jazzfish | "how's annie?" (Reply)

[David Lynch] was a boomer who made his name by being weird and transgressive, and instead of using that as a license to behave like an asshole at all times, he was fundamentally full of joy and a profound love of his craft. He wasn't afraid of being earnest or uncool, of looking at the brokenness of the world and sitting with your sadness about it. And he felt no obligation to explain himself or suit his work to any tastes, high or low."
--Abigail Nussbaum, "Lynch"

In the late nineties, Jonathan had the entire run of Twin Peaks on VHS, and he and I watched it over the course of a few months. It's stuck with me in a way that a lot of what I watched in college didn't. Slow, meandering, confusing, incredibly visual: the only thing I'd seen even vaguely like it before was 2001. And Twin Peaks had a much broader range of human experiences and emotions to support and magnify its surreality and paranormality. I'm not sure I'd rewatch it; I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone else. But it certainly changed me.

Around the same time I watched Blue Velvet and Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway (at least twice), and understood more or less none of them. With Lost Highway at least I quite enjoyed being swept away in the strangeness of it all. I never got around to seeing Mulholland Falls, or the Twin Peaks revival series. A few years ago I watched about half of Dune but stalled out after the massacre. Mostly I've enjoyed the existence of David Lynch, for being so very much who he is, and having such a strong sense of artistic (and personal?) vision.

So it goes.