David Lynch died on January 15, 2025. There are a myriad of places on the internet where you can find the timeline of his life, his deeply important work, and why you should actually give a shit about a man like that leaving this earth. So many people have already waxed poetic about who he was as an artist and his lasting impact on filmmaking. I’m just going to pile onto that sentimentality.
What was always important to me was how open and true he was as an artist. I picked up his memoirs years ago when I was in the middle of a biography kick and fell in love with it. The book itself is written as a conversation between the woman who wrote the more objective bits of his life and he filled it all in with color in the next chapter. A memoir in conversation with its subject was something that I had never experienced. I could look up whether or not that book is singular in this way, but me going on about how much I love the set up of the memoirs is not the purpose of this piece. Lynch filling in objective truths about his life with the ways that he remembers experiencing it is still something that I love deeply.
Since his death, I decided to reread the book since I haven’t picked it up in years (and I am nothing if not a chaotic, voracious reader), and it continues to be a conversation I love hearing from the other room. What struck me just in the first few chapters of this reread is how much I love his vulnerability. In this context, it's so raw and beautiful to bear witness to.
That’s part of the reason why I was drawn to his work initially. I was obsessed with Twin Peaks when I first discovered it, and inhaled Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive immediately after it. What struck me the most about all of these projects is just how much of Lynch’s own vulnerability and openheartedness is reflected not just in his characters but in his world building. I need to move on before this just becomes a rant about how much I love Lynch’s entire body of work – one of the things that I have been thinking about since I saw it was Ethel Cain’s tumblr post about how frustrated she is with her own fanbase and people in general not taking things seriously.
I am a person that struggles with vulnerability, and it has truly been the reason why I have only now at my big age of thirty one been able to fully dedicate my time and life to a career in writing. Writing and creation of any sort requires an inherent ability to be incredibly vulnerable with yourself, with your audience, and what you are writing. There are a number of reasons why I struggle with this that I will discuss with a licensed professional, but for the purposes of this piece of word vomit a significant part of that is because I have a deep uncomfortability with being seen misunderstood by people who take the wrong thing from what I write.
When I was in community college, I took a creative writing course and wrote some short story (that I definitely wrote drunk) about a woman running from some beast following her. The only part of this short story that I fully remember wanting to be the cohesive idea was that the beast would turn out to be a man she knew, but it was more about the paranoia experienced by interacting with the unknown. It was definitely a poorly written, half baked draft of a decent idea the morning I turned it in. The person who edited my piece was this grandpa (the dude was taking community college courses for fun in his retirement) who took the piece to be about women assuming the worst out of men and proceeded to give me his rant about how feminism ruined my generation of women. I can feel the anger building in my chest even now thinking about how I listened to this bag of bones drone about the evils of feminism. In a writing class. Surrounded by women. Taught by a woman. He was wildly unpopular among all of us, and I know the professor wanted to kick him out on a number of occasions.
It is, to this day, one of the most egregious ways I have seen anything I’ve written be misinterpreted. I experienced it firsthand, bore witness in real time to a man read the thing I wrote so incorrectly. Blessedly, I had forgotten about this incident until I was thinking about why I’m having such bad writer's block and such a hard time actually finishing anything to post the other day. Where had my insecurities come from? Why did they have such a chokehold on me?
I was re-blessed with Ethel Cain’s tumblr post from October about what she refers to as an irony epidemic on my twitter timeline not a few hours later and the memory came back to me. In her initial post she talks about how irony is lost on so many people these days, and in her follow up post she talks more in depth about how insanely frustrating it is that no one takes anything seriously anymore:
“...there is surely a noticeable lack of passion in everything these days. Everything now is ‘cringe’, or ‘doing too much’, or ‘not that serious’. Actually, it is that serious. Insecurity in one's own deeper feelings may not be a new thing, but a culture that seems to promote this eschewing of them does seem to be a new evil. The tone of the internet has completely shifted.”
Like most of her stuff, this post is full of gold and things that I have been feeling recently too. As a person who has been nothing but loud, intense, and passionate since the day she was born, being vulnerable comes quite naturally to me (much to my own dismay). More often than not when in conversations with people who will let me ramble, I will get into long discussions (read:rants) about topics and things that I have been/am passionate about.
How much do I share? What do people even give a shit about? Where do pieces like this one leave me other than with yet another seemingly rant-y blog style piece of writing that will sit in my google drive while I stress out about whether or not to post it?
Yet another thing that David Lynch said that I have seen ad nauseam for weeks now is this:
“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”
And truer words were never spoken. When you take writing classes, especially at the collegiate level, they impress upon you that you have to release your ego and embrace the most vulnerable parts of you to write something that's real and true and worth sharing. It was always one of those things that sounded doable in theory, but in practice is wild. The writing itself is actually easy, you just throw up on a bunch of pages. The next part of editing (either yourself or allowing an editor to rip you to shreds) is where your ego needs to be put in a box and locked up for a little bit. And that’s hard. Oscillating between thinking that I am the next big thing and nothing I ever write will be good enough for human eyes to bear witness to has lead to me tying my own hands. Maybe all my loved ones who think I’m a good writer are really just blowing smoke up my ass, or maybe, just maybe, I’m good at the one thing that I have been obsessed with for most of my life.
Accessing and sharing that vulnerability is going to have to be something I get used to. Lynch did. And what kind of person would I be to not follow in the steps of one of my greatest inspirations? As the world is burning around us in new and horrifying ways, I will seek out what ignites my passion and what truly brings out the more vulnerable and real parts of myself.