Fix Your Hearts or Die : Remembering David Lynch
David Lynch died this week. His family announced his passing on Facebook last Thursday, saying :
There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.”
My own experiences with Lynch’s work have been fewer than I’d like, owing mostly to my first work of his being the disturbing short film “The Grandmother” which tackles child abuse with non-verbal grunts for dialogue and a surreal mix of live action and Gilliam-esque animation, but the news hit me hard.
During my time in college, I enjoyed coming home after class to watch his Weather Reports. “Good morning,” he’d say to me, long after the sun had set in the UK, before giving the weather as he knew it from his window in Los Angeles. He might talk about songs or people or types of food that were on his mind or cut right to the chase. Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes it was cloudy, sometimes the report was coloured by the stress that comes with living in this world. No matter the weather, he would turn it into a positive, promising “blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way”. If not today, then soon enough.
It feels fitting that his passing comes at a time where there were no blue skies, nor golden sunshine in his home state. Instead, the skies of L.A were choked up with smoke from unseasonal wildfires burning at all hours. People fled their homes to save their lives while firefighters, both free and incarcerated, risked their own to contain the blazes.
Over time, I’d read interviews with him about the five Woody Woodpecker dolls he called his boys, discover his connections to Dune and Link’s Awakening, and appreciate his old comic “The Angriest Dog in the World”. I’d see screenshots from his most famous work, the TV series Twin Peaks, too.
In the days since his passing, one scene has been shared the most. It’s a scene from Twin Peaks : The Return. Lynch, playing FBI Agent Gordon Cole, speaks to Denise – his former sub-ordinate who transitioned years ago – telling her :
“When you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”
And God, did I need that.
On what would have been his 79th birthday, Donald Trump came to office in his home country. Each day since then, there has been a flurry of executive orders signed (I didn’t even know those were a thing before his presidency) that seek to strip away the freedoms and equalities that have been afforded to people in America over the years, including trans people. Now more than ever do we need to give hatred no quarter.
That is who David Lynch was to me – an offbeat and occasionally cantankerous old man who, no matter what, knew how to see you off with a salute and a smile. A man who knew all about the evils of the world and refused to let them change how he treated others, letting his art speak for him. I suggest we all do the same.
Rest in peace, David Lynch. You’re already missed.
This article was originally published as part of my weekly newsletter on 21/1/25.
