David Lynch, Mystic

“Mystics” get a bad rap these days. Casting a wide net as I prepared to write my dissertation, I recall checking out a book called something like Marxism and Mysticism, expecting a life-changing mash-up of the material and the spiritual. Instead, it was a book almost entirely about why proletarians don’t get that they’re the subject of history. Fair enough, I suppose. But even more mundane thinking places the “mystical” in the realm of the purely obfuscatory: religious nuts, tarot readers, quietist hermits, cultic castraters, and a host of fat-chewing freaks and clowns.

As a student of medieval mysticism, none of that would really do. Not for me. The mystic captures what we find in the original, Middle English sense of the term. She casts shadow in order to shine light, obscures in the name of revelation. Mystics often labor in paradox and strained prose, not because they have something to sell you but because the hard limits of language bend and curve. These are social creatures, political as all get out, products of and shapers of their worlds.  I wrote a whole dissertation about it. But that’s not something you need to pretend to be concerned about here.

With David Lynch’s passing, it struck me that he is, if nothing else, a mystic. I’m very serious about this. I don’t know that I have any business writing a eulogy for Lynch. It’s true his films meant a lot to me. It’s also true that I have many a thought about his oeuvre. But others can do and have done that better. What I can offer is a perspective on his mysticism, plain and simple.

In good mystical fashion, perhaps it is most fitting to begin with what Lynch was not. He was not some particularly intelligent weirdo who was kind enough to share his freakishness with the world. This is to treat him like a sideshow or a carnie. He was not a liberationist filmmaker hellbent on finding out where the Bobs and Dennis Hoppers will hide once the revolution comes. He was not an apple-pie munching reactionary whose films embody and betray his secret Montanan fascism. He was not a freak—at least not any more than most Americans.

Feel free to read his work in those terms. But here I am concerned with the man himself.

David Lynch was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM). He paid to meditate with its founder; he took it seriously.

I have no opinion on the practice’s efficacy, but it’s clear from many interviews, his setting up a foundation to teach the practice to children, and his regular comments about the relationship between individual consciousness and “the universe” that Lynch believed that the technique allowed him to access and shape ideas. This fact does not remove his films from the world, from the conditions under which they were created. Lost Highway (1997) can be a fever dream, a retelling of the OJ Simpson story, and an inchoate expression of Lynch’s own sexual anxieties all at once. What matters is that, for him, art arises from this peculiar spiritual relationship to all things. Again, plain and simple.

And so, when we experience a Lynch film, we are not just watching something odd, something meant to pull our legs, a wink and a nod from a consummate salesman. He is not and never will be (as much as I might love his movies) John Waters. Each Lynch film is as a prayer; it presents a set of visions, loosely connected first on the page and then through the act of, well, acting. In this sense, any strangeness, any alienation, is fundamentally a product of translation, of Lynch’s desire to make legible the visions presented to his mind through TM.

I believe we ought to accept and greet his artistic output in those terms, in the same way I would when reading the poems of a Sufi or the visionary prose of a medieval Christian mystic. Of course anyone can take away whatever they like from art; this isn’t intended to foreclose all non-religious avenues of interpretation. Rather, it’s to challenge the idea that what makes Lynch interesting is that he’s weird, that there exists some fundamental disconnect between his aw-shucks persona and his sex-laden, horror-show films. Obviously, he felt no such chasm; obviously, he felt he was, at whatever level, an integrated, real person. Why should we not take his view seriously?

The point, then, is that I think—whatever we make of Lynch’s affect, his politics, his “freakishness”—that his films and paintings have much to teach us by way of his mode of artistic production, that in obscuring he reveals, as any mystic worth his salt does. And should we read him in that way, I suspect we’ll be forced to interrogate ourselves and our biases too. If Lynch can be a mystic, if an eagle scout from Montana can probe the darkest depths of the human soul and come out smiling, maybe it’s time we look for fewer freaks, stigmatize less virulently, and inquire: what’re these mystics up to?