Rita (Laura Harring), the femme fatale with amnesia, wakes in the night having remembered something: “Go with me somewhere,” she whispers to her lover, Betty (Naomi Watts). It’s around two o’clock in the morning in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) when the women hail a cab; it takes them into Downtown Los Angeles and drops them at a door at the rear of a parking lot. A glowing neon sign above the door reads “Silencio” and throws a miasma of blue light across the dark, empty lot. In one shot, we are watching from afar as the women disappear into the club when the howling wind picks us up like a scrap of cardboard and hurls us toward the door. Or maybe we are being sucked? Pulled across a threshold into this small hole in the wall. 

Last week, on Monday 16th of January, Lynch’s family announced that the director had died. No cause of death was mentioned but he had been suffering from emphysema, caused by many years of smoking cigarettes. On my phone, announcements of his passing appeared between headlines about the wildfires still raging in Los Angeles. Instead of tracing the perimeter of the fires again in Google Maps, I scrolled further into Downtown and stopped at 632 South Spring, where a public lot called Joe’s Auto Parks backs onto the stage door of the historic Palace Theatre. Using street view you can see that this is the location Lynch used as the entrance to Club Silencio, but in this image the light is overcast and smooth, and the door is closed.

Questions in Snoqualmie. 

Late in November 2019, I travelled from Vancouver to Los Angeles by train. To do this, you take the Amtrack Cascades to Seattle. From there, you board the Coast Starlight train, which takes you all the way to Union Station in Downtown. This is a great way to see the spectacular west coast of the United States – and if you stop for a night or two before changing routes, you can visit the various Washington State locations where David Lynch shot Twin Peaks. The most famous of these is Snoqualmie Falls, which are as majestic and misty and mysterious as the series’ opening credits would have you believe. I visited with a guide who drove me around for hours to see key locations, like the diner that stands in as the “Double R”.

At one point, my guide pulled over beside the Snoqualmie river. I got out of the car and watched him unroll a facsimile of the “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign, which he proceeded to set up on the gravel beside the road. The river was loud, swollen with recent rain, and the powerlines overhead moved in the wind. Suddenly I realised we were standing right where the camera had been positioned to capture that iconic image of the road leading into the town of Twin Peaks, “population 51,201”. My guide asked if I wanted a photo beside his sign, but I declined. As he pulled the whole set-up down and packed it away, I took a picture of the empty road. He seemed annoyed, and it was fair enough. On the drive back I remember thinking: what am I doing here? Why do we visit the places we see on screen?

Fish Kit. 

Most of the messages I received about Lynch’s passing were from people who had been my students. At first, I wondered if this was because they thought I was some kind of Lynch tragic. I thought I’d kept that under wraps? But as the messages kept coming, I realised that studying Lynch’s films had been a formative experience for so many people.

Lynch loved to build things and to take things apart. His goal was not, I think, to get to the bottom of how they worked, but to assemble their parts and explore new possible relations between them. Lynch’s fascination with parts and wholes is perhaps most obviously articulated in the “animal kits” he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s: photographic artworks depicting animals’ bodies dissected into component parts and assembled in the manner of a children’s toy kit. His 1979 work ‘Fish Kit’ labels the parts of a fish that’s been sliced into three silvery chunks. This may sound macabre. But the handwritten instructions to “Place finished fish in water” show us that the work is not about the animal’s death, but the possibilities of creating something new with its material components. Writing about Lynch’s animal kits, Michel Chion observes that “it is what he discovers in the parts that impassions him: details, and as he says, textures which are normally invisible unless one plays at erasing their names”.1 Chion’s point is that this fascination with the assembly of parts fuels Lynch’s creativity across the breadth of his artistic output. It is what drives him, in his practice as a filmmaker, to connect “images with the same sense of freedom in editing reminiscent of the silent film era”.2 

This balance between structure and freedom makes Lynch’s film and television work excellent for teaching and for learning about cinema. I have listened to Lost Highway (1997) with students in dozens of classrooms, and I have watched eyes widen with new awareness of the power of film sound. When the parts are recognisable, the potentiality of their assemblage begins to emerge.  

Moving through time.

This practice of assemblage also has something to do with time. First, this careful testing of resonances between figures and textures cannot be rushed. In the 2024 Sight and Sound interview in which he made his emphysema diagnosis public, Lynch also described his love for smoking; he said “the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful”.3 What one senses in this reminiscence is how the ritual of smoking was vital to shaping the rhythms of what Lynch earnestly called the “art life” – by which he meant a life dedicated (above all else) to the production of art. In this endeavour, smoking opened space for allowing resonances to emerge. 

Second, his method of assemblage shaped the temporal dimensions of the art itself. Lynch is perhaps most widely known for his “non-linear” or “dream-like” narratives, which are often read as temporal puzzles to be solved. But reflecting on the structure of Mulholland Drive, Jonathan P. Eburne suggests that Lynch’s narrative doubling is more like “a kind of mechanism for marrying and breaking apart its constitutive parts”.4 What is important, then, is not the restoration of the whole, but the ways in which the parts are energised by one another.

In Lynch’s work, references to other films also tend to function like parts, which, unmoored from history, haunt the temporality of his assemblage. This produces a sense of what Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin call “an eternal present – the time in which everything is always happening now”. In their text which stages a collision between Lynch’s Twin Peaks and David Bowie’s 1995 album Outside, Álvarez and Martin describe this as a temporality through which every event: its spectacular instant of trauma, its prelude, its aftermath, and also the inversion or reversal of every event – is accessible, through some portal or other, at every moment”.5 

Los Angeles.

When I was a kid, Los Angeles was an idea I knew only from the covers of two cassette tapes that lived in our family’s car: The Doors’ 1971 album L.A. Woman, and Tim Buckley’s Greetings from L.A. (1972). We listened to these tapes on holidays, as we drove up the Victorian coast. This is to say that it took a long time for me to become interested in Hollywood, but Lynch’s films opened the door. 

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, but had lived in Los Angeles since 1970, when he moved from Philadelphia to study filmmaking at the AFI. As a filmmaker, he is often associated with explorations of the film industry’s “dark side”, but Lynch’s Los Angeles films are also portals through which we can touch Hollywood’s glorious past. Throughout his career, he expressed adoration for the “bright…smooth” quality of the city’s light, which had attracted silent era studios to set up camp and begin making films there. Lynch said he could feel the spectral presence of Classical Hollywood in Los Angeles. In his book Catching the Big Fish, he described L.A. as a place where “the golden age of cinema is still alive…in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather”.6 I have thought about this a lot as I watch video footage of the catastrophic fires tearing through the city. It is difficult to imagine his final days, when the blue skies and golden sunshine he so cherished had disappeared, and the air was filled with smoke. 

I keep hearing people reflect on his passing as “the end of an era”, but I don’t think Lynch would want us to see it that way. He would want us to keep making art, to meditate, to experiment and go dreamy. This is how we keep the door open.

Endnotes

  1. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Translated by Robert Julian. London: BFI, 1995, p.229
  2. Ibid, p.62
  3. Wigley, Sam. “I LIKE TO CALL IT EXPERIMENTATION.” Sight and Sound, vol. 34, no. 7, 09, 2024, pp. 26-32, p.30
  4. Eburne, Jonathon P. “Fish Kit” in Campana, Joseph, et al. The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive, edited by Jonathan P. Eburne, and Judith Roof, Indiana University Press, 2016, pp.179-211, p.199
  5. Álvarez López, Cristina & Adrian Martin. “Outside / Twin Peaks (2015)” Adrian Martin Film Critic, 4 June 2021. https://www.adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/essays/outside_TV.html. Accessed 14 January 2025
  6. Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish. 2016, pp. 31-32

About The Author

Alexia Kannas lectures in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is the author of Deep Red (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, forthcoming 2017) and is currently completing a monograph on the Italian giallo film for SUNY Press.

Related Posts