Notes on David Lynch

I want to remember everything his work means to me and this is a start

I took up drinking black coffee after watching Twin Peaks for the first time.

Though I fancied Bobby, my first intense crush that felt it had an adult dimension was Agent Dale Cooper. A scene in Twin Peaks where Leyland Palmer is in the police cell and the water sprinklers go off, and Coop’s hair gets wet and falls over his face, while he is wearing his FBI jacket, and I still find almost unbearably beautiful. I occasionally google to find a still from that scene.

I was once sent out of my English class where we were doing individual reading because I became hysterical reading The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper by Mark Frost, specifically a bit where a watermelon becomes impaled on a bed post. (I hope I’ve remembered that right).

I went to see Lost Highway with my boyfriend at The Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds and silently wept because during the film I knew for certain he was going to break up with me. Even now if I hear This Mortal Coil’s ‘Song to the Siren’ I cry.

My mum once read my copy of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer while she waited to pick me up from choir and when I got in the car she told me she was worried it was too grown up.

I was obsessed with The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer because it gave me access to experiences of my own that I couldn’t yet talk about. It was the first time I found art about trauma that help me make sense of myself.

I tried to make a collage poem out of The Log Lady’s dialogue in Twin Peaks, but I never finished it. I did use a piece as an epigraph in my collection Isn’t Forever though.

During the pandemic I rewatched Twin Peaks and I realised that the comfort I got from the portrayal of Laura Palmer is Dale’s compassion for her and his refusal to judge.

Twin Peaks was a poem that revealed more and more to me with each reading.

I taught myself to play piano because I wanted to be able to play the ‘Twin Peaks Theme’. I also learned how to play ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’ and ‘Freshly Squeezed’ and ‘Audrey’s Dance’ – two jazzy numbers that often accompanied Dale and Audrey.

I got Julee Cruise’s Floating into the Night for Christmas one year. It came out in 1989, but I must have been later I got it, either 1990 or 1991 when it had been on TV for a while in the UK.

I didn’t fancy David Lynch when I was younger but as I’ve got older I’ve realised how incredibly beautiful he was.

There are a couple of Lynch films I’ve yet to see. One is Inland Empire. It feels nice there’s something else waiting for me.

I remember watching a scene where Naomi Watts’s character Betty masturbates in Mulholland Drive and thinking it was so real and wretched.

I watched all of Twin Peaks The Return on my laptop in bed, in my last flatshare. I’m not ready to watch it again but it was probably the most intense and extraordinary TV I’ve ever seen.

I even loved The Straight Story.

Lykke Li’s and David Lynch’s song ‘I’m Waiting Here’ is a sister, I think, to ‘Just You and I’ from Twin Peaks.

Speaking of that song, the longing of the scene is almost too hard to watch.