‘Then the day when the sadness comes. Then we ask, ‘Will the sadness which makes me cry, will the sadness that makes me cry my heart out, will it ever end?’ The answer, of course, is yes. One day, the sadness will end.’

The Log Lady, Introduction to Twin Peaks Episode Three

This is a difficult post. I’m beginning to write on the day of David Lynch’s death, and although the fact that I tend to work at roughly the speed with which the world’s most decrepit room service waiter delivers a glass of warm milk in the Great Northern Hotel suggests that it will be some considerable time before I finish, I can confidently predict that the sadness will not have ended by then. And I do feel sad, deeply and profoundly sad, despite the fact that I usually find the excessive online outpourings of faux-grief over the death of some celebrity none of us has ever met more than a little uncomfortable. This is different. This feels different. I’m feeling a sadness far stronger than the death of someone I didn’t know personally has ever inspired in me before. In fact, awful though it is to say, also far stronger than the deaths of several people who I did know personally.

It leads me to wonder why. After all, Lynch was 78. Not very old by modern standards, but still not a bad knock. A handy few years beyond the biblically allotted three score years and ten. Not really a premature death. And not a shockingly unexpected one, given that Lynch had been in failing health for some time. The entirely characteristic tone of his public declaration that he was suffering from emphysema remains perhaps my favourite such celebrity disclosure:

“Yes, I have emphysema from my many years of smoking. I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco — the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them — but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.”

In fact we’ve lost far too many enormous talents far younger and more unexpectedly over recent times and yet none of those deaths, desperately sad though they were, moved me anything like this. When Bowie died, for instance, or Robin Williams, I never had the experience which I had, very vividly, walking my dog this morning (I told you I was slow – a day has passed already) of feeling fully conscious, in every jangling nerve ending, that, for the first time, I was walking in a post-Lynch world.

Part of it is entirely selfish. I’m not grieving Lynch, exactly. I’m not sure it’s even possible to genuinely grieve for someone you didn’t know. No, I think what I’m really grieving is the fact that I will never again sit in a darkened cinema, or living room, and find myself surprised, terrified, enraptured and utterly enthralled by a new Lynch project. It never seemed likely, of course, not since the mammoth undertaking of directing all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. Such a monumental effort by a man in his 70s who hadn’t directed at all since the much smaller scale INLAND EMPIRE eleven years previously always had the hint of a last testament about it, from the moment that saw Chromatics performing Shadow, with its plaintive repeated refrain “For the Last Time”, at the conclusion of the opening double episode. But it wasn’t completely impossible. After all, The Return itself had been an entirely unexpected, wildly unlikely bonus, its announcement coming out of the blue and at a single stroke adding more than half as much again in terms of running time to Lynch’s entire combined directorial output up to that point. So I was clinging by my fingernails to the outside chance of there being something more to come. And, as it turns out, it came much closer to actually happening than most of us knew. The mysterious Unrecorded Night, for which Lynch wrote and copyrighted thirteen scripts, was in active pre-production at Netflix under the codename Wisteria before first Covid, and then Lynch’s own health intervened. So though the likelihood of any further work declined with each passing day, there was still a chance of something new.

But the cruel clarity of death means that it is now certain that I will never see Unrecorded Night, or Ronnie Rocket or Antelope Don’t Run No More or any of Lynch’s other unproduced projects. Nor will there be any continuation of Twin Peaks. Nor indeed something entirely new and unexpected. It baffles me how a talent like Lynch’s could ever have been allowed to struggle for funding or approval for any of his ideas. Couldn’t some handy billionaire have just thrown him the money to make whatever the hell he wanted? Elon, it would have been peanuts to you. Wouldn’t that have been a more rewarding use of your wealth than buying democracies? Or Jeff – couldn’t you have slipped Lynch a few quid whenever you weren’t too busy thinking up ways of making life even more miserable for your employees?

Because, make no mistake about it, Lynch was a monumental, once-in-an-era talent, the only figure in contemporary film for whom the cheapened and overused word ‘genius’ was truly applicable and whose face should be carved alongside those of Hitchcock and Welles on Hollywood’s own Mount Rushmore. There are, and have been, many, many other great directors, some of whom have changed and extended the language of film, but Lynch, like only the true Gods of Cinema, transcended being simply a great director. He didn’t just make great films, he built a world uniquely his own, and in building it he changed the way we see the one we live in.

It’s more than just the loss of an extraordinary talent though. I remember the deaths of Hitchcock, and Welles. And Bergman, Fellini, Wilder and Kubrick come to that. All of them were sad – and Welles’s in particular carried, if anything, an even greater sense of ‘what if’ and lost opportunities than Lynch’s – but none of them had me feeling quite like this. I think this was probably because I came to their work – at least for the most part – after it was already done. But I saw almost all of Lynch’s work as it was first released, and as a result his work has been intertwined inextricably with my own life for almost half a century.

My first encounter with Lynch was seeing The Elephant Man – perhaps the most powerful tearjerker in the history of film – on its initial release in 1980. I had been drawn to the film largely because, with its rich black and white photography and its somewhat lurid title, it seemed to be entirely in keeping with the Universal Monster Movies I loved so much, and so, being a little too timid to think of going on my own and lacking any similarly inclined friends, I prevailed on my dad’s good nature to go with me to Norwich’s ABC cinema – long gone now of course – to check it out. I was fifteen. Exactly the age when, perhaps without even knowing it, I was beginning to yearn for a kind of movie – in fact an artistic experience of any kind – that was bigger and broader and deeper and more meaningful than anything I had previously encountered. A grown-up film which would challenge and trouble me rather than simply entertain me. And that was exactly and thrillingly what I found in Lynch’s second feature film.

Although certainly more mainstream and linear than most of Lynch’s output was later to prove, its dream sequences and abstract poetry, sitting alongside its devastatingly emotional narrative and those magnificent, heartfelt performances gave me exactly the experience I had been looking for. There were moments, and whole sequences, which bypassed all thought and spoke directly to the spirit – those surreal, industrial dreams; the strange, nocturnal, Felliniesque parade of escaping fairground performers; the pantomime montage as an enraptured Merrick experiences the theatre for the first time; that extraordinary ending. Even then I was, as I continue to be, pretty much a materialist atheist – Lynch was neither – and yet for the first and not for the last time, the strange, mysterious, yearning quality at the heart of Lynch’s films spoke directly to a soul that I’m not sure I even believe I possess, and brought me as close to a spiritual or religious experience as I have ever been in my life.

Curiously, about half way through, the screening was interrupted by a splutter of electricity and a power cut – a very Lynchian moment, though no-one would have known that yet – and the audience was invited to wait in the foyer until power was restored and the film could continue. That had never happened before, and in a lifetime of cinemagoing has never happened again, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I choose to overload the moment with a significance it probably doesn’t deserve – as though that sudden break in the current, one of the most frequently recurring motifs in Lynch’s future work, usually signalling some kind of traffic or portal between worlds, were heralding my own transition from a world before Lynch to one that included him. Either that, or it was a Lynchian portent of disaster. After all, it’s not only the ABC cinema that is no longer there. Neither is my dad, with whom I shared the experience. And loss and aching sadness are just as much a part of Lynchland as mysterious longing and grace.

So deep was the impression that The Elephant Man made on me that I added the Book of the Film to my birthday requests that year. A remarkable combination of a lengthy stills gallery which wordlessly retold the story from start to finish and a series of behind the scenes articles (in those days before Making Of documentaries and DVD Special Features), the profile and interview with Lynch it contained meant that I fairly quickly knew more about him than pretty much any other contemporary director. Particularly interesting to me were Lynch’s comments about the use of sound in film:

‘I’m real interested in mood and sound combinations. I think sound is coming into its own now. I don’t think it’s gone that far yet. An image with the right sound and what it can do is what cinema is all about. It seems to me that sound was used for dialogue and for a while film was theatre moved into cinema. But people are really thinking a lot more about sound now and it really is the new area. It all goes back to mood. You have to get the sound to fit a particular film. Certain lighting can create feeling – sound can alter mood even more. I really like the idea of sound effects being used as music.’

It’s almost a Lynchian manifesto – sound and image working together, mood prioritised over narrative or dialogue, and of course as time went on, it became more and more clear that notwithstanding his remarkable visual imagination (his original impetus for moving into film was simply a desire to see his paintings move), Lynch was also the greatest innovator in terms of sound design the cinema has ever seen. Remarkable really that a young director in his early thirties discussing what was effectively his first major feature film – the previous Eraserhead was in essence a student film that grew – should have such confidence in his own vision, such certainty of the direction he wished to travel. With the exception of what Lynch regarded as his one mis-step, Dune, he remained remarkably true to his own and entirely idiosyncratic view of the kind of cinema he wished to make. “Staying true to the ideas” was the way Lynch usually put it, and he stayed true with a dogged independence, loyalty and persistence greater than that of any other filmmaker I can think of.

When I next met Lynch – his work anyway, if not the man himself, though I’m not sure in his mind he would have separated the two as much as the rest of us – the experience could hardly have been more different. By now it was the mid eighties, I was a longhaired undergraduate at an obscure Northern Irish university, and the student film society had procured a print of Eraserhead. Buoyed by my passionate love of The Elephant Man I happily trotted along to the lecture theatre which served as a screening room. And what followed was probably the most unpleasant and enraging couple of hours I have ever spent in front of a film. And I’ve seen the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man. I hated Eraserhead. Hated it more violently and angrily than I had ever hated a film. It felt less like a movie and more like a personal affront.

Of course looking back now I can see that the issue was with me, not with the elaborately coiffed Henry Spencer. It was my first real encounter with the genuinely avant-garde, and the film presented itself to me as a self-indulgent, arrogant, self-satisfied pile of steaming pretension. Though, like INLAND EMPIRE, Eraserhead will never be my favourite slice of Lynch (no right or wrong choices here, but my own tastes run particularly to the works where Lynch’s abstractions are married to a stronger sense of story and are working alongside a more recognisably real world rather than existing entirely within their own bubble of abstraction) I can enjoy and appreciate it far more now than I once could, and I can see how callow and shallow my initial judgement was. But you see, I was in a rather more insecure place back then, adrift in an unfamiliar world, and Eraserhead’s studied bizarrity seemed to me to be of a piece with all the other forms of alienating, exclusive and elitist forms of knowledge, expression and experience I was beginning to have to negotiate. The relatively narrow limits my working-class background had given me meant I was unable, back then, to see Eraserhead as any different to all the other things I was constantly reminded that I didn’t know about, had never experienced, didn’t understand. ‘You just don’t get it,’ the voices around me seemed to be constantly saying, and by now it was a far more damaging internalised refrain, running round and round in my head and undermining my every step. I didn’t get it, because I was too stupid, too provincial, too limited, too ordinary. And my reflexive form of self-defence was an aggressive rejection of anything that made me feel like that – I wasn’t too stupid, it was too elitist, too bourgeois, too empty of meaning.

The years have passed, and over time I’ve found myself a little more comfortable in my own skin than the frightened, prickly young man who first saw Eraserhead. I can see Lynch’s debut feature now for what it is. An astoundingly assured, highly personal, utterly idiosyncratic expression of self, astonishing in the level of conviction Lynch brings to his nightmare vision despite the fact that he personally was a mass of seething anxieties at the time of the film’s lengthy gestation, demonstrated most visibly in his habit of wearing two or three ties at a time as ‘protection’. Far from being a smug joke at the expense of an audience of squares and hicks like me, as I thought when I first saw the film, Lynch was so completely lost in his own dream of dark and troubling things that in truth he had no sense of an audience at all. You can’t look down on an audience if you’re not even aware of them. A true artist, bent only on self-expression, he was making Eraserhead entirely for himself.

So by the mid eighties, the score was a one-all draw as far as my feelings about Lynch were concerned. He had delivered one of the best films I had ever seen alongside one of the worst – and throughout his career he remained a director whose work roused extreme reactions, both positive and negative. Blue Velvet, for instance, gained Lynch his second Oscar nomination for best director, and yet was reviewed with a visceral loathing by Roger Ebert. Wild at Heart won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and yet was widely dismissed by critics as shallow and almost self-parodying. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was actually booed by critics at Cannes on its first screening, and Vincent Canby in the New York Times described it as ‘…not the worst film of all time. It just seems to be.’ Among the catcall chorus of critical abuse there were only a couple of critics who saw the film’s extraordinary power at the time – notably Kim Newman and Mark Kermode – and yet for me it remains perhaps the single most profoundly affecting experience the cinema has ever given me, and it gives me a pleasing degree of told you so satisfaction to have witnessed the almost complete turnaround in the film’s reputation the passing years have brought.

My next encounter was with Lynch himself, rather than one of his films (for reasons I’m not sure of now, I didn’t see either of Lynch’s 80s movies, Dune and Blue Velvet, when they were first released, only catching up with them a few years later), when he presented a 1987 Arena documentary called Ruth, Roses and Revolvers for the BBC, in which he introduced a number of pioneering surrealist short films and discussed their influence on his own work – discussed briefly that is, notoriously reluctant as he would always be to offer any real analysis or explanation of his films for fear of dispelling something of their dreamy mystery. More than the range of films he showed however, it was Lynch’s own persona which interested me. It was my first meeting with the strange contradictions inherent in his personality, the ‘czar of bizarre’ coupled with an ‘aw shucks’ wholesomeness, an alien boy-scoutedness most famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” I found the mixture intensely appealing, and for almost the next forty years would find myself looking forward to Lynch’s on-screen appearances – which were oddly frequent for a man who once described being interviewed as “like facing a firing squad but you don’t die” – almost as much as I looked forward to his all-too infrequent films.

And then came the big one. At 9.00pm on Tuesday 23rd October 1990 BBC2 broadcast the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, heralded by a surprisingly vigorous degree of BBC ballyhoo, with a Lynch-focused episode of Moving Pictures airing on the preceding Saturday, a very rare midnight screening of Lynch’s experimental short The Grandmother shown as Saturday slid into Sunday, and a special Behind the Screen preview of Twin Peaks on the Monday, all coupled with a repeat screening of the pilot episode itself the following Saturday (a pattern BBC2 continued throughout the series’ original run). The unusual degree of brouhaha reflected the fact that, at the time, the idea of a twice Oscar-nominated major film director working in television was absolutely unheard of. There’d been Hitchcock in the 50s of course, but as the title suggests, Alfred Hitchcock Presents was, for the most part at least, a presenting gig rather than a directing one – he directed only 17 of the 268 episodes transmitted – and it came well before auteur theory and New Hollywood had made deities out of film directors far too precious to dabble with the squalid little gogglebox in the corner. In fact most of what little critical interest there has been in Hitchcock’s television work has focused on how it contributed to his black and white down and dirty approach to Psycho rather than it being seen as worthy of too much attention in itself. Since Twin Peaks, the directorial world and their wife has landed up with some small screen gig or other – Stone, Tarantino, Fincher, Spielberg, Von Trier, you name them. But Lynch was the first.

And within a few minutes of the first screening of that extraordinary pilot episode – specifically at the moment that, after several minutes of rising panic, Sarah Palmer learns for certain of the death of her daughter over the phone, and Lynch’s camera gives us an agonizingly slow crawl up the phone cable (remember those?) from the dropped receiver on the floor – I knew that this was something very special indeed. I realized at once that this was a fictional world I would happily spend the rest of my life absorbed in and by. No Middle Earth or galaxy far far away, no Whoniverse or final frontier really came close. I was utterly hooked, as I have remained from that moment to this one. Twin Peaks arrived like a strange vision from another dimension, looking and sounding like nothing else on TV. And, despite the many later shows – often excellent ones – influenced by it to a greater or lesser degree (Wild Palms, Northern Exposure, Eerie Indiana, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Detective, Lost…) there has still been nothing else quite like it.

The world of Twin Peaks is filled with secrets, a world both wonderful and strange, with room for horror and fear and rage and trauma alongside a wild, absurd humour that borders at times on the slapstick. It is a place of cosmic horror and damn fine cherry pie, a place filled with warmth and friendship and humanity alongside the most hideous depravity. Above all it is a world whose people resist simple explanation, even while seeming in some ways to embody the most crudely obvious generic stereotypes, a world filled with rich, multi-layered characters who have inexhaustible depth and complexity and never quite offer up all of their mysteries. It’s also worth stating, at this point, that, despite, or perhaps because of, Lynch’s absolute unswerving adherence to his own singular vision, he was a great collaborator, and the contribution of others to the magic of Twin Peaks needs to be acknowledged. ‘David Lynch’s Twin Peaks‘, as the series is too often referred to, doesn’t even tell half the story. Angelo Badalamenti’s extraordinary music helped create the mood of Twin Peaks as much as anything else (just as it did in his frequent collaborations with Lynch from Blue Velvet in 1986 to Twin Peaks:The Return in 2017). The cast, including Lynch regulars like Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance and Catherine Coulson, are uniformly magnificent – it’s often underestimated what a wonderful director of actors Lynch was, but from John Hurt in The Elephant Man to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, from Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story to Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, few directors have been blessed with, or helped to produce, so many wonderful performances – and there were many other fine writers and directors who turned their hand to parts of Twin Peaks. First and foremost, of course, is Mark Frost, co-creator, and chief architect of the show’s arc. It’s fair to say that for most of the original run of Twin Peaks Mark Frost was the one that kept the ship running, with Lynch absent for most of the first season while making Wild at Heart and losing interest half way through the second season after being forced to bow to network pressure to reveal the killer. Indeed many of the show’s most iconic ideas and moments – including some of those often held up as the most Lynchian – derive first from Frost, not Lynch. And yet it’s not to denigrate the contribution of anyone else to recognise that the episodes of Twin Peaks which Lynch did direct (only six, which is far fewer than commonly thought) are, without exception, the strongest episodes by some considerable distance. When Lynch came to town it elevated what was always the most interesting show on TV (even during the second season low points so often derided by fans, and sadly, by Lynch himself) into something of an altogether different order, something which was truly sublime. Taken together as a body of work, those six episodes remain, for me, the greatest and most powerful pieces of television drama I have ever seen, and there are moments from all of them – but most of all the moment when the killer is finally revealed in a twenty minute sequence which cuts between the Roadhouse and an act of shocking brutality in the Palmer house in a visual and aural symphony which interweaves the most unbearable darkness and horror, a desperate sadness, and a strange, haunting beauty – which are truly as much a part of me as any artistic experience I have ever had.

It’s often said that Twin Peaks changed television. It’s certainly true that it showed that it was possible to do something more challenging and experimental than had often been attempted before – only The Prisoner at the end of the 60s and certain strands of particularly British, writer-driven ‘serious drama’ by figures like Dennis Potter can measure up in terms of boldness – and in doing so laid the groundwork for acclaimed later series like The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, while also offering a more direct influence on some of the key 90s shows I’ve already mentioned. But Twin Peaks itself has no real successors. Outside of sharing a risk-taking sensibility, nothing that has come before or since Twin Peaks has ever felt remotely like it. Although in one rather more specific regard, it did change television for me, and, I suspect, for many others too. It changed the way I watched television. During the entirety of the show’s original run on BBC2, without exception, I watched both the Tuesday screening and the Saturday repeat. The show aired just a little year or two before I owned my first VCR, so I didn’t record it, but not too long afterwards I was able to buy the full series on VHS – or almost, as rights issues for a time meant only the extended International Version of the Pilot episode, with a closed ending, was available. Both seasons were gradually released in the UK, two or three episodes to a tape. And for the rest of the 90s, those videocassettes sat, carefully ordered, on a shelf in my house, and I watched them, over and over again, on a loop. As soon as the series ended, I would simply return to the beginning and start again. In other words, Twin Peaks was the first television show which leant itself to the modern phenomena of the box set and the bingewatch.

After Twin Peaks, of course, Lynch had me, completely and absolutely. And for a time, the rest came in a wild rush. Lynch was suddenly everywhere. While Peaks was still airing, I caught up with Dune (which, messy though it is, I’ve always liked rather more than Lynch himself did) through a late night showing on Channel 4, immediately following on from a rather lovely profile and interview with Lynch presented by Jonathan Ross, and also Blue Velvet in a midnight screening at Cinema City, my hometown’s only arthouse cinema. I went with Mark, my best friend at the time, who had already seen it and hated it but felt like giving it a second chance. He fell asleep, as I recall, but I felt more as though I had just woken up. Lynch’s world felt so powerful and new to me, as if my filmgoing eyes were open for the first time. Almost immediately, I saw Wild at Heart at the same venue, this time in the company of Mark’s startlingly beautiful girlfriend Helen, and the never-to-be-spoken-of spell she was exerting over me at the time only added to my breathless appreciation of Lynch’s high octane, wildly violent and wildly erotic powerhouse of a movie. Around the same time I was able to pick up a VHS copy of Industrial Symphony No. 1, Lynch’s extraordinary, hypnotic live show, built around the songs he had written with Angelo Badalamenti for Julee Cruise and featuring, as well as Cruise herself, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in a brief filmed sequence in which they appear to be, if not overtly, reprising their roles as Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart, and also Michael J Anderson from Twin Peaks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of those works together formed the main contours of Lynchland for me. I say unsurprisingly because of the degree of overlap between them all. MacLachlan, of course, is the central presence in both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, while he shares the former film with Wild at Heart’s Laura Dern. Jack Nance, Sheryl Lee and Sherilyn Fenn all appear briefly in Wild at Heart and have major roles in Twin Peaks. The music of Badalamenti and the ethereal vocals of Julee Cruise are central to both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, while Industrial Symphony No. 1 incorporates songs featured prominently in Twin Peaks and one which appeared in Wild at Heart. It was an extraordinarily rich creative moment for Lynch and the only period of his life when his work seemed to be right at the heart of the culture, rather than sitting on its more interesting fringes – the same period when he found himself staring out at millions of Americans from the cover of Time magazine.

A backlash was inevitable, I suppose, for a figure whose work tended towards the divisive anyway, and it came in the form of the cancellation of Twin Peaks, and of the – actually very funny – Lynch/Frost sitcom On the Air, followed by the howls of critical outrage alongside audience indifference which greeted Lynch’s prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on its initial release in 1992. Over the years since its release, years of re-evaluation, it has become a critical commonplace to talk about how the film was ‘unappreciated’ at the time. Well, not in this tiny little corner of the world it wasn’t. I had been desperately eager to see it from the moment I knew it was being made, and that eagerness was fuelled by the very limited pre-publicity that was available to me – most notably an excerpt from the Questions in a World of Blue scene shown on a ‘Coming Soon’ section of Barry Norman’s long-running Film (insert relevant year here) BBC series. Fire Walk With Me became, and remains, pretty much my all-time-favourite film as soon as I saw it, practically alone in the cinema. Its impact was so powerful that I had to consciously gather myself at the end in order to be able to step back out from the darkened screening room into the ‘real’ world in order to buy myself a ticket so see it again, twice on the same day. It is a horrifying, agonising, beautiful film, and it features some of the best performances I have ever seen – most notably from Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, and above all the incandescent Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer.

After that, things went a little more quiet in Lynchland. New works were relatively few and far between from then on. I filled the gaps with my Twin Peaks tapes, and endless rewatches of his films on video, then gradually replacing them all with DVD, and later Blu-ray. I saw The Grandmother as part of a themed BBC2 Evening called ‘Weird Night’ in 1994 – the same evening which gave me the chance to see George Romero’s extraordinary Martin for the first time. Lost Highway arrived in 1996, a full four years after Lynch’s star seemed to have faded, and it is typical of Lynch that rather than responding to the critical backlash by veering closer to the safer ground of the mainstream, he instead chose to plunge deeper into darkness with one of the strangest stories ever committed to celluloid. A beautiful, troubling descent into madness, featuring perhaps the most unsettling first half hour or so of any film I have ever seen, Lost Highway was and is a wonderful piece of work, but it was never likely to do much to restore Lynch’s somewhat battered reputation. Another three years passed before The Straight Story, which again was a surprise; a quiet, restrained and deeply touching story lit up by an incredible performance from Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight. 1999 also saw Lynch’s attempt at a return to television with Mulholland Drive flounder in the face of network misgivings, only to re-emerge triumphantly a couple of years later as a theatrical feature, gaining Lynch another Best Director Oscar nomination, a win in the same category at Cannes, and, some 15 years later, topping the BBC’s critics poll of Best Films of the Twenty First Century.

And then things went even more quiet. Lynch, perhaps by now feeling that squabbling and bartering with executives and financiers was not the best way to pursue his singular vision, became fixated with the smaller scale, entirely independent opportunities opened up by the internet. davidlynch.com, Lynch’s subscription website on which he posted animations, experiments, and short films began to absorb his time and energy. Gradually, some of this material, alongside Lynch’s new-found love of the possibilities presented by digital video as opposed to film, expanded to produce his first feature film for five years, INLAND EMPIRE starring Laura Dern and shot entirely on relatively low quality DV. Lynch loved the immediacy, the ability to shoot very long unbroken takes, the hands on quality which his video camera gave him, and swore he would never work with film again. A dizzying, obscure reflection on identity and the fractured self, in INLAND EMPIRE Lynch was free to take his time and follow wherever the mood or the ideas took him in a way that hadn’t really been true since Eraserhead – as I’ve said before, though I enjoy both, INLAND EMPIRE and Eraserhead are my least favourite of Lynch’s features – and in its wake it seemed as though Lynch had abandoned not only film, but film-making itself.

And then, quite suddenly, after almost a decade in which Lynch seemed to be interested only in promoting and advancing the cause of Transcendental Meditation through his online presence and his charitable Foundation, in 2014 Frost and Lynch simultaneously tweeted “That gum you like is going to come back in style.” I missed the tweets – I wasn’t on Twitter back then – but fairly quickly found myself caught up in the whirl of online speculation and then the confirmation. After a quarter of a century, Twin Peaks was returning, spectacularly and wonderfully fulfilling Laura’s strange prophecy in the Red Room “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years.” I first found out for sure at work, and actually leapt out of my chair and danced around my classroom. Fortunately I didn’t have a class at the time, since chair-leaping and wild dancing are not a dignified look for a man in his fifties and might have eroded a little of my teacherly gravitas. I’d longed for, and almost abandoned hope of, a new Lynch project for the eight years that had passed since INLAND EMPIRE, and now here it was, and not just any Lynch project, but Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks written entirely by Frost and Lynch and directed entirely by Lynch! If I could have written my proposal for the single thing I would most want to happen in the world, that would have been number one on the list, well ahead of World Peace or an End to Starvation. There was the brief agony of Lynch walking away from the project, and then being enticed back by Showtime, and then there were long long months of rumour and speculation, with me constantly telling myself I wanted no spoilers and then repeatedly succumbing to the delightful temptations of the ‘Spoilers’ thread on dugpa.com. Details were few and far between, with Lynch as far as possible imposing absolute secrecy, but the few tiny iotas of information that emerged were thrilling beyond measure. A coffee cup would fly through a window. At some point Kyle MacLachlan would wear a startling lime green jacket. Two familiar characters would walk up to the Palmer house at night.

And finally, after an apparent eternity of waiting, it arrived. Twin Peaks: Season Three, or Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series, or Twin Peaks: The Return, depending on your preference. And, perhaps predictably, though I must admit to not having predicted anything of the sort, the eighteen hours or so that Lynch unfolded across that extraordinary summer were by turns beautiful and baffling, agonisingly frustrating and jaw-droppingly wondrous. You mean I waited twenty five years in order to watch fifteen hours of Cooper barely able to speak, walk or think, and a random man sweeping the floor of the Roadhouse for about an hour and a half??? Cooper in the ‘mauve zone’ in Part Three? One of the most strange and beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And Part Eight? Certainly the most extraordinary hour of television I’ve seen since the original Twin Peaks. And poor, poor, tragic Audrey. For much of its running time I must admit to finding it desperately disappointing and at other times extraordinarily enlightening, often simultaneously if such a thing is even possible. I’m still in the process of working through my true feelings and final position in relation to Lynch’s last masterpiece, though I’ve come as far as to be able to recognise that, to paraphrase both Agent Cooper and his evil doppelganger at different times, The Return gave me very little that I wanted, but many things which I needed, without even knowing that I needed them. Not least among them, given that this piece I am writing and, finally, close to finishing, is essentially a farewell to David Lynch and everything he has meant to me, it gave me the chance to spend lots of time in the company of Lynch’s own Gordon Cole. I know there are those that dismiss Lynch as an actor, and consider Cole to be no more than a one-note bad taste joke, but, frankly, they’re wrong. It’s a wonderful, warm, generous comedic performance, which The Return also deepens into something deeply humane and touching. The Return is, of course, an acting tour-de-force from the extraordinary Kyle MacLachlan – for so many years effectively Lynch’s on-screen alter-ego – but, wonderful though MacLachlan is, he’s certainly no better than Lynch himself in his final on-screen appearance.

So there it is. A couple of months have passed, as I foretold, and now that I’m done and glancing back over what I’ve written I can only reflect on how inadequate it seems. Lynch himself was always somewhat suspicious of words and language, regarding them as capable of only making a large experience infinitely smaller in the telling, and though I’ve offered the best part of my life to words and language in one way or another, I think all I’ve really done here is prove Lynch right, because none of this really does any kind of justice to the feelings his work has offered me over the years. Others have done better – Kyle MacLachlan’s own beautiful tribute to Lynch on the day of his death reduced me to tears – but even so I wanted to try. As the Log Lady almost predicted, the sadness has lessened, is less profound and intense, but I’m not nearly as sure as her that it will ever really end.

I suppose, in the end, all I want to do is say thank you. Thank you, David Lynch, for the way that your work has moved me and inspired me and tangled itself up so completely with my own life that sometimes I can hardly separate the two. Thank you. God speed. I’ll see you in the trees.