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My feed has been flooded with tributes and memories and moments following the passing of David Lynch this past week.
This one hit the people I spend time with in the underground hard. So hard, in fact, that this is only one of the tributes I am composing (another focused on his films more broadly will appear elsewhere). Yes, the stage of what was The Windup Space was designed to look like the Red Room. Yes, my friend’s band Practice Finger, members of which would go on to form Thank You, started after being inspired by the band playing in the Bang Bang Bar in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
But, yeah… let’s talk Lynch and his use of music, one facet of his artistic output. Potential spoilers ahead as well as clips to moments in R-rated films.
Yes, he put out albums and did work in music in that sense. But I want to focus on few moments from his films that struck me sonically, moments where the marriage of picture and sound were particularly striking, moments from that world he made that provides myself and others with endless inspiration.
In Wild at Heart, it is hard to find a more fantastical scene in terms of what could be, in dreams, in a concert setting. It is an amazing four minutes or so of film. I won’t spoil it but imagine seeing this sequence in 1990, when you are fourteen. I still seek such moments of magic on any given Friday or Saturday night.
Once I caught on, I dug in to his filmography via the local video store and saw Blue Velvet, getting knocked out once again in that particular Lynchian way by the “Candy Colored Clown” sequence. I have always had a “broad ear”, and seeing older music used in striking and challenging ways made sense to me, bringing its power into new contexts and forms.
Conceptually, in Lost Highway, another dream would be that you could be this wild of a jazz saxophone player and afford to live in a house like the one that Fred Madison inhabits in the film. It is maybe taking a rational reading of a film often interpreted to be about a “fugue state.” Still, this other reality struck me as the one that should be as opposed to the one that we inhabit.
These are but a few of the examples of moments that have stuck with me over a creative lifetime of watching and cheering on the artistic output of David Lynch and seeing its broad and powerful influence on the underground. He was singular and uncompromising in his achievement of his vision. He is the epitome of the name of this column, the aspiration achieved. Not bad for a kid from Missoula.
