of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
I’m not the kind of person easily intimidated by a story. I don’t “walk out” of a film or show unless I’m bored. But I have to confess: I have only finished one of David Lynch’s films and shows. I turned off all the others I started. They were too much for me. The only film I ever completed was my first. More on this later.
Is there anything freakier than David Lynch?
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker who died this past week, and many pecked pixels have already been published on his genius and his impact on the art of film. I agree with most of what has been written. “Lynchian” is not a descriptor that will fade quickly, or maybe ever. This is why I keep starting his films. He’s a master of the medium. This is also why I keep turning off his films. He is a medium for his material, passing messages from forces beyond him.
Lynch’s dark places are too dark; his encounters with evil, too close to the truth. If they teach us anything, it’s that our dabbles in the dark connect us with things more raw than we realize. Some things truly are evil, and when we believe we are dipping our pinky toe in, we are dipping our entire head in, connecting us to the greater evil.
His brushes with evil can be found anywhere: in cities, small towns, insolation, a crowded room, with family, with a neighbor, in the woods, in your living room, in a hotel, or on a phone.
The town has become unhauntable—a space so thoroughly sanitized and commercialized that it resists the very authenticity it once embodied.
And perhaps in his film. I find myself in a state of skin-raising horror at his climaxes or disturbing moments, typically the point at which I turn that sh*t off. This worsens it, leaving me unresolved and focused on the pinnacle of evil. I hit the viewpoint from Blue Velvet's closet, and I bounced. Naw. I don’t need this. I don’t need to dwell on this. It’s true evil. This isn’t entertainment or maybe even literature. This is sick. Am I dipping my pinky toe in as I watch this? I question myself, knowing I’ve dipped my pinky toe in before. Is observation? Participation? Observation is participation.
Is he connecting or correcting? Is he unsettling or settling? Is he disturbing or disturbed or disturb?
The Commodification of Local Horror

This may have to do with my lived experience. I was raised in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. We moved there a couple of years before it aired. It’s unlikely, but I may have been caught on film during the shoot. I recognized all the locations when I watched Twin Peaks (nope, I didn’t finish it). It’s almost like a bit of autofiction, where I’m a side character in the show. Lynch is known for the surreal, but Twin Peaks is real for me.
Lynch knew that beneath the surface of every small town lay both darkness and light. Today's retail landscape, in its rush to eliminate the former, might have accidentally erased the latter.
This is hard because much of my childhood was charmed. The Snoqualmie Valley is unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in America, and North Bend butts up against the jagged Mount Si, while the three forks of the Snoqualmie River swirl their way through its midst and converge shortly before their great falls - featured in Twin Peaks.

North Bend was a one-stoplight town when we moved there, and yes, it was dangling from a wire, as featured in the show. What you don’t get from the show: the town attempted a Bavarian Alpine architecture theme for its downtown a la Leavenworth, Washington (except we weren’t even close to as good at it as Leavenworth). I remember going to George’s Bakery with my Papa, getting a bear claw, and then popping over to the Tift House, where he let me pull some quarter tabs.
This commercial authenticity paradox would have delighted Lynch. While Netflix's "Stranger Things" now mass-produces small-town nostalgia for global consumption, Lynch captured something fundamentally different: the raw reality of local spaces before they were optimized for content creation.

The Horror of Frictionless Space
A new library was constructed in 1994; that was the biggest news that year. My friends and I biked and scootered around everywhere, playing in streets and forests and rivers.
It was idyllic.
That’s one of the things that makes Twin Peaks so freaky. The train car where Laura Palmer is raped and murdered in the show is connected to the historic train that ran on Christmas, on which I played Christmas carols on the piano for riders who sipped on hot cocoa. The Double R Diner is a place where I really ate breakfast and pie without thinking of the show. My parents would go to the lodge at Snoqualmie Falls on their anniversary. The wind in the dark trees at night was out my window. The blusters really did blow through on early winter evenings, with darkness accentuated by the surrounding mountains.
There was magic in that place.

That’s why my parents moved there (and it was affordable). They were reversing some surreal Lynchian-level evil that my family had experienced in the past—in Los Angeles, Lynch’s other location muse. That story is not my story yet, but I can tell you with certainty that there is absolute horror in the world. For my family, North Bend—the future set of Twin Peaks—was redemptive, restorative, opposite of LA and the city. The place where they could let their children roam—hope, safety, and home.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple. You can never run away from all your trauma. My household needed tears, work, and raised voices to get through. And we did.
It’s not quite so simple in a small town, either. My idyllic childhood hometown is certainly another kid’s location of horror. Bad things are inflicted wherever there are people. And like people, just because towns are beautiful doesn’t mean they are absent of horror. That’s an elementary reading of Lynch, and it’s not wrong.
But even though this is true, we all instinctively know—whether this is our experience or not—that a small town in its ideal state has the power to lift, to be a community, a family, a formative place of safety. I had it. For me, the legacy of David Lynch is to expose my best memories to the darkest truths which haunt humanity.
I know evil is always lurking, like a beetle in your yard or a parasite in the system. The owls are not what they seem. But you can’t have my good dreams, Lynch, I need them. And so I choose not to watch, at least for now.
But what if there is something even more insidious than Lynch’s nightmares? My hometown has changed so much since my childhood. North Bend had a water moratorium and water sourcing issues for years. “The State Department of Ecology (DOE) refused to grant additional water rights to North Bend out of concern that pumping more water would lower the river’s flow and affect fish and wildlife.” In short, new building in North Bend was extremely hard for 30 years. This has only recently been resolved in the past few years.
A few sites from the filming of Twin Peaks are untouched, like a suburban version of the house from Pixar’s Up. Stoplights are everywhere, and they’re fixed on poles instead of hung on wires. The Bavarian motif is almost non-existent. And many of the lots and green spaces I used to play with my friends have been developed. Most of the charm has been transformed into Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld.
There are still a few relic spots from the past, but they feel like the well-groomed pets of what is now a bedroom community for Seattle commuters. When the weather is nice, the hiking trails are full of Lululemon and Alo.
The town is unhauntable. Terror has been transformed from myth to content. David Lynch was in the business of making myths.
So, is there anything freakier than Lynch? How about a world without him? A world that tidies his work sanitizes the spiritual, and leaves us believing evil has departed. It is removed from our environment—slick, frictionless, clean, cutesy evil. Evil may have existed in prior eras, but not now, not in our suburbs.
David made sure we knew that evil was real. The beetles live behind the Potemkin brands, and between the 0s and 1s, and on what’s trending.
And if evil was real for David, so was good.
And that is where I will conclude, where I first started with Lynch. As a kid, before I knew that Lynch was Lynch, I watched The Straight Story all the way through. It is DL’s most straightforward story, and easily his most beautiful. It is a true myth about a man who drives a tractor across counties and states to reconcile with his dying brother.
I showed this movie to my children.
I won’t be showing them Twin Peaks. I’m not even sure that I’ll ever attempt it again.
I’m not the kind of person easily intimidated by a story. I don’t “walk out” of a film or show unless I’m bored. But I have to confess: I have only finished one of David Lynch’s films and shows. I turned off all the others I started. They were too much for me. The only film I ever completed was my first. More on this later.
Is there anything freakier than David Lynch?
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker who died this past week, and many pecked pixels have already been published on his genius and his impact on the art of film. I agree with most of what has been written. “Lynchian” is not a descriptor that will fade quickly, or maybe ever. This is why I keep starting his films. He’s a master of the medium. This is also why I keep turning off his films. He is a medium for his material, passing messages from forces beyond him.
Lynch’s dark places are too dark; his encounters with evil, too close to the truth. If they teach us anything, it’s that our dabbles in the dark connect us with things more raw than we realize. Some things truly are evil, and when we believe we are dipping our pinky toe in, we are dipping our entire head in, connecting us to the greater evil.
His brushes with evil can be found anywhere: in cities, small towns, insolation, a crowded room, with family, with a neighbor, in the woods, in your living room, in a hotel, or on a phone.
The town has become unhauntable—a space so thoroughly sanitized and commercialized that it resists the very authenticity it once embodied.
And perhaps in his film. I find myself in a state of skin-raising horror at his climaxes or disturbing moments, typically the point at which I turn that sh*t off. This worsens it, leaving me unresolved and focused on the pinnacle of evil. I hit the viewpoint from Blue Velvet's closet, and I bounced. Naw. I don’t need this. I don’t need to dwell on this. It’s true evil. This isn’t entertainment or maybe even literature. This is sick. Am I dipping my pinky toe in as I watch this? I question myself, knowing I’ve dipped my pinky toe in before. Is observation? Participation? Observation is participation.
Is he connecting or correcting? Is he unsettling or settling? Is he disturbing or disturbed or disturb?
The Commodification of Local Horror

This may have to do with my lived experience. I was raised in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. We moved there a couple of years before it aired. It’s unlikely, but I may have been caught on film during the shoot. I recognized all the locations when I watched Twin Peaks (nope, I didn’t finish it). It’s almost like a bit of autofiction, where I’m a side character in the show. Lynch is known for the surreal, but Twin Peaks is real for me.
Lynch knew that beneath the surface of every small town lay both darkness and light. Today's retail landscape, in its rush to eliminate the former, might have accidentally erased the latter.
This is hard because much of my childhood was charmed. The Snoqualmie Valley is unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in America, and North Bend butts up against the jagged Mount Si, while the three forks of the Snoqualmie River swirl their way through its midst and converge shortly before their great falls - featured in Twin Peaks.

North Bend was a one-stoplight town when we moved there, and yes, it was dangling from a wire, as featured in the show. What you don’t get from the show: the town attempted a Bavarian Alpine architecture theme for its downtown a la Leavenworth, Washington (except we weren’t even close to as good at it as Leavenworth). I remember going to George’s Bakery with my Papa, getting a bear claw, and then popping over to the Tift House, where he let me pull some quarter tabs.
This commercial authenticity paradox would have delighted Lynch. While Netflix's "Stranger Things" now mass-produces small-town nostalgia for global consumption, Lynch captured something fundamentally different: the raw reality of local spaces before they were optimized for content creation.

The Horror of Frictionless Space
A new library was constructed in 1994; that was the biggest news that year. My friends and I biked and scootered around everywhere, playing in streets and forests and rivers.
It was idyllic.
That’s one of the things that makes Twin Peaks so freaky. The train car where Laura Palmer is raped and murdered in the show is connected to the historic train that ran on Christmas, on which I played Christmas carols on the piano for riders who sipped on hot cocoa. The Double R Diner is a place where I really ate breakfast and pie without thinking of the show. My parents would go to the lodge at Snoqualmie Falls on their anniversary. The wind in the dark trees at night was out my window. The blusters really did blow through on early winter evenings, with darkness accentuated by the surrounding mountains.
There was magic in that place.

That’s why my parents moved there (and it was affordable). They were reversing some surreal Lynchian-level evil that my family had experienced in the past—in Los Angeles, Lynch’s other location muse. That story is not my story yet, but I can tell you with certainty that there is absolute horror in the world. For my family, North Bend—the future set of Twin Peaks—was redemptive, restorative, opposite of LA and the city. The place where they could let their children roam—hope, safety, and home.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple. You can never run away from all your trauma. My household needed tears, work, and raised voices to get through. And we did.
It’s not quite so simple in a small town, either. My idyllic childhood hometown is certainly another kid’s location of horror. Bad things are inflicted wherever there are people. And like people, just because towns are beautiful doesn’t mean they are absent of horror. That’s an elementary reading of Lynch, and it’s not wrong.
But even though this is true, we all instinctively know—whether this is our experience or not—that a small town in its ideal state has the power to lift, to be a community, a family, a formative place of safety. I had it. For me, the legacy of David Lynch is to expose my best memories to the darkest truths which haunt humanity.
I know evil is always lurking, like a beetle in your yard or a parasite in the system. The owls are not what they seem. But you can’t have my good dreams, Lynch, I need them. And so I choose not to watch, at least for now.
But what if there is something even more insidious than Lynch’s nightmares? My hometown has changed so much since my childhood. North Bend had a water moratorium and water sourcing issues for years. “The State Department of Ecology (DOE) refused to grant additional water rights to North Bend out of concern that pumping more water would lower the river’s flow and affect fish and wildlife.” In short, new building in North Bend was extremely hard for 30 years. This has only recently been resolved in the past few years.
A few sites from the filming of Twin Peaks are untouched, like a suburban version of the house from Pixar’s Up. Stoplights are everywhere, and they’re fixed on poles instead of hung on wires. The Bavarian motif is almost non-existent. And many of the lots and green spaces I used to play with my friends have been developed. Most of the charm has been transformed into Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld.
There are still a few relic spots from the past, but they feel like the well-groomed pets of what is now a bedroom community for Seattle commuters. When the weather is nice, the hiking trails are full of Lululemon and Alo.
The town is unhauntable. Terror has been transformed from myth to content. David Lynch was in the business of making myths.
So, is there anything freakier than Lynch? How about a world without him? A world that tidies his work sanitizes the spiritual, and leaves us believing evil has departed. It is removed from our environment—slick, frictionless, clean, cutesy evil. Evil may have existed in prior eras, but not now, not in our suburbs.
David made sure we knew that evil was real. The beetles live behind the Potemkin brands, and between the 0s and 1s, and on what’s trending.
And if evil was real for David, so was good.
And that is where I will conclude, where I first started with Lynch. As a kid, before I knew that Lynch was Lynch, I watched The Straight Story all the way through. It is DL’s most straightforward story, and easily his most beautiful. It is a true myth about a man who drives a tractor across counties and states to reconcile with his dying brother.
I showed this movie to my children.
I won’t be showing them Twin Peaks. I’m not even sure that I’ll ever attempt it again.
I’m not the kind of person easily intimidated by a story. I don’t “walk out” of a film or show unless I’m bored. But I have to confess: I have only finished one of David Lynch’s films and shows. I turned off all the others I started. They were too much for me. The only film I ever completed was my first. More on this later.
Is there anything freakier than David Lynch?
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker who died this past week, and many pecked pixels have already been published on his genius and his impact on the art of film. I agree with most of what has been written. “Lynchian” is not a descriptor that will fade quickly, or maybe ever. This is why I keep starting his films. He’s a master of the medium. This is also why I keep turning off his films. He is a medium for his material, passing messages from forces beyond him.
Lynch’s dark places are too dark; his encounters with evil, too close to the truth. If they teach us anything, it’s that our dabbles in the dark connect us with things more raw than we realize. Some things truly are evil, and when we believe we are dipping our pinky toe in, we are dipping our entire head in, connecting us to the greater evil.
His brushes with evil can be found anywhere: in cities, small towns, insolation, a crowded room, with family, with a neighbor, in the woods, in your living room, in a hotel, or on a phone.
The town has become unhauntable—a space so thoroughly sanitized and commercialized that it resists the very authenticity it once embodied.
And perhaps in his film. I find myself in a state of skin-raising horror at his climaxes or disturbing moments, typically the point at which I turn that sh*t off. This worsens it, leaving me unresolved and focused on the pinnacle of evil. I hit the viewpoint from Blue Velvet's closet, and I bounced. Naw. I don’t need this. I don’t need to dwell on this. It’s true evil. This isn’t entertainment or maybe even literature. This is sick. Am I dipping my pinky toe in as I watch this? I question myself, knowing I’ve dipped my pinky toe in before. Is observation? Participation? Observation is participation.
Is he connecting or correcting? Is he unsettling or settling? Is he disturbing or disturbed or disturb?
The Commodification of Local Horror

This may have to do with my lived experience. I was raised in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. We moved there a couple of years before it aired. It’s unlikely, but I may have been caught on film during the shoot. I recognized all the locations when I watched Twin Peaks (nope, I didn’t finish it). It’s almost like a bit of autofiction, where I’m a side character in the show. Lynch is known for the surreal, but Twin Peaks is real for me.
Lynch knew that beneath the surface of every small town lay both darkness and light. Today's retail landscape, in its rush to eliminate the former, might have accidentally erased the latter.
This is hard because much of my childhood was charmed. The Snoqualmie Valley is unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in America, and North Bend butts up against the jagged Mount Si, while the three forks of the Snoqualmie River swirl their way through its midst and converge shortly before their great falls - featured in Twin Peaks.

North Bend was a one-stoplight town when we moved there, and yes, it was dangling from a wire, as featured in the show. What you don’t get from the show: the town attempted a Bavarian Alpine architecture theme for its downtown a la Leavenworth, Washington (except we weren’t even close to as good at it as Leavenworth). I remember going to George’s Bakery with my Papa, getting a bear claw, and then popping over to the Tift House, where he let me pull some quarter tabs.
This commercial authenticity paradox would have delighted Lynch. While Netflix's "Stranger Things" now mass-produces small-town nostalgia for global consumption, Lynch captured something fundamentally different: the raw reality of local spaces before they were optimized for content creation.

The Horror of Frictionless Space
A new library was constructed in 1994; that was the biggest news that year. My friends and I biked and scootered around everywhere, playing in streets and forests and rivers.
It was idyllic.
That’s one of the things that makes Twin Peaks so freaky. The train car where Laura Palmer is raped and murdered in the show is connected to the historic train that ran on Christmas, on which I played Christmas carols on the piano for riders who sipped on hot cocoa. The Double R Diner is a place where I really ate breakfast and pie without thinking of the show. My parents would go to the lodge at Snoqualmie Falls on their anniversary. The wind in the dark trees at night was out my window. The blusters really did blow through on early winter evenings, with darkness accentuated by the surrounding mountains.
There was magic in that place.

That’s why my parents moved there (and it was affordable). They were reversing some surreal Lynchian-level evil that my family had experienced in the past—in Los Angeles, Lynch’s other location muse. That story is not my story yet, but I can tell you with certainty that there is absolute horror in the world. For my family, North Bend—the future set of Twin Peaks—was redemptive, restorative, opposite of LA and the city. The place where they could let their children roam—hope, safety, and home.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple. You can never run away from all your trauma. My household needed tears, work, and raised voices to get through. And we did.
It’s not quite so simple in a small town, either. My idyllic childhood hometown is certainly another kid’s location of horror. Bad things are inflicted wherever there are people. And like people, just because towns are beautiful doesn’t mean they are absent of horror. That’s an elementary reading of Lynch, and it’s not wrong.
But even though this is true, we all instinctively know—whether this is our experience or not—that a small town in its ideal state has the power to lift, to be a community, a family, a formative place of safety. I had it. For me, the legacy of David Lynch is to expose my best memories to the darkest truths which haunt humanity.
I know evil is always lurking, like a beetle in your yard or a parasite in the system. The owls are not what they seem. But you can’t have my good dreams, Lynch, I need them. And so I choose not to watch, at least for now.
But what if there is something even more insidious than Lynch’s nightmares? My hometown has changed so much since my childhood. North Bend had a water moratorium and water sourcing issues for years. “The State Department of Ecology (DOE) refused to grant additional water rights to North Bend out of concern that pumping more water would lower the river’s flow and affect fish and wildlife.” In short, new building in North Bend was extremely hard for 30 years. This has only recently been resolved in the past few years.
A few sites from the filming of Twin Peaks are untouched, like a suburban version of the house from Pixar’s Up. Stoplights are everywhere, and they’re fixed on poles instead of hung on wires. The Bavarian motif is almost non-existent. And many of the lots and green spaces I used to play with my friends have been developed. Most of the charm has been transformed into Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld.
There are still a few relic spots from the past, but they feel like the well-groomed pets of what is now a bedroom community for Seattle commuters. When the weather is nice, the hiking trails are full of Lululemon and Alo.
The town is unhauntable. Terror has been transformed from myth to content. David Lynch was in the business of making myths.
So, is there anything freakier than Lynch? How about a world without him? A world that tidies his work sanitizes the spiritual, and leaves us believing evil has departed. It is removed from our environment—slick, frictionless, clean, cutesy evil. Evil may have existed in prior eras, but not now, not in our suburbs.
David made sure we knew that evil was real. The beetles live behind the Potemkin brands, and between the 0s and 1s, and on what’s trending.
And if evil was real for David, so was good.
And that is where I will conclude, where I first started with Lynch. As a kid, before I knew that Lynch was Lynch, I watched The Straight Story all the way through. It is DL’s most straightforward story, and easily his most beautiful. It is a true myth about a man who drives a tractor across counties and states to reconcile with his dying brother.
I showed this movie to my children.
I won’t be showing them Twin Peaks. I’m not even sure that I’ll ever attempt it again.
I’m not the kind of person easily intimidated by a story. I don’t “walk out” of a film or show unless I’m bored. But I have to confess: I have only finished one of David Lynch’s films and shows. I turned off all the others I started. They were too much for me. The only film I ever completed was my first. More on this later.
Is there anything freakier than David Lynch?
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker who died this past week, and many pecked pixels have already been published on his genius and his impact on the art of film. I agree with most of what has been written. “Lynchian” is not a descriptor that will fade quickly, or maybe ever. This is why I keep starting his films. He’s a master of the medium. This is also why I keep turning off his films. He is a medium for his material, passing messages from forces beyond him.
Lynch’s dark places are too dark; his encounters with evil, too close to the truth. If they teach us anything, it’s that our dabbles in the dark connect us with things more raw than we realize. Some things truly are evil, and when we believe we are dipping our pinky toe in, we are dipping our entire head in, connecting us to the greater evil.
His brushes with evil can be found anywhere: in cities, small towns, insolation, a crowded room, with family, with a neighbor, in the woods, in your living room, in a hotel, or on a phone.
The town has become unhauntable—a space so thoroughly sanitized and commercialized that it resists the very authenticity it once embodied.
And perhaps in his film. I find myself in a state of skin-raising horror at his climaxes or disturbing moments, typically the point at which I turn that sh*t off. This worsens it, leaving me unresolved and focused on the pinnacle of evil. I hit the viewpoint from Blue Velvet's closet, and I bounced. Naw. I don’t need this. I don’t need to dwell on this. It’s true evil. This isn’t entertainment or maybe even literature. This is sick. Am I dipping my pinky toe in as I watch this? I question myself, knowing I’ve dipped my pinky toe in before. Is observation? Participation? Observation is participation.
Is he connecting or correcting? Is he unsettling or settling? Is he disturbing or disturbed or disturb?
The Commodification of Local Horror

This may have to do with my lived experience. I was raised in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. We moved there a couple of years before it aired. It’s unlikely, but I may have been caught on film during the shoot. I recognized all the locations when I watched Twin Peaks (nope, I didn’t finish it). It’s almost like a bit of autofiction, where I’m a side character in the show. Lynch is known for the surreal, but Twin Peaks is real for me.
Lynch knew that beneath the surface of every small town lay both darkness and light. Today's retail landscape, in its rush to eliminate the former, might have accidentally erased the latter.
This is hard because much of my childhood was charmed. The Snoqualmie Valley is unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in America, and North Bend butts up against the jagged Mount Si, while the three forks of the Snoqualmie River swirl their way through its midst and converge shortly before their great falls - featured in Twin Peaks.

North Bend was a one-stoplight town when we moved there, and yes, it was dangling from a wire, as featured in the show. What you don’t get from the show: the town attempted a Bavarian Alpine architecture theme for its downtown a la Leavenworth, Washington (except we weren’t even close to as good at it as Leavenworth). I remember going to George’s Bakery with my Papa, getting a bear claw, and then popping over to the Tift House, where he let me pull some quarter tabs.
This commercial authenticity paradox would have delighted Lynch. While Netflix's "Stranger Things" now mass-produces small-town nostalgia for global consumption, Lynch captured something fundamentally different: the raw reality of local spaces before they were optimized for content creation.

The Horror of Frictionless Space
A new library was constructed in 1994; that was the biggest news that year. My friends and I biked and scootered around everywhere, playing in streets and forests and rivers.
It was idyllic.
That’s one of the things that makes Twin Peaks so freaky. The train car where Laura Palmer is raped and murdered in the show is connected to the historic train that ran on Christmas, on which I played Christmas carols on the piano for riders who sipped on hot cocoa. The Double R Diner is a place where I really ate breakfast and pie without thinking of the show. My parents would go to the lodge at Snoqualmie Falls on their anniversary. The wind in the dark trees at night was out my window. The blusters really did blow through on early winter evenings, with darkness accentuated by the surrounding mountains.
There was magic in that place.

That’s why my parents moved there (and it was affordable). They were reversing some surreal Lynchian-level evil that my family had experienced in the past—in Los Angeles, Lynch’s other location muse. That story is not my story yet, but I can tell you with certainty that there is absolute horror in the world. For my family, North Bend—the future set of Twin Peaks—was redemptive, restorative, opposite of LA and the city. The place where they could let their children roam—hope, safety, and home.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple. You can never run away from all your trauma. My household needed tears, work, and raised voices to get through. And we did.
It’s not quite so simple in a small town, either. My idyllic childhood hometown is certainly another kid’s location of horror. Bad things are inflicted wherever there are people. And like people, just because towns are beautiful doesn’t mean they are absent of horror. That’s an elementary reading of Lynch, and it’s not wrong.
But even though this is true, we all instinctively know—whether this is our experience or not—that a small town in its ideal state has the power to lift, to be a community, a family, a formative place of safety. I had it. For me, the legacy of David Lynch is to expose my best memories to the darkest truths which haunt humanity.
I know evil is always lurking, like a beetle in your yard or a parasite in the system. The owls are not what they seem. But you can’t have my good dreams, Lynch, I need them. And so I choose not to watch, at least for now.
But what if there is something even more insidious than Lynch’s nightmares? My hometown has changed so much since my childhood. North Bend had a water moratorium and water sourcing issues for years. “The State Department of Ecology (DOE) refused to grant additional water rights to North Bend out of concern that pumping more water would lower the river’s flow and affect fish and wildlife.” In short, new building in North Bend was extremely hard for 30 years. This has only recently been resolved in the past few years.
A few sites from the filming of Twin Peaks are untouched, like a suburban version of the house from Pixar’s Up. Stoplights are everywhere, and they’re fixed on poles instead of hung on wires. The Bavarian motif is almost non-existent. And many of the lots and green spaces I used to play with my friends have been developed. Most of the charm has been transformed into Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld.
There are still a few relic spots from the past, but they feel like the well-groomed pets of what is now a bedroom community for Seattle commuters. When the weather is nice, the hiking trails are full of Lululemon and Alo.
The town is unhauntable. Terror has been transformed from myth to content. David Lynch was in the business of making myths.
So, is there anything freakier than Lynch? How about a world without him? A world that tidies his work sanitizes the spiritual, and leaves us believing evil has departed. It is removed from our environment—slick, frictionless, clean, cutesy evil. Evil may have existed in prior eras, but not now, not in our suburbs.
David made sure we knew that evil was real. The beetles live behind the Potemkin brands, and between the 0s and 1s, and on what’s trending.
And if evil was real for David, so was good.
And that is where I will conclude, where I first started with Lynch. As a kid, before I knew that Lynch was Lynch, I watched The Straight Story all the way through. It is DL’s most straightforward story, and easily his most beautiful. It is a true myth about a man who drives a tractor across counties and states to reconcile with his dying brother.
I showed this movie to my children.
I won’t be showing them Twin Peaks. I’m not even sure that I’ll ever attempt it again.
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