Aside from being 'a good movie' why do you think Kubrick was so enchanted by Eraserhead?

my cousins makeup bag looking familiar, trying to get them to watch twin peaks so this made for a perfect segue

Whats time in your place?

Please feel free to delete if this counts as spam! My band As Lonely As a Blue Star is deeply inspired by and referential to David’s work, and we just dropped a record full of references :) I’d be very interested to see if anyone can clock what the album cover is. The record is titled “I’ll See You Under the Sycamore Trees”

I grew up in this town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_River,_Ontario. I wonder: Is there anyone alive today who could (even in principle) explain why David Lynch seemingly had a "fascination" (maybe that's an exaggeration) with the town that I grew up in? Lynch himself is obviously no longer with us. Maybe there is nobody who could answer the question (even in principle).

Maybe he just scanned over a map of Ontario and saw the town. Maybe before he saw the town he already had the words "Deep River" in his mind as something that interested him or maybe his interest in those words came after he learned about the town. The idea that he was just scanning over a map is so unsatisfying and random, though. And is there any evidence whatsoever that Lynch would search for inspiration by randomly scanning over maps...is that something that we know he did or is that something that an artist like him might do?

My main question is whether Lynch actually knew anything much about the town and its history or not. The more I look into the town's history, the more I wonder if he actually did know something about the town and its history. The town has been described multiple times as a "utopia" and there's definitely some "weirdness" regarding the town...seems like there are "Lynchian" themes that come up when you learn about the town and its history, though I'm sure there are many small towns that you could say that regarding.

From Google:

There is no public record or direct evidence confirming whether David Lynch specifically studied or learned about the town's history of Deep River, Ontario.

• The Reference in Film: David Lynch used Deep River, Ontario as the origin of the naive, aspiring actress Betty Elms (played by Naomi Watts) in his 2001 film Mulholland Drive, where she famously says, "I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I'm in this dream place."

• Utopian and Atomic History: Deep River, Ontario was established and incorporated in the 1950s as a planned, isolated community for atomic scientists and nuclear researchers working on projects like CANDU reactors. A famous 1958 Maclean’s magazine article described it sarcastically as a crime-free, utopian "atomic city".

• Lynch's Intent: While fans and critics have speculated whether David Lynch came across the 1958 Maclean’s article or used Deep River purely for its evocative, wholesome, small-town contrast to the dark surrealism of Hollywood, Lynch never explicitly detailed a deep historical study of the Canadian municipality in interviews.

I think you can see why this bugs me a little. He either knew something about the town and its history or he didn't. It seems like there are things about the town that would've fascinated him, but I just can't know how much knowledge he had. Did he perhaps meet someone from Canada who might've told him about the town? How would he have learned about the town if not through a Canadian friend?

I know it's probably very silly to try to imagine ever shedding light on this matter. Just something that nags at my mind a bit.

Edit: I forgot to mention the below, though this doesn't really actually shed any light on anything of course:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140612051254/https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/remain-light-mulholland-dr-and-cosmogony-david-lynch

The threshold entities speak a language that provokes association without binding the listener to any directed intent. Lynch has spoken of how the incidental conjunction of a few words (“deep river,” “lost highway”) is enough in itself to “set [him] dreaming”.

Edit 2: See below an interesting comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1xdqk43/is_there_anyone_alive_today_who_could_even_in/19rk31b65hkth/

If you combine the aforementioned reference to the deep unconscious, with his absolute obsession with the 50s as a symbolic origin point for both good and evil in the modern world , your hometown is a perfect Lynchian space. Perhaps he heard about it in passing and it grabbed him.

Consider that in The Return, he positions the atomic bomb/ atomic age as a spiritual nexus for a great evil.

Also, from Catching the Big Fish:

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful."

It seems your town is a perfect nexus for everything Lynch was interested in portraying, cosmically and “geopolitically.”

Yeah, he's basically the prototype for Cooper in Twin Peaks, but I do wish we got to learn more about Jeffrey specifically. We know he seems to be a genuinely good soul with a dark side (the sacred and the propane), he's eccentric (stakes a shady factory for an entire night with a homemade camera just to capture evidence), and he's quirked up. I know over an hour was cut from the movie and there's some stuff in the script about him being a bit of a voyeur at college, but I always felt he was one of Lynch's more "human" main characters, and I would've liked if we learned more about him. What fascinates him so much about the ear for him to risk his life?

Or maybe that'd just ruin the mystery. I know Jeffrey basically is a bit of a self-insert for David Lynch as well. I don't know, anyone else feel the same way? Maybe I just love Kyle too much.

/j just watched for the first time and as much as these films are different the similarities btwn the two are a bit uncanny

the first one is the horse and the second one is audrey

Hi, what is the best book about Davud Lynch art?

For those who want a cheap digital license :)

Just read that to my kid and it reminded me of some lynch’s works. Maybe a thread with some recommendations for Lynchian children book ?

I found this on Facebook from the Bruce Campbell Memes page.

"The essence of the human soul lives within waves. Like an obsidian tide crashing on the shores of the mind in the galactic black shroud of dusk; these waves permeate ashen sands. They dance between ever-changing frequencies, flowing in and around us like a stream of life. Ever-free, the soul breathes around the body, free from its confines, capable of vanishing like a ship in the night under cover of the crashing waves to once again join in the endless sea.

The body dissolves and the soul becomes as music; becoming part of the life stream itself. Boundary-free, the soul travels where it detects the waters of life; a voice, vibrations, the very breath issuing the final dirge to send the body off forever. The soul persists, ethereal nomad, becoming life itself and no longer the catalytic instrument that once expressed it."

In Gorillaz - The God of Lying, the very beggining of the song features a sample and we hear a voice saying something like: "Human and being is... cause there's being... know the unknown, the spiritual, the alien"

I found this comment in a post asking the same thing in r/Gorillaz and I was wondering if any of you can confirm this is indeed David Lynch's voice.

Regarding both DFW and Lynch, it seems to me that these artists put forward art that can be appreciated at different levels. Sometimes certain interpretations seem to really "unlock" something like Infinite Jest or something like Twin Peaks in a way that goes "deeper", though; every interpretation is "valid" in a sense but obviously the data sometimes lines up in a way that starts to suggest that a given interpretation has really "unlocked" something. See here for an interpretation of Twin Peaks that seems to me at least to really "unlock" things, though obviously this doesn't render other intepretations "invalid" in any way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM. If that video that I just linked is (at least largely) successful in providing an interpretation that really "unlocks" things (lines up with a lot of data from the show) then that would kind of weird in a way, since it would mean that Lynch presumably knew about this interpretation and thus Lynch made a show that millions (???) of people saw and yet basically zero people would ever be able to "unlock". I'm not sure by what year (how many years after the show aired???) scholars ever started to talk about the interpretation that "unlocks" Twin Peaks; maybe to this day it's just that YouTube video that presents that interpretation, without any scholars ever having written about that interpretation.

Imagine Lynch presented something with a "hidden" interpretation that would only ever be known to very few people (like, film scholars??? not even sure if film scholars have written about that interpretation, to be clear). It's almost a bit "creepy", maybe, right? The very idea that (maybe?) zero people who ever saw the show in the 1990s even knew about this interpretation...that seems super weird to me. All those people watching it, but nobody knowing about that interpretation. The same logic might apply to Infinite Jest, except I think that DFW (maybe?) would've had more of a reasonable expectation that his novel would ever be "unlocked", since literary scholars are so meticulous in analyzing texts...maybe Lynch would've had less of a reasonable expectation that his TV show would ever been "unlocked".

The idea of "hiding" a powerful interpretation (that "unlocks") of your art just seems so odd. Imagine writing a message in code and getting millions to look at the message but nobody can decipher it; that would be a bizarre thing do, psychologically, right? I know that that's a flawed analogy, since in the case of a book or TV show the "deeper" interpretation might "shine through" and affect the "surface" of the art, so it's not the same as an undecipherable coded message that nobody can read. Just the idea of someone hiding their message so that nobody can read it seems like weird behavior. I saw this, though, so this is an important caveat to consider:

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/dtvx8g/twin_perfect_doesnt_understand_twin_peaks/

The idea that everything in the show must be filtered through a single governing idea is also flawed. If you look at a work of art and consider what it seems to be evoking, the ways in which it resonates, you can have an interesting and substantial discussion. When you settle on a "theory" and watch every scene thinking about how to crowbar your predetermined interpretation into it then you're just succumbing to confirmation bias and fundamentally misunderstanding art. By the time the video gets into discussing Ed and Norma it's so far gone into cloud-cuckoo land I'm not sure how anyone can take it seriously. It can't just be that Lynch and Frost are communicating something about art and commerce through the story of the Double R franchising, everything has to be a one to one metaphor. Ed must be Lynch, Norma must be Twin Peaks etc. It's the most simplistic possible understanding of symbolism, and it does a disservice to a thematically rich piece of work.

...

In addition to all this, the guy's tone is so condescending and self-important. I particularly dislike the built-in defence that anyone who dislikes his video is just upset about how it destroys the show's sense of mystery, that he's just too damn correct about everything. But the truth is that he's not the first person to view aspects of the show in this way at all, he is just the first to ignore all other aspects of the show and turn a meditation on violence, trauma and consciousness into some nebulous diatribe about bad TV. The fact he keeps going with his Lynch impression despite how self evidently fucking terrible it is serves as the ultimate testament to his utterly unearned confidence.

Someone responded:

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/dtvx8g/twin_perfect_doesnt_understand_twin_peaks/

Honestly, this reads like pure jealousy that your theory isn't getting as much attention as his.

I don't really care about his tone or whatever.. the fact is, no one has managed to tie up as many loose ends as he has. It might not be a perfectly correct interpretation, but it's way more compelling than anything I've seen so far.

I should note that I'd love to see what film scholars who study Twin Peaks have to say about the intepretation (by Twin Perfect) that's being debated. Maybe he goes too far in some places but not others.