally takes another swing at Mulholland Drive, which would have been an unbelievable television show, like unbelievable. It was an amazing movie, but I can only imagine what would have unfolded with the pieces that he was creating

and setting out for us and That's not picked up for bullshit reasons and it plunges him into another depression where he doesn't want to create Anymore and I wonder that if if David Lynch cared less About what other people thought or was less affected by those external pressures I wonder if he would have been freer to create more. We'll never know. You know, the important thing is you can look at his IMDb. And even though I wasn't watching everything he did from 2006 to 2017, he was doing all kinds of stuff for him. A lot of it's like weird little pieces

of experimentation. And like I said, weather reports and just all kinds of absurdities, but it was him expressing himself. And I'm happy to know that even though there was a drought between films, there wasn't a drought with his creative expression. And someday I'm gonna go track down and find and watch every one of those little weird pieces of ephemera he created throughout the years.

Because it's a finite resource now. I know that he won't be making anything else and that's a real tragedy but what a gift he left us and even somebody who spent the first 30 years of his life consuming every second of content that man created that he could get his hands on. He still has secrets left for me to discover, stories left for me to learn. I still have to go back and watch Inland Empire again and understand that I wasn't ready for it at the time. I don't remember anything about it. I still have to go back and watch Twin Peaks The Return and make my way through that third series because I know it explains and ties up a lot and I

everything I hear about is that literally the episode after where I stopped watching it takes off and becomes an insane rollercoaster ride and I cannot wait to experience that and I love that I still have that out there and I know I made a day in New Year's resolution to watch it in 2025 But that was before he died and now that he's dead and I know that he's not gonna make anything else. I Might be a little more precious with what I have left of his to consume. I don't know. I gotta think about that. I Gotta think about that. I Learned so much about the creative process from him. He said one time, I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think that somewhere we're all connected, often some very abstract land, but somewhere between there and

here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. Yeah. He also said, he's not a fan of Philadelphia. He said, I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia and I meant everyone. He said, I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.

It seems like religion and myth were invented against that trying to make sense of it. That's a little existentialist thought there from David Lynch. He said, I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world and film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing to get lost inside of the world of film. I think my favorite line from any David Lynch film, not that it matters is from lost highway when Bill Pullman's talking to the police. They're walking through the house trying to

figure out how somebody got in and videotaped them. And they're like, do you have a VHS camera in the house? And he says, no, I don't have one. And they're like, why? Why not? And he says, I like to remember things my own way, how I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened. I love that line. That's always stuck with me. It becomes kind of an important indicator to where the story is going to go in the film. But also I just like, I completely agree with it. And it's one of those things that just sticks with you. So David Lynch has died at the age of 78 due to COPD and emphysema, which he got from smoking his entire life. He smoked and glorified smoking in the way I used to glorify drinking.

I wish that he'd stopped so that we could continue to feel the gift of David Lynch. But I also wonder, I wonder how much more, well, I just will never know, you know? We'll never know what could have been. That's just not how the world works. David Lynch loved smoking cigarettes. He was unapologetic about it.

I think he knew they would do them in someday. And when they did, I don't know how much regret he had, at least from the things that I read. I guess he was pretty consistent in that front. He's inspired more thought in my mind than any other creator. and it's not even close It's crazy to think about How much of my idle thought he takes up and has taken up? I?

Quote him constantly more than you probably have any idea unless you're very familiar with David Lynch He comes up in some way conversationally almost every day of my life still to this day. I had a couple of opportunities in my life where I could have maybe met him chose not to because I felt like the best I could hope for is that I didn't embarrass myself. But everything below that sucked. And I would never want to look at David. I would never want to not be able to watch Mulholland Drive again because as soon as the his name appears, I remember how I put my foot in my mouth or how I embarrassed myself

or how stupid I was. And so I endeavored never to meet him, even though I came close a couple of times. And I probably love coffee and cherry pie 50% more than I would have if it weren't for him. He had a book of photography once that came out. I still, I don't think I still have it. I don't know where it might, probably lost it in a move. But he just took photos of septic tanks across the country. And then he had this little photo essay he did where he, uh, he made this like clay skull

and he hollered it out and then he stuffed like ham and cream cheese and stuff inside it and put it on a pole and then stuck it in his backyard. And then he documented ants eating it from the inside out and taking photos of it and just these things that like were so weird and off the wall. It really made me look at, consider everything as, as creatively possible, if that makes sense. And I, man, I just feel so absolutely lucky to have discovered him and been able to enjoy as much of his body of work as I have.

And I don't think they'll be another person like him in my lifetime. Surely there'll be another person like him someday. But true visionaries and creative geniuses like David Lynch come along pretty rarely. Oh, another lesson, and this will be the final thing I cover, I think. David Lynch grew up fairly, I would say middle-class.

His dad was a research scientist, I think, and his mom was a teacher or taught English. And I think he was born in Montana, but they moved pretty quickly to Virginia. Now, the lessons I learned from his early life are as such. Lynch joined the Boy Scouts. Later, he said he became a scout just so he could quit it and put it behind him.

I love that. I love that thought process. I really do. I really, really do. He did not excel academically. He had little interest in schoolwork. Similarly to me. And decided he wanted to study painting in college.

I did not. He began his studies at the, this is what's so fascinating about his career. He began his studies at the Corcor is what's so fascinating about his career. He began his studies at the Corcoran School of Art and Design in DC. Then he transferred in 1964 to the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with his roommate, Peter Wolf, the musician.

He left there after a year saying he wasn't inspired at all by that place. Instead, he decided he wanted to travel with Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who also worked on a ton of stuff in film as well. I think he does art design. And they wanted to link up with this Austrian expressionist painter and learn from him.

Anyway, they made it about three weeks in Europe before they gave up and came home. When he came home, at this point, he's been to two different colleges, right? He returns to Virginia. His parents no longer live there. They'd moved to California, I think. And so he stays with a friend and enrolls

at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This is his third college, essentially at this point. He likes it more saying that in Philadelphia, there were great and serious painters and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there. That was the beginning of this time in Philadelphia. He also met his wife there, Peggy. They got married and had their first daughter, Jennifer, who went on to direct as well. I think Boxing Helena was her debut

film. It was weird. I don't know what she's done since then. Peggy said Lynch was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. If you've watched Eraserhead, I think it's pretty clear that Eraserhead is David Lynch trying to come to terms with parenthood and he turned it into a horror film and a pretty dark. He also says that it's a lot of the Eraserhead had a lot to do with Philadelphia and how he felt about Philadelphia. He really learned to hate that place in Philadelphia, they bought a house, a 12 room house for $3,500 and it was brutal. He said, we live full of fear.

A kid was shot to death down the street. We were robbed twice. We had our windows shot out, our car stolen. The house was first broken into three days after we moved in. The feeling was so close to extreme danger and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth

But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city so all of the violence and the hate and the filth and the fear and the danger that he Expressed in his films and his art I guess came from there It was there at the Pennsylvania Academy that he makes his first short film, Six Men Getting Sick. He then goes on to make a few more that I've talked about. It's an interesting story. I'm not gonna just vomit his Wikipedia to you,

but eventually he becomes disillusioned in Philadelphia, releases a four minute short called The Alphabet in 1968. I'll just read the description. You should see it though. The film stars Lynch's wife, Peggy, as a character known as the girl who chants the alphabet to a series of images of horses before dying at the end by hemorrhaging blood all over her and her bedsheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken U-Hur tape recorder to record the sound of Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch found particularly effective. Later describing what had inspired him, Lynch said,

Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. It's crazy. It's crazy where inspiration comes from, right? But anyway, in the process of making that, he discovers the American Film Institute and that they give grants to filmmakers. So he submits the alphabet and a script he'd written for a film called The Grandmother. They agree to help finance the work. They got from $5,000, he gets $7,000 out of them.

He makes it, it's fucking awesome. It's about a neglected boy who like grows a grandmother from a seed to help take care of him. He ends up moving to Los Angeles to study filmmaking at the American Film Institute. And that's where he ends up hooking up with Jack Nance and a lot of the people, Sissy Spacek, a lot of the people that he ends up working with.

It gets convoluted in there. He has a lot of failures. He loses a lot of funding. It takes him four years to make a racer head. His marriage ends in the process. It's amicable, but he's going through all these life changes. He finally gets a racer head made.

Some people think it's brilliant. Most people think it's terrible. It gets rejected from film festivals left and right. But at some point, Stuart Kornfeld, who is an executive producer from Mel Brooks, sees it and is just blown away by it. He thinks it's the greatest thing he's ever seen. He shows it to Mel Brooks.

Mel Brooks immediately wants him to make the well actually Lynch wants to make this film Ronnie rocket, which I said as a script I read, but he knows nobody's going to make it because it's too weird. So he asked that guy Kornfeld, can you bring me a script that I can direct somebody else's story? That's not too weird. They bring the elephant man. He turns it into the surrealist brilliant piece. It's nominated for like eight Academy Awards based on the success of that. He makes Blue Velvet, which it becomes this cultural phenomenon

and his career is now set, but he has the roller coaster of ups and downs going forward. The whole point of me telling you all this is to show you that David Lynch started out wanting to be a painter, got into making animated films, went to four different colleges before he found his place,

before he figured out what he was doing and before everything clicked and he made it work. It was a process of a young man refusing to give up and refusing to be stagnant in the situation that wasn't creatively inspiring him. Somebody who clearly believed so deeply in his own abilities or was so overwhelmed by the pull and the urge to do it. It's less of a choice to be creative and more of a compulsion, you know, and he may not have had a choice, but it's a story of resilience. It's a story of somebody having doors shut in his face, always searching for a better, more conducive environment to create and grow and learn.

And eventually, 10 years after he begins his first day of college in Washington, DC, he's directing the Elephant Man and being nominated for Academy Awards. His career, as I said after that, is a roller coaster of successes and failures. Up and down his career would go, but at that point he was firm and established and successful and he had a body of work. I could probably talk for another couple of hours about him,

but I think that's probably enough. I love David Lynch. I've loved him since 1989. I'll love him till the day I die. I appreciate every second of his art that I have enjoyed. I feel so fortunate to know that there's a few pieces out there that I still get to discover. I don't know what more you can really say.

Thank you, David Lynch, you complete stranger for being so influential and teaching me so many lessons about how I do and don't wanna live my life and express myself creatively. We'll do two songs of the day today. And we're going to do two because they are both David Lynch inspired. In Eraserhead, there's a very bizarre little song and dance number called In Heaven. If you've seen Eraserhead, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you don't know what I'm talking about. It inspired two songs, probably more,

but it inspired these two songs, which are gonna be our song of the day. The first one is In Heaven by the Pixies. It's essentially just Frank Black's version of a song that's sung in the Racerhead. And then the second one is Working On Leaving the Living by Modest Mouse. And it's a whole ass song, but it uses In Heaven as kind of a jumping off point.

And I think they're both wonderful songs and they're both great ways to remember David Lynch. So I hope you'll check them out. And I will see you next week when we pour over all the research I did earlier today on dog breeds. Alright. This is the end of the show. Mwah!