No, I didn’t always understand what we were making. Sometimes I’d get a sense of it, and then like on a breeze, it was gone. Other times it seemed to exist on a plane that I wanted to reach but couldn’t quite articulate.
But eventually, I realized it didn’t matter.
Though my lifelong friend, collaborator and mentor David Lynch was as eloquent as anyone I’d ever met — and a brilliant writer — he was not necessarily a word person.
I think he just found them insufficient. One-dimensional. Not up to the job.
It’s why he never wanted to explain his work. He wasn’t trying to be surly or obtuse. That was never David’s way. He loved connecting with people, meeting them where they were, sharing time or space or consciousness. It’s just that explaining his art after the fact seemed antithetical to the very point of making it.
I sat in interviews and on panels next to him and could see him struggling with questions about what things meant. Often I felt compelled to pick up the baton and talk in circles for a bit until the questioner moved on.
David knew that anything he said would be putting his thumb on the scale. And he wanted people to experience his work on their own and take away what they wished.
If words were sufficient, why would he have spent the effort and the time and the millions of dollars making it? Wouldn’t words have been so much easier?
David didn’t fully trust words because they pinned the idea in place. They were a one-way channel that didn’t allow for the receiver. And he was all about the receiver.
This distrust of words created a unique challenge for him on set, as a director’s job is all about communication. With the producers, the executives, the craftspeople and, of course, the actors.
David got around this by inventing his own peculiar way of talking to actors. I wonder if that’s why he liked to work with the same ones — me, Laura Dern, Jack Nance, Harry Dean Stanton, Naomi Watts. We understood his secret language.
Because David and I had a vaguely similar look, comparable childhoods and Northwest roots, I think he found it natural to channel ideas through me. Sometimes it was as though I was a creation of his mind.
I don’t just mean Jeffrey Beaumont or Special Agent Dale Cooper were David Lynch creations. I mean Kyle MacLachlan, too. This version of me doesn’t exist without him.
As for the secret language, he’d give me direction like “more wind” or “think Elvis.” Other times, after a take, he’d come stand next to me, and we’d just both look out into the distance and somehow — I can’t explain it — commune in that quiet space. I received him. I knew what he wanted, and he knew that I knew.
How could words possibly do justice to an experience like that?
It’s why David was not just a filmmaker: He was a painter, a musician, a sculptor and a visual artist — languageless mediums.
When you are outside language, you are in the realm of feeling, the unconscious, waves. That was David’s world. Because there’s room for other people — as the listeners, the audience, the other end of the line — to bring some of themselves.
To David, what you thought mattered, too.
With his actors, he didn’t want to give straight direction because he saw us as artists and he knew the process of getting there was part and parcel of the art. With his audience, he was the same way. He valued you, as a unique individual, to make of it what you wished.
He was drawn to mystery because he understood mystery as a conversation — a collision of differences, interpretations, perspectives. Not a message sent down from an all-knowing source.
A mystery leaves room for other people to get in there. It is two-way communication.
When David was a kid, his mother wouldn’t let him use coloring books because she thought they would kill his creativity. I think of that as the David Lynch origin story. He was given a world without lines and went about making his own.
It has been one of the great pleasures of my life to be included inside those lines.
I’ve long marveled at the trust David had in me: From my first screen test in 1983, when I froze delivering a line directly to camera. To hiring me as the lead on his very next film, “Blue Velvet,” after “Dune” landed with a thud. To building a TV series around me — “Twin Peaks” — that premiered when I was 31 years old and not particularly well known. To escorting me into a secretive, windowless room in 2015 and handing me the 500-page script for “Twin Peaks: The Return,” in which he asked me to play three distinct roles, two of which were light-years outside my wheelhouse.
In our work together, he entrusted me with carrying these things in his mind out into the world. To bring them to life. So onscreen I might have been his avatar. But he was also mine. He was the floating presence on my shoulder that told me I could do it.
I was willing to follow him anywhere because joining him on the journey of discovery, searching and finding together, was the whole point. I stepped out into the unknown because I knew David was floating out there with me.
It’s like Agent Cooper says to Sheriff Truman in “Twin Peaks”: “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
I will miss my dear friend. He has made my world — all of our worlds — both wonderful and strange.
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