You know that feeling when you miss a day of school and when you come back, everyone is talking about this one exciting thing that happened when you were out and you’ll never be able to understand because you just weren’t there? That was me trying to catch up with my cooler more knowledgeable peers in trying to appreciate David Lynch when I was (erm) in middle school.
Sitting around a TV screen with some friends one afternoon in San Antonio, TX, circa 1989, I remember thinking that I could have done without watching Eraserhead. “What the hell was that?” I thought, but I probably didn’t say it aloud because David Lynch was a surrealist and that was code for cool, and maybe I just wasn’t cool enough to get it. Or maybe I was just an awkward middle-schooler with no context for appreciating this strange Black and White film made the year I was born.
The next year, Twin Peaks was the talk of the school. I watched too, at least until I couldn’t anymore because I got too scared. Here was this weirdo David Lynch again, and why was he trying to infect my dreams? I didn’t understand. Maybe not everything was for me to understand.
That might have been the end of anything Lynchian for me, but then later I came around to watching Twin Peaks as an adult and that led to watching some of his films. I started to appreciate his weirdness as art.
Then, as fate would have it, or perhaps it was a dose of magical realism turned reality, one of my childhood friends and schoolmates—a born diva—became a musical collaborator with David Lynch. To this day Chrystabell is still the only person I’ve been in a hot air balloon with, which is fitting because I had an early suspicion that she was destined for the sky. (The phrase “The world is your oyster” makes me think of Chrystabell and her Texas-sized dreams.)
While I was in college studying public policy, I learned she was touring with a band called 8 1/2 Souvenirs. Someone sent me her CD, and I distinctly remember thinking she had the pipes for a bigger stage. So it really wasn’t a surprise to me to learn that she later met David Lynch through her agent, collaborated on some of the music for Inland Empire, and then released her debut album, which he wrote and produced. Over the years, they continued to collaborate.
In 2017, she played the role of Special Agent Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return, and it was a delight to have that personal point of entry into this tale that I couldn’t quite enter into when we were schoolgirls. Entering into his weirdness through her weirdness was not as dark, and it gave me a way to further appreciate him as a visionary artist who pushed against the grain.
Because I came of age with a political consciousness, and because the political world right now is about as surreal as some of his films, it seems fitting to highlight that Lynch had a political evolution, which you can read about on his Wikipedia page. I can see his wry humor at work in this quote that tickled me for its bare truth. A sad, weird, yet hilarious take:
“I’m a Democrat now. And I’ve always been a Democrat, really. But I don’t like the Democrats a lot, either, because I’m a smoker, and I think a lot of the Democrats have come up with these rules for non-smoking.”
And sadly, he died of emphysema when the LA he loved so much was burning. RIP to a rare genius whose artistic visions made the world much weirder—and better—because he dared to share them and lift up so many artists to help them share theirs.
Élan Young 