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David Lynch, divine wisdom, and finding beauty in a chaotic world

Brendan McLean reflects on David Lynch’s surreal art, biblical wisdom and divine mystery.

Photo courtesy of David Lynch's Facebook.

I first saw David Lynch’s debut film “Eraserhead” in my dorm room at the end of a long weekend. I worked on campus the summer between my sophomore and junior years and there was not much going on. My jobs were over by Thursday afternoon when I went to the college’s audiovisual library and rented a stack of DVDs to watch over the long weekends. “Eraserhead” was at the bottom of the stack.

When I watched it for the first time, I hated it. I found it disturbing, grotesque. The film felt disjointed and incoherent, especially at a time when I was developing my critical thinking skills. I assumed Lynch was a tortured artist, whether because of a rough childhood or some other internalized trauma.

So I looked him up on the internet.

Lynch was born and raised in a loving Presbyterian family, moving around often due to his father’s job as a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist. Lynch would say that this moving around didn’t negatively affect him as a child. He had no trouble making friends wherever he moved. He joined the Boy Scouts, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. He was a popular kid in high school. His favorite film was “Wizard of Oz.”

I was extremely confused at how a man with a loving and nurturing childhood could make such a disturbing film.

Years later, after I had fallen in love with Lynch and the beauty of his works like the three seasons of “Twin Peaks,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Lost Highway,” I saw an interview he did in 2007 where he told the interviewer, “Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual film.” When asked to elaborate by the interviewer, Lynch responded, “No.”

So, I bought his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, hoping to see if he’d say something more about his “most spiritual film.” He did, but not what I expected: “‘Eraserhead’ was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant … So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I close the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent. I don’t think I’ll ever say what that sentence was.”

My gut reaction was to be annoyed at these intentionally obscure answers. I needed his help making sense of his own movie, one of the few of his works that I still didn’t care for. Yet, I found no help, even in his own writing.

I wouldn’t dare solve the mystery of Lynch’s biblical sentence, but at this point in my career, I wonder if it might have been from one of the wisdom texts in the Hebrew Bible. After all, these are increasingly where I turn when I want to cling to something that acknowledges the beauty and chaos of life.

Biblical wisdom texts like Job, Psalms and Ecclesiastes don’t shy away from the way things are in the world. Horrific things happen to people that make no sense. Undeserving people suffer greatly. We are told that even our reality, universal truths we experience or things we see with our own eyes, is up for debate. The people who inspire us die while the people who don’t care about us are in power and live long. Amid all of this, there are people who tell us that all this unnecessary suffering and seemingly random cruelty is the work of God.

Life doesn’t make sense.

Yet, wisdom literature also tells us a great deal about the beauty of God in a world that doesn’t make sense. We witness majestic images of creation amidst the depths of suffering not as an explanation for the suffering, but rather as an embrace of mystery. We see the exercise of wisdom beyond knowledge, understanding what it means to know something but also what it means to admit we do not know everything about how our neighbors walk in the world. We are called to be kind, working together with God to create and witness beauty and compassion in a world full of disturbing experiences and circumstances.

It is liberating to embrace the mystery of God in an illogical world, where good people suffer and bad people profit, and it’s motivating. Mystery calls us to understand one another more deeply and show grace in beautiful ways, some we have yet to discover. Mystery calls us towards kindness rather than apathy. Mystery lets us see beauty in a way that doesn’t ignore pain and suffering.

David Lynch’s absurd, surreal art laid the groundwork for me to embrace divine mystery. It comforts me to know that a man who created movies with baffling, disturbing imagery was also a kind soul, full of love for everyone he worked with or encountered.

One example of this comes from a 2021 interview with the music podcast “Launchleft,” where he spoke with host Rain Phoenix about his life and his work with the David Lynch Foundation. In the end, when Phoenix lets him know how much she appreciates him taking the time to talk with her, Lynch responds that he saw her conversation on the podcast with the actress and activist Jane Fonda. He then tells Phoenix directly, “You have a very good heart … and you are interested in other human beings. And so, you’re a great interviewer and you make people feel at ease … and you’re very intelligent and you have a very good heart.”

Lynch seems to have wholly embodied the idea of creating beauty and kindness in a frightening world that doesn’t make sense. The authenticity behind his work and how he put himself out in the world is something we don’t often see in the world of making movies and I don’t know if we’ll ever see in the way he did it again.

In announcing Lynch’s death on January 15, his family offered a well-known quote from him: “Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole.”

May we all see what is before us, not what’s missing.

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