Every little region of the world treasures the works of art which come to define our home in the collective imagination. We celebrate the expressions which give voice to the strange alchemy of history, environment and experience which makes each place on Earth unique. In our sleepy corner of the Pacific Northwest we have the screaming guitars of ‘60s garage rock, Hendrix, and grunge; the mystic visions of painters like Morris Grave and Mark Tobey; the immortal words of writers such as Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, Raymond Carver and Tom Robbins. We also make a justifiable claim on a piece of the legacy of Bruce Lee. Yet in the realm of cinema no one has ever put forth as searing and definitive of a statement on what it truly feels like to live around here than the late David Lynch in his sprawling saga Twin Peaks. Despite only having lived in the state of Washington for a portion of his childhood, we the cinemas of Seattle proudly declare Twin Peaks to be the quintessential and defining work of PNW motion pictures and David Lynch as one of our greatest artists. And this year we will celebrate the totality of Lynch’s contribution to the arts by collaborating on an exhaustive retrospective of his towering body of work. As Kyle MacLachlan says as Agent Cooper, beginning to employ the logic of the unconscious while investigating the murder of Laura Palmer in the fictional North Cascade town of Twin Peaks, “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
The groundswell of grief that followed David Lynch’s death on January 15 was a testament to his reach and the life-altering encounters his art offers to anyone who comes into contact with it. With his passing we have lost a conduit to a profoundly singular way of seeing the world—the vision of someone attuned to the universe at its most subliminal frequencies. Describing the oft-(mis)used term ‘Lynchian’ in a remembrance for Film Comment, critic Dennis Lim writes, “It was a sensibility at once elusive and ubiquitous, a way of seeing and sensing that applied to entire categories of experience and yet suggested something possibly different to each of us. No wonder this loss feels so profound.” The generosity in Lynch’s refusal to offer interpretation of his works leaves them open for each of us, grasping through the darkness and confusion, to find in them our own solutions to “the absurd mysteries of the strange forces of existence.”
Lynch’s work speaks to us in symbols, emotions, abstractions and dreams. Yet it always remains anchored in the specificities of human experience in the strange places and times we find ourselves in. It tells us that what we experience as reality is, maybe, just one fragment of something incomprehensibly larger—the echeloned layers of unreality that subsume our fragile consciousness. It reminds us that something within this shared experience is very, very wrong—and that the only transcendence can be achieved through love. In Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, Dennis Hopper as the terrifying psychopath Frank Booth ominously intones the words, “Now it’s dark.” And so it is. But art lives on and we aim to keep the projector bulbs flickering in that dark with the wondrous visions which Lynch leaves behind.
Join with us this year, all year, as the independent cinemas of the greater Seattle area celebrate the legacy of this sublime artist with TO LIVE IS TO DREAM: A NORTHWEST TRIBUTE TO DAVID LYNCH. We’ll see you in our dreams.
