By Peg Aloi

The late American filmmaker David Lynch.

My first experience of David Lynch, who died on January 15, was watching Eraserhead (1977) in college sometime around 1983. We had a coffee house film club in the Rathskeller where there would be screenings of things like Reefer Madness and other trippy stuff. Friends and I would go and smoke some weed, watch the movies, and laugh ourselves silly. We had 35mm screenings on campus, too: a memorable showing of Excalibur (1980) saw the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism arriving in full renaissance faire regalia. At the dawn of the videotape age, cult films were an emergent social phenomena.

Eraserhead was unlike anything I’d ever seen before (or since, to be honest). It was surreal, disturbing, dark, and kind of edgy in a way that is hard to describe. It was like a slow flip book of nightmares. I was only beginning to study cinema in a formal way, but I understood there was a lot going on in this film, psychologically and symbolically, even if those symbols were very upsetting to engage with.

My next Lynch film was one that introduced him to many people: Blue Velvet (1986). I saw it at a little art house theater in Northampton, Massachusetts, near where I went to grad school. I found it mesmerizing, spooky, erotic, and also quite funny. It was so compelling on every level: the haunting images of the seedy underbelly of a seemingly idyllic small town; the horrific, unpunished acts percolating beneath its decorous surface. And then there was the pervasive strangeness of its vision. That ranged from random settings to inscrutable actions, such as Dennis Hopper inhaling some unknown elixir through an oxygen mask to get him into the proper mindset for committing cruel abuse. The often-stylized dialogue supplied instantly quotable lines (like when Hopper screams at Kyle MacLachlan after hearing he likes Heineken beer: “Heineken?!? Fuck that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!”) 1984’s Repo Man, another cult hit of the time, contained a similar assortment of quotable lines, but that film was absurd and funny, not violent and terrifying. Blue Velvet caught on with audiences because of the oddity of its originality; it has an indescribable look and feel — by turns dreamy, alluring, grotesque, shocking.

Shortly thereafter came Twin Peaks in 1990. By that time I was working part time at that art house movie theater, which was next door to its eclectic, arty video store. I learned that the video store’s employees had been getting together every Saturday night since the show premiered in April to watch Twin Peaks. I guess I had a more active social life than that at the time. In addition, I didn’t have a TV, so I was blissfully unaware of what a powerfully ritualistic commitment that Saturday night gathering was.

One night I did tune in to Twin Peaks, kind of randomly while changing channels, and watched for about five minutes. The scene was the one where Dale Cooper (MacLachlan, Lynch’s frequent and longtime collaborator) has been shot and is lying on the floor of the Great Northern Hotel. He sees (or imagines he sees) a very tall, very elderly busboy shuffling slowly to smile at him and give him a thumbs-up. But this dreamlike figure can’t understand Cooper’s requests for help. I thought the scene was strange but, knowing nothing about the series at all, its tone seemed self-indulgent and pretentious. I made a mental note: maybe this particular Lynch work was not for me. I’d recently seen Wild at Heart (which was released in August that year) and had loved it, wholly and passionately. Of course, I’d heard people go on about Twin Peaks; I knew there was an extensive advertising campaign around who killed Laura Palmer. To me, it felt sort of like a procedural with a weird folkloric mystery behind it. At the time, I had no inkling of the program’s jaw-dropping artistry.

Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. A BBC poll ranked it the best film of the 21st century so far.

Fast forward several years. I was living in Boston. By then, Twin Peaks was just starting to be syndicated, broadcast in its entirety weeknights at 11 p.m. on the Arts and Entertainment network. My roommate at the time and I decided to tune in for the pilot episode; neither of us had seen the show before. We were blown away, instantly addicted, and continued to watch every night that we could.

From that point on, I considered myself a die-hard Lynch fan. I also started working as a film critic. I wrote a short review of Lumière and Company (1995) for the Boston Phoenix, mentioning that Lynch’s 52-second short film contribution to this visionary project was the most compelling among the 41 international filmmakers represented. I also started teaching film and media studies, and made a point of showing Twin Peaks in my classes whenever it was possible to do so. At first, the point was to showcase the show’s cinematic artistry, to inspire students in their own writing and filmmaking. But, as the years went by, I screened the series to acknowledge and then explore its historic impact on television and on storytelling itself. I stopped teaching in 2019, but not before I had the opportunity to moderate discussions about Lynch’s superlative achievement, Twin Peaks: The Return. I haven’t watched the show since its its auspicious premiere. Now, perhaps, I will soon feel ready to revisit it.

It’s impossible to trace all of the moments of joy, fear, wonder, excitement, and sheer entertainment I’ve derived from Lynch’s imagination, via film, television, music, art, or literature. The discovery of actors and collaborative artists and metaphysical ideas and little-known baubles of popular culture. The moments of terror and beauty that wended their way into my dreams, both nocturnal and lucid. I envy those who knew this great artist personally; I’ve heard he was also a wonderful human being: kind, thoughtful, supportive, passionate, hilarious. It is impossible to think that anyone could have been exposed to his work — its generous vision, so far-reaching in its scope, so recognizably rooted in the modern human condition, so sensitive to the mysteries that surround life and death — and not come away changed, haunted, and awed.

Peg Aloi is a former film critic for the Boston Phoenix and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Alliance for Women Film Journalists. She taught film studies in Boston for over a decade. She has written on film, TV, and culture for web publications like Time, Vice, Polygon, Bustle, Dread Central, Mic, Orlando Weekly, Refinery29, and Bloody Disgusting. Her blog “The Witching Hour” can be found on substack.