'The self we talk to doesn't age': remembering David Lynch
Time loops, Twin Peaks, memory and fandom
I didn’t watch Twin Peaks when it was first on television, when I was fourteen. My memory is that my mother wouldn’t let me, though maybe I just prefer to forget not being interested. I was intensely interested in normality, which I performed by falling asleep each night to an audio cassette tape I’d made of Top Gun.
If I skip ahead to when I did watch it, maybe five years later, after I’d exchanged my Tom Cruise obsession for The Cure and Nirvana, my memory still wavers.
I know I first devoured it on a series of rented videotapes, during my first years of university. I remember sprawling on a sharehouse bean bag in a chipboard room, communing alone in the dark for hours. Throughout my life, I would rent those tapes (then DVDs) again and again. My memory is that I first watched it with an exercise book beside me, pausing to take notes, for a cultural studies essay where I argued for Twin Peaks’ feminism. Here’s the blurriness: the tutor I remember admiring the essay (though she disagreed with its premise) was one I had in Melbourne, in 2000, but the sharehouse television room (more likely to be accurate) was in Adelaide, in 1995.
“An accurate memory of the past would be depressing probably,” David Lynch, co-creator of Twin Peaks, told interviewer Kristine McKenna (who would go on to become his biographer) in 1992. We favour ourselves in our memories, he explained. “We make ourselves act better in the past and make better decisions, and we’re nicer to people and we take more credit than we possibly deserve – we candy-coat it so crazy so we can go forward and live.”
In Lynch’s work, both memory and time blur and overlap. Strands loop, parallel and overwrite each other. His narratives often circle back to where they began, and end thrusting forward into an unknown that is informed by what’s come before, but unfolds in strange ways.
Think of the audacious ending to Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). The final hour begins with FBI agent Dale Cooper finally arriving back in Twin Peaks, twenty-five years and almost an entire third series after his soul was trapped in the mystical Red Room. Immediately, he goes back in time, in an attempt to rescue Laura Palmer, whose murder sparked the original episode of the original series, and was our entry point into the world of Twin Peaks. The final words of the final episode suggest Cooper is lost in time, that he is in the past and the future at once: What year is this?
Always 19, and discovering Twin Peaks
Lynch, of course, died last week, on January 15, 2025, five days before his seventy-ninth birthday. “People don’t really have an age,” he wrote in his half memoir, half biography, Room to Dream, in 2018, “the self that we talk to doesn’t age – that self is ageless. The body gets old, but that’s all that changes.” He has told interviewers, more than once, that his emotional age remained somewhere between nine and seventeen (and sometimes six).
I think a part of me will always be nineteen and first discovering Twin Peaks. Accepting, without articulating it (even to myself), that my deepest affinities lie in the not-quite-normal.
Soon after my first greedy Twin Peaks binge, I began collecting Twin Peaks ephemera, starting with a photocopied script for the pilot and two glossy publicity stills. (Sadly, I threw these things out in a short-lived bout of grown-up-ness I regret, about twenty years ago.) The first photo showed two beautiful cast members smouldering beside a coffee cup; the second showed a pale, bruised brunette in a torn slip, teetering barefoot on train tracks, pine trees looming greyly in the distance.
I loved Kyle MacLachlan’s alternately crisp and dreamy FBI agent, Dale Cooper and Sherilyn Fenn’s schoolgirl sexpot, Audrey Horne, whose fifties sweater-girl outfits I would sometimes try to emulate (usually clumsily) in the years ahead. But I was especially enchanted by the series’ haunting mood of dark beauty, seductive threat and tarnished innocence, its deep articulation of how everyday life is experienced in layers: a forever-repeating fold of the normal and the skewed. I was excited by its invitation to be a partner in decoding and building its story, just as I decoded and built myself and the world I inhabited. I felt, more than understood, why I loved it.
Lynch would probably approve of that. In 1990, he told David Breskin:
If it stays abstract, if it’s in an area where it feels truthful, and it hooks in the right way, and it thrills you as you move to the next idea and it seems to move and make some kind of intuitive sense, that is a good guideline.
He told Chris Rodley in 1997, in Lynch on Lynch:
Painters don’t have to talk. Every idea was in another language, down, deep inside … Talking about things isn’t a totally satisfactory thing.
Isabella Rosellini said he “hates words”. First wife Peggy Reavey said she was with him in his “preverbal stage”. She went on: “He didn’t talk the way a lot of people do about their work. He would make noises, open his arms wide and make a sound, a sound like wind.”
‘I like to remember things my own way’
I first watched Lost Highway, a film inspired by the O.J. Simpson murder trial, in a cinema on Rundle Street in Adelaide. I feel like I was with a friend who was an aspiring photographer; she had a handsome older boyfriend, was having an affair with her (much older) photography lecturer and wondered about maybe being bisexual. She had a curtain of bluntly cut grey-blonde hair, plump lips and dressed mostly in black. I wore a lot of navy then, so I could wear dark clothes too, but not copy her. I dated two of her ex-boyfriends (and a boy with a crush on her) after she’d finished with them, which she wasn’t hugely impressed by. I was a bit lost. Looking for clues as to what I might like, who I might be.
Lost Highway is split into two distinct narratives: in the first, Bill Pullman plays a wary, watchful, intense jazz musician, Fred Madison, married to slinky brunette Patricia Arquette. Videotapes start arriving at the doorstep of their stark LA home, depicting first the interior of their house, then the couple sleeping. Then – after a tense party where Pullman encounters a coldly terrifying Mystery Man and watches his wife flirt with a sleazy friend – he wakes to a third video, of him murdering her.
In his prison cell, a crippling headache erupts, and he is replaced by an innocent, eager young mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, who falls for a white-blonde Arquette, glowing girlfriend to a gravelly mobster who gradually reveals herself as the scheming femme fatale of Fred Madison’s dark suspicions. The film’s final sequence includes a moment from its beginning, its perspective switched from inside to out: the words “Dick Laurent is dead”, spoken into the intercom of the Madison house.
In a 1997 interview with journalist Dominic Wells, Lynch nodded when he suggested Pullman’s musician was the grown-up version of Getty’s mechanic, rather than a different person. And he didn’t disagree with his thesis the film’s protagonist is “trapped in a time loop, doomed to repeat his murders and mistakes”. Wells asked: “Is it anything to do with Karma, the wheel of life, with rebirth?” Lynch replied: “It could be.” He continued: “It’s not so much a circle as like a spiral that comes around, the next loop a little bit higher than the one that precedes it.”
This conversation could as easily be applied to the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return.
I viscerally remember, aged twenty-one, sitting in the dark with the Trent-Reznor-produced soundtrack of Lost Highway, its soft crooning and industrial beats, and Lynch’s painterly images. Patricia Arquette’s sculptural white nakedness and satiny curves, Bill Pullman’s head blurring in shadowed transformation, Mystery Man Robert Blake’s too-red lips and too-white face as he mouths to a bemused Fred Madison at that party that he’s been inside his house. “I’m there right now.”
I say “I feel like” I was with my photographer friend. It’s how I remember it. But if I do the math, I’m pretty sure our friendship was over by 1997, when Lost Highway came out.
I was seduced by Lost Highway’s visceral beauty and underlying anxiety. Perhaps I connected to its theme of duality, of consciously becoming someone else to escape my own skin … even if it was impossible to stay inside that transition. To not gradually, before you could control it, become yourself again.
“I like to remember things my own way,” says Fred Madison in Lost Highway, to a policeman asking why he doesn’t like home videos. “How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” Lynch told David Breskin something very similar: “I don’t want to see something so clearly that it would destroy an imaginary picture.”
Maximum-level intensity
Lynch is famous for his intricate attention to detail: on his films and television projects, he is closely involved with details like props and sound design, as well as directing the actors, writing or co-writing his screenplays, and supervising editing in postproduction. Laura Dern has described him mixing lipsticks to get the exact right shade he envisaged for her character, Diane, in Twin Peaks: The Return, because the colour he wanted didn’t exist.
And I’m sure I’ve read that he designed Sheriff (Frank) Truman’s gorgeous wooden desk, with its pop-up desktop computer (which emerges, encased in wood, at the press of a button). A device that combines the old-fashioned simplicity of a pre-computer-age desk with the necessary functional 2010s update – and embodies blended eras and timelines. (I would love to own that desk.) It mirrors the design logic of his own house, where he had designed boxes to conceal the video system and phone, to “keep rooms as pure as possible”.
“If you put this word caring at the maximum-level intensity, it wouldn’t even begin to be enough to say how much I love furniture,” Lynch told John Powers in 2001.
It’s instructional that the worst moment of Lynch’s filmmaking life, “the only time I really considered suicide as a way to stop the torment”, was after the suit he created for John Hurt to wear in The Elephant Man (1980) didn’t work. “I couldn’t crawl out of my body, and that’s what I wanted to do – I wanted to be somebody else, crawl out, and not have knowledge of that other person,” he told Chris Rodley for Lynch on Lynch. He couldn’t “eat right, sleep right, move”, and expected to be fired when producer Mel Brooks arrived on set to deal with the problem. But of course, Brooks just brought on a makeup artist who specialised in special effects. “David, you should’ve never tried to do that, you’ve got enough to worry about, directing the picture,” Brooks very sensibly told him.
Lynch’s special genius for building mood, character and story from an accumulation of carefully composed detail was also used to explain the one of his films that could really be described as a consensus critical and commercial failure: the big-budget science-fiction extravaganza, Dune (1984), where concentration on minute detail was impossible.
Dune was responsible for one major win in his career though – it’s where he first encountered Kyle MacLachlan, his regular muse (even avatar) and a close friend for the rest of his life. Dune, which he famously hated, was taken away from him and re-edited: he said the version screened wasn’t his vision. He insisted on final cut of his film projects from then on, willingly sacrificing budgets and salary in exchange for creative control.
Routine, comfort and ‘no surprises’
Lynch always liked control, over his work and his life. It wasn’t about power, though – he was uninterested in it for its own sake. Mary Sweeney, his third wife (and longtime editor), has described him as “a hermit”. And he said in the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life: “There is always a nervousness of going out.” This began in childhood and seems to have erupted in varying periods of intensity.
In The Art Life, he remembers a difficult fortnight when he first arrived in Boston to attend university, far from his family and friends. He spent the time before school started in his apartment, sitting in a chair, listening to a transistor radio until the batteries ran out, only getting up to use the bathroom. It was a “real struggle” to go to school, but when it came time, he went. (He dropped out after a year.)
A week before Lynch died, he was temporarily evacuated from his three-house compound in Los Angeles, near Mulholland Drive, due to the fires. His original home there was the pale pink Beverly Johnson House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright. His second house became his production studio and the third was converted into a sound and recording studio (after serving as the unhappy Madison home in Lost Highway).
As I write, the spontaneous shrine to Lynch is growing at the site of Bob’s Big Burgers, where he famously consumed the same thing (coffee and chocolate shakes) at the same time (2.30pm) every day for around seven years. This habit of eating the same food is a longstanding one, mirrored by his attachment to the same basic uniform throughout his life – with his shirts buttoned to the top, to avoid wind touching his collarbone. “I’ll have the same thing every day for six months maybe or even longer. And then one day I just can’t face it anymore,” he told John Powers of his food habits in 2001. He explained it as “reassuring … there are no surprises there.”
This concept is deeply familiar to me. I have often been embarrassed to return to the same cafe every day and order the same thing, to have staff ask “the usual, then?” with wry smiles. Very occasionally, I would deliberately alter my order, to prove I’m not a weirdo. (Though the next time, I’d always revert.) For the past several months, most days I’ve cooked my own lunch of kale, tomatoes, two eggs and pita bread, all cooked in garlic olive oil and chilli. One day, I know, I will wake up and no longer want to eat it.
“Your horror of all horrors is that all of us are so much out of control, and if you start thinking about it, you can worry about that for a long time,” Lynch told Breskin. “The smaller the world, the more safe you feel, and in control.”
In The Art Life, Lynch muses that until high school, his world was “no bigger than a couple of blocks”. Though he has often attributed his sunny disposition to a happy, even “idyllic” childhood, he has also shared descriptions of unease. That unease is not what he privileges in his story of self, but it is equally there. “We all have at least two sides,” he told Chris Rodley. “The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile these opposing things.”
One old friend recalled these two sides being represented in Lynch’s high-school love life. “David had a really straight girlfriend, but he also used to date some of the ‘fast’ women at school … He was intrigued by the wild side of life.” I (re)read this passage during my latest Twin Peaks rewatch, and was struck by the reflection in Laura Palmer, the prom queen officially dating the football hero, but secretly seeing a biker with a poet’s soul and the local drug-trafficking trucker (among others).
Lynch was “like catnip to women”. He nearly always had a girlfriend, from childhood on, and they often overlapped, as he cheerfully admitted. Though he never wanted to marry and have children – it was antithetical to the all-consuming “art life” he imagined for himself – he had four wives, and a child by each of them. His first two wives remained his close, lifelong friends. So did Isabella Rosellini, his Blue Velvet star, who he dated for five years (despite him breaking up with her very badly). “It’s a lot of work being with David Lynch,” said Peggy Reavey, who typed his early scripts for him. “Our friendship continued, I just quit the job.”
Madchen Amick, whose waitress Shelley kissed an infatuated Gordon Cole (played by Lynch) on Twin Peaks, said all the girls were jealous she got to kiss him. Laura Elena Harring, the smouldering brunette to Naomi Watt’s blonde ingenue in Mulholland Drive, described him as “drop-dead gorgeous”. But aside from Rossellini, his relationships with actresses seem to have been collegiate, even paternal.
Particularly with Watts and Dern, who he first cast (in Blue Velvet) when she was seventeen and who starred in his final feature film, Inland Empire (2006). Dern said he “instantly felt like my family”. Watts said “his eyes were real and true and interested” at their first meeting, like no audition she’d ever been in. “He loves actors.”
Good art friends
It seems Lynch’s ability to burrow into a world of his own through making things has been as key to his happiness as the affinity for friendship so many people comment on. Many of those friendships were forged through making art. Jack Nance, star of Eraserhead and in everything he did since until his death – including the iconic Pete in Twin Peaks – was one of his best friends. His actual best friend (since tenth grade), Jack Fisk, was a fellow artist turned production designer (including on Terrence Malik’s Badlands, Mulholland Drive and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon).
Lynch’s grown children are all artists. He has admitted he’s not been a very present father, something he described as generational, though he believed his father was a better one than he is. In Room to Dream, he called the modern habit of parents attending their kids’ baseball games “ridiculous”. He said: "The work is the main thing, and I know I’ve caused suffering because of that. But at the same time I have huge love for the kids."
Director Jennifer Lynch was a production assistant on Blue Velvet (where she noticed her father falling for Rossellini) aged roughly eighteen, and wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer – a bestseller companion book to the series – when she was twenty-two. She often described her father as “kind” and was quoted this week saying he was “the best dad he could be”.
Austin Lynch, who also directs, had a memorable cameo as Mrs Tremond’s magician grandson in the original Twin Peaks. Riley Lynch worked as a production assistant on Twin Peaks: The Return, and performed at the roadhouse with longtime Lynch music supervisor Dean Hurley . Lula, his youngest, born when he was sixty-six, appeared in The Art Life, painting beside him or sitting on his lap as he made things.
Getting ‘on the inside’
Lynch’s own family moved around a lot:
When you’re uprooted, you have to start all over again. It’s hard if you’re on the outside. It forces you to want to get on the inside.
When his family moved to Virginia just before he started ninth grade, he became friends with “a bad bunch”. He developed intestinal spasms. “It was turmoil,” he said. “It was almost like I couldn’t control it. It was just what was happening.”
A year later, he made a friend whose father, Bushnell Keeler, was a fine-art painter. It “blew all the wiring,” Lynch remembered. Keeler would become an important mentor, getting him his first studio space and even convincing Lynch’s father he was serious about his art. It’s surely no coincidence Dougie Jones has a boss and mentor named Bushnell in Twin Peaks: The Return.
In tenth grade, Lynch said, “the sunshine start[ed] coming back”, though he still hated school and “never studied … I hated it with powerful hate”.
He described his struggle to compartmentalise his “three lives”, friends, home and art, saying he acted, spoke and thought “totally different” in each one. He never brought his girlfriend or friends home, and asked his parents – who he adored – not to attend his graduation. (They came anyway.)
“I was afraid of what would come out if everyone got together,” he said.
Jimmy Stewart from Mars
Mel Brooks famously referred to Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. He was both utterly of his generation, and utterly himself.
I feel like this anecdote from the 1960s says a lot:
We didn’t go to the concert at Woodstock, but we did go to Woodstock. It was in the winter and we went up there because we’d heard about this hermit who lived there, and wanted to see this hermit.
He loved wood, and mounds of dirt, and liked to dissect dead animals to examine their texture. (He was “obsessed with textures”.) He liked electricity, too. Ronnie Rocket, his unmade (but never entirely abandoned) 1977 script about an interdimensional detective, had electricity as a menacing central force. In the Twin Peaks universe, electricity is aligned with spirits and netherworlds – from the eerie flickering of the lamp over Laura Palmer’s dead body in the morgue to Cooper and Diane’s journey back through time in the final episode of The Return, linked to the specific coordinates of power lines along a highway.
Lynch indicated this fascination in Lynch on Lynch, a decade before The Return:
If you were blindfolded and drove down a highway under those power lines and really concentrated, you could tell when they occurred. There’s something very disturbing about that amount of electricity — they know these things now.
Many have wondered if Lynch was autistic – and he certainly has traits. The part of me that has rewatched Twin Peaks (and Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive) more times than I count, and seen new clues to their meaning every time, the part of me that has read his biography and books of interviews, and the oral history of Twin Peaks, and various books by fans and academics, and Blue Rose magazine … this is the part of me that has excavated these traits.
I mean, of course this autistic fangirl wants to see this in David Lynch. I won’t give him a label, though. (He would hate that.) Instead, I’ll leave this carefully composed mosaic of fragments and let you piece it together your own way, combining your intuition, feelings, what you’ve read and what you see in his life and work.
I’ll leave the last words to Lynch:
I love the idea that one thing can be different for different people. Everything’s that way.
