Over the past few days, a cult has sprung up at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank.
At the base of the Big Boy statue’s feet is a shrine of sorts. There are the usual flowers and prayer candles nestled there, but also cans of Coca-Cola; packs of cigarettes, coffee mugs, stray donuts, owl figurines, and a few chocolate milkshakes to-go that are now rancid under the unforgiving Burbank sun. It’s a scene that at first glance might be mistaken for a pagan offering to appease the little cherub’s wrath.
Clever readers (or at least those familiar with “Twin Peaks,” which is often the same thing) can tell by the offerings that this is a tribute to filmmaker/painter/general renaissance man David Lynch, who died at 78 on Jan. 15. Lynch was known for drinking a milkshake almost every day at this diner while he wrote, which explains its new status as a pilgrimage site.
Lynch is a difficult man to eulogize: his fans already know whatever I could share, and there’s no quick access point for novices. Even for his fans, Lynch was an open book written in a handwriting we couldn’t decipher. In a famous exchange, he once told an interviewer that his debut film “Eraserhead” was his most spiritual film. When asked to expand upon that, he politely yet flatly refused.
The easy, if incomplete, answer is to say Lynch was a surrealist. He had the privilege (or curse) of having his name immortalized as an adjective in his own lifetime, making it into the Oxford dictionary, which associates “Lynchian” with “juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments” and “compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.” This will have to do for now.
Lynch earned this reputation with films like “Blue Velvet” and his television show “Twin Peaks,” where the folksiness of small town America collided with utter depravity, beset by evils from both sides of the white picket fence. His so-called “Hollywood trilogy” (“Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Inland Empire”) follows a similar thesis, contrasting the celluloid dreams of Los Angeles with bitter realities and almost cosmic horrors lurking in the hills. Lynch was a man who spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, something he never forgave himself for.
It’s easy to presume that Lynch was cynic. But the most endearing aspect of Lynch was how pure he was in his oddity and how odd he was in his purity. He really did love Americana; blue jeans and slicked hair, soda fountains, Roy Orbison and, yes, milkshakes. In one video, Lynch mists up while analyzing a clip from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What’s funny is that he chose the clip himself, even when he saw it coming he couldn’t help but give himself over entirely.
Lynch also believed in such trifles like family and friendship, which is why he spent most of his films trying to destroy them. To Lynch, these things above all else held power, and threats to them were the only story that mattered. They were the bulwark against the forces of evil, and if they were broken (or, God forbid, infiltrated) then nothing stood in the path of destruction. A character in his “Twin Peaks” once said his greatest fear was that Love was not enough, a thought that haunts the rest of his work.
I’ve attended screenings of his films where the audience, uncertain at how to respond to moments of such unblinking sincerity, resorted to laughter until the coast was clear. They munched popcorn throughout his violence yet shifted uncomfortably in their seats when the synth strings swelled in a love theme. There was another interviewer who asked Lynch what the frequent use of angels meant in his films. He refused to accept Lynch’s answer — repeated several times — that they were just angels and that he believed in them. It was the quintessential Lynch experience: to be directly told the answer and still not comprehend it.
Lynch’s belief in angels doesn’t mean he was a Christian. As with most things involving him, it’s rarely that simple. Lynch was a proponent of Transcendental Meditation, and even started a charity dedicated to it. Lynch always looked further east for his spirtual needs, favoring the dualist and indecipherable over the specifics of Abrahamic faith.
His work could perhaps properly be understood as the marriage between Western kitsch and Eastern spirituality. At his core Lynch was a believer; it was an expansive theology which held space for angels, Tao, tulpas, llamas, astral projection, and the kitchen sink. He favored something over nothing, yet something meant everything.
But amid all that indiscriminate dogma, he also found room for one of the most Christian scenes I’ve ever seen on TV. It takes place in “Twin Peaks,” where a military man runs into his delinquent son at a diner. Instead of fighting once more, the father invites his son to sit down.
At the booth, he tells him of a vision he had the previous night, which he stresses is not the same as a dream. In it he saw a beautiful palazzo and his son inside it, finally joyful and free of what drove him from his true self. The son, up to this point the worst sort of lowlife, unexpectedly embraces this pure unadulterated grace, nearly in tears at his reprieve. His father then offers his hand, wishing him “nothing but the best in all things.” It is ridiculous, melodramatic, contrary to everything we knew about the characters before, absurd to its very marrow. I watch it on YouTube every two days.
Before I departed the Big Boy shrine, I left two offerings of my own: an old Lenten palm cross I didn’t have the heart to burn, and a serenity prayer card. Serenity is a common cause for whatever direction your spirituality faces, whether East or West. In any case, I have good hope that the only direction Lynch is moving in right now is up.
