The first time I watched a David Lynch film I was 14.

Dune had just come out, and I was a science fiction loving teenager who’d only just read Frank Herbert’s opus with a film tie-in cover. I lapped up the film, warts and all. Granted, Sting’s golden underpants didn’t quite sit right with me, but in that post-Return of the Jedi period, I would watch any decent SF I could. I even read the official behind the scenes book, The Making of Dune by Ed Naha, which unusually for these kinds of things, didn’t entirely ignore some of the major production issues that took place along the way (Read Tim Robey’s recent Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops for more on Dune‘s many challenges).

But I didn’t really discover Lynch until I was at university.

Specifically I was living in Edinburgh for a placement, and my flat was in the Toll Cross part of the city. Within easy walking distance I had the Filmhouse which was like Edinburgh’s version of the BFI, the Cameo that showed late night double bills of classic films, and the Odeon for new stuff. That was also the year I got my first VCR – a reconditioned model. And there was a local video rental place that rented a vast array of titles for just 50p each!¹

I saw a lot of films that year.

One night, the Cameo had a double bill of Blue Velvet and Eraserhead. It probably didn’t start until 11pm, but I spent a wonderful few hours watching some truly eye-opening cinema. Now, I was beginning to understand David Lynch. That August we also got Wild at Heart with Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and whole host of Lynch regulars.²

I mentioned above that I’d bought my first VCR. The reason for that was that BBC2 was going to be airing Twin Peaks and I knew that I’d want to record it. It cost me £99. The first episode aired on Tuesday 23rd October 1990, and the new series got star billing in the Radio Times with a sultry Sherilyn Fenn featuring on the cover.

As well as 9pm Tuesday airings, the show also got a same-week repeat on Saturday nights where it was sandwiched between the excellent film programme Moving Pictures, and a classic film that was tied into something that evening’s Moving Pictures had explored. Truly a cineaste’s Saturday night viewing.

With an array of strange, but also recognisable characters, a straight-laced lead in Kyle MacLachlan who had previously starred in Dune, and a killer soundtrack from Angelo Badalamenti, featuring Julee Cruise, it’s music I constantly listen to, even today.

The only real problem was that the first season had already aired in America between April and May that year, so we were a few months behind in the UK. While the first season was ordered as a “mid season replacement” meaning it had just eight episodes – a full season two had been ordered which would ultimately consist of 22 episodes. Lynch wouldn’t be involved on a day-to-day level. Furthermore, season one did not solve the overarching mystery of “Who killed Laura Palmer.”

When the final episode of season one aired in the UK on December 11th, I was now quite concerned, because I had “discovered” the internet, and the issue of “spoilers.”

I did have The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer written by Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, it having been published in November, right in the middle of the massive buzz Twin Peaks was causing in Britain. And I’d bought the Rolling Stone issue that featured the series’ three female stars. But season two had started airing in America before season one had even started in the UK.

What we now understand as “the web” wasn’t really made public until 1991, and I didn’t install Mosaic or Netscape until a year or two after that. But back in 1990 I had access to my university’s computer system and in particular I now knew about internet newsgroups.³

alt.tv.twin-peaks was where any fan of the show went to learn more about the series and dissect recent episodes. But I had to visit the site very cautiously, and studiously ignore threads where new episodes were being dissected.

Fortunately there were broader discussions, and while I was more of a lurker than a contributor, I discover that I did post at least once during that period.

The good news was the BBC didn’t delay too long in bringing season two to UK screens, and episodes began airing on January 8, 1991, again with Saturday repeats. And because the run was essentially uninterrupted, the penultimate episode aired only one day after its US airing, where the final two episodes aired back to back in mid-June.⁴

While Twin Peaks had been cancelled by the US network ABC, there were now rumours of a follow-up feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and it went into production in the summer of 1991 with a healthy dose of French money backing it. Needless to say, that although it was even weirder than the TV series had been, and it’s incredible now to think that Twin Peaks had aired on network TV in America, I loved the sideways nature of the film.

We had to wait a few more years before another Lynch movie came our way. Lost Highway was profoundly odd, and would presage some of his later works. Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman are both superb in it.

I confess that I’ve not re-watched The Straight Story since its original release, telling the story of veteran who has to use his tractor to go an epic road trip at a very slow pace.

But the mighty Mulholland Drive was to come, and that was glorious. It’s incredible to think that it was originally conceived as a TV pilot for a series, before it was worked into a film. I’m not going to attempt to describe the plot of the Los Angeles-based film that has threads involving a failed murder attempt, and an aspiring young actress coming to Hollywood in hope of her big break.

There are some incredible scenes including the wonderful Club Silencio which we’ve all dreamt of going to, and the truly remarkable scene where Naomi Watt’s character auditions for a part.

I’m sure that I remember seeing a newspaper advert that featured “David Lynch’s 10 Clue to Unlocking This Thriller”, but those clues certainly appeared in the physical DVD release in some territories.

Lynch’s final film would be 2006’s Inland Empire which was similarly experimental and featured many of Lynch’s regular cast members in another LA set milieu.

Again, it’s something that I need to get back to, although I remember being enraptured for its three hour run-time.

In 2014 came news that there was going to be a new series of Twin Peaks. Early in the era of “Peak TV” meant that every network was looking for something new and high-end, and Showtime, which had always played second fiddle to HBO, was the cable network that ordered it.

Over the next year or so, there was a lot of back and forth over how many episodes there would be, budgetary issues, and which actors would be coming back for the new series. But in May 2017, the new series arrived, this time reaching UK shores simultaneously with its US release.

I’m not sure that Twin Peaks: The Return was ever entirely up there with the original first season of the TV series, but it was certainly event TV, and every bit as weird and exciting as anything else Lynch had done. Basically all of the original series’ cast came back, alongside new characters. And while some plot strands were over-played – we didn’t need that much of Cooper as Dougie – it was a welcome epilogue to the series.

And it also made a great epilogue to Lynch’s career. Outside of films and television, there was music, there were paintings and there was his daily YouTube weather reports. He was a singular filmmaker, who was never curtailed by creative imagination. He will be missed.

RIP.

Notes

1. At the time, I couldn’t work out the economics of renting films so cheaply. “Well it must make sense to them,” I thought. The rental shop went out of business a couple of months later.

2. Makes mental note to rewatch Wild at Heart along with many of the other titles that are mentioned in this piece.

3. I like to remind people when talking about newsgroups, that the entirety of IMDB was published in those newsgroups along with a program that you could compile on your own UNIX machine to enable you to locally parse the database of linked film titles, actors and so on. IMDB datasets are still made available for non-commercial purposes.

4. Cancelled shows often had their final un-aired episodes “burnt off” during the summer months. Prior to those final two episodes airing on June 10th, the previous new episodes had aired in mid-April, nearly two months earlier!