I was almost 15 when David Bowie passed away. The nine-year (nine!!) anniversary just came and went, but I remember it very clearly. There was a lot of grief that day – the strange, almost-absurd grief you feel for a public figure; someone who you have never met but there’s always the feeling that they met you – but the grief was slightly delayed, as is often. What came first, I remember, was the overwhelming sense of shock (again, as is often with grief). The feeling that they can’t die, they’re not allowed to. The sheer bewilderment of having to suddenly refer to someone monumental to you, in the past tense. But I just saw them. I just watched them on TV, read their words, heard their voice on the radio.  When someone that seminal, that all-encompassing, proves their mortality, it can almost feel like a betrayal.

The sudden news of David Lynch’s passing feels similar. Death seemed beneath him. He was too influential, too important, he had too many more stories to tell. Of course, this is true for anyone you lose. You’ve lost people. So have I. So, we all know, that there’s never a right time to go. But what’s different – and more comforting, I guess – about someone of Lynch’s magnitude, is that the grief is shared amongst millions. You cannot be a fan of his and feel alone at this moment. My timeline is universally united in affection for this man. It’s a small consolation, a grace note to a gut-punch.

Everyone is sharing stories about his work. Recounting some of his lesser-known shorts or their favourite Agent Cooper asides. His weather reports and his delightful grassroots Oscar campaign (featuring a cow?) for Laura Dern’s performance in Inland Empire. The actors he worked with lovingly doing their impersonation of that voice. How he made them feel less alone, or how they found a community through sharing his work with others. There’s always the wish that someone could read their obituary whilst still alive (I guess the closest that we’ve come to this is Bob Odenkirk). But we have to believe he knew. At any rate, here’s a tiny example of what he meant to me.

I first watched Twin Peaks in the summer of 2016. My previous attempts at watching Lynch were pretty fruitless – my fault. That’s because, for anyone who decides whilst a teenager that cinema is their thing, they must first flush some very annoying habits out of their system. The biggest one for me was the feeling that I had to unlock a film, and therefore beat it, gain power over it. Everything Lynch has ever made has been a middle-finger to that bollocks. So my early attempts to watch the likes of Lost Highway or Blue Velvet were DOA. His films didn’t ask to be understood; they asked to be felt. To surrender yourself, hold on tight. “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”

What helped to snap me out of my myopic teenage attitude was Twin Peaks. I do think the “weirdness” of the show is occasionally overstated – what typifies the show is its gaping, yearning sincerity. The opening half hour is one of the most stunning, staggering meditations on grief ever put to the screen. In the death of Laura Palmer, in that gorgeous Angelo Badalamenti theme that came around like clockwork but still knocked your socks off every time, he laid an unimpeachable emotional groundwork that carried through whatever followed. Twin Peaks is full of every feeling under the sun, but it all stems from an entire community reeling from losing someone, long before they were ready to.

That’s the other thing about Lynch; he was never out to impress you, with either his outré style or quirks. For the foremost surrealist of Americana, there was an openness to his work. This sounds stupid but I don’t care; I’m a better person because I had Twin Peaks in my life, because of that openness. It rewired my brain a little bit. Crystalised some things. All those wonderful characters feel like home to me, and I remain moved and inspired by their best qualities. Their love, their bravery, their sweetness. I wanted to be as kind as Dale Cooper when I grew up. I still do. Sherilyn Fenn, who portrayed the immortal Audrey Horne, described Lynch like this: “I think David looks for people’s souls… I think he looks in their eyes and tries to see who’s in there.”

David Lynch was a paradox. He demanded your attention, but he came to you. He was strange but rarely hostile. His work was often described as inscrutable (which is, again, missing the point), but what separated him from his many useless imitators was the emotional throughline of it all. Eraserhead springs from a fear of parenthood. Twin Peaks, if you make a possibly-pointless effort to boil it all down to its essence, is about Laura Palmer, and the weight she leaves behind. The “golden goose”, as he liked to call it, the original thought or premise from which a thousand brilliant, mad ideas could spill. Even then, reducing either one of those works discounts so many other things. Although maybe you can describe his entire career in one line: “Fix your hearts or die.”

His final on-screen acting role is, in hindsight, beautiful. Steven Spielberg’s conclusion to The Fabelmans is a wonderful coda. The director’s young avatar, Sammy, has bullshitted his way onto a studio lot and wrangled a meeting with legendary director, John Ford. The scene is, somehow, dripping with tension. Sammy waits, palms-sweating, eying posters and paintings and Oscars dripped liberally around the office. And then, in walks David Lynch. Chewing a cigar and the scenery. He gives Sammy a curt, concise lesson on framing, scares the shit out of him, wishes him genuine good luck, then kicks him out. God, what a treat.

If you’re talking formally, Spielberg and Lynch could not be more different. But one of our greatest directors, cast one of our greatest directors, to play one of our greatest directors. And what linked all three of those men was a shared belief in the sheer power of cinematic spectacle to deliver an overwhelming emotional catharsis. For his participation, Lynch reportedly only asked for on-set Cheetos and his costume a week in advance. And what could’ve been stunt-casting turned an already-joyous sequence into a moving act of metatextual solidarity between two of America’s finest artists.

There’s a lot of anger online as well. The knowledge that the ongoing wildfires in LA that forced Lynch to be evacuated from his house, was a likely factor in his death. Or that many of his long-gestating projects will never see the light of day – Netflix passed on a film very recently, and it was seen as a dereliction of artistic duty long before yesterday. He was housebound due to emphysema, yes, but he wasn’t done yet. He was writing, painting, giving weather reports, concocting, dreaming until the very end. And we would have watched whatever came of it. Anything he made was to be ecstatic for.

He was an arthouse surrealist that managed to tap into feelings so universal, that he brought an unbelievable amount of disparate people together. Like Bowie, there was the feeling that someone that wildly successful could also feel like your own little secret. He was impossible to gatekeep, because no one – not even him – could claim ownership or authority over any of his work. We were all travellers in his world, fellow dreamers. Stay as long as you like. Pick an image and find something in it, something that belongs just to you. He was a canvas. He was a whole universe.

I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to write. I just felt like I had to. And you can never write enough, of course. Or ever truly articulate what someone like that means to the world, and to you. But to sum it up; all my love to David Lynch. All my love to his family, his friends, the people who knew him. And all my love to all of us, those who were privileged to know him a little bit through his work. And in doing so, know each other and know ourselves a little bit more. It’s an unimaginably bittersweet day. To quote Donna Hayward, “it’s like having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.” But I’m thinking of another famous quote from Twin Peaks, one that’s already been shared a lot online, when Major Briggs is strung up by the gonzo Windom Earle, and asked “What do you fear most in the world?” Without skipping a beat, Briggs responds: “The possibility that love is not enough.”

His love was enough.

David Lynch, 1946–2025