On one side of the marquee outside of the Angelika Film Center in New York’s East Village a list of 5 – 6 new releases was spelled out. A documentary, a couple of animated films, and two Best Picture likelies. On the other side, however, read simply:
Mulholland Drive
Blue Velvet
Eraserhead
It was hard to have read those three titles as anything but a farewell, a tidy way of saying goodbye and see you later. On February 2, 2025, at 7:30 pm, Theater 3 was the place people came to pay their respects to the recently deceased: director, artist, musician, and writer David Lynch.
The chairs were in rows, flat and screwed into the floor. The seat dropped down and you sat. That was all there was to it. As I sat in my own seat watching the procession of other attendees stream through the door, a brief flashing image of a wake, with its lifeless fold-out chairs, packed together in a room smattered with strangers who must have known the deceased came to mind. The screen up ahead on the wall played trivia, but that’s all it was, trivial, in my blink-and-you’ll-miss-it heart to heart with that room full of strangers. Not only had I come alone, but I had taken the train from Port Chester. I was an imposter among these people who went to sleep just the night before in the city, and who would do so again that night. I let myself lean back into my seat more, trying out this newfound feeling of belonging. I liked it.
When the lights began to dim and the muted conversations stopped altogether, one might have expected a notice, a memorial image of Lynch. Instead, there was a long, winding description describing the 4K restoration of the film, and Lynch’s “heavy involvement” in it. The room chuckled, knowingly. And throughout the film they continued to do so, with a particular attention paid to Kyle McLachlan’s character of Jeffrey Beaumont, who became less of a character and more of a reminder of Lynch’s own boyish, eager, wide-eyed charm as the film continued. It occurred to me then that the last time I had seen Blue Velvet had been over five years ago, and in that time my own relationship with Lynch had changed drastically. It was the first of his films I had seen, and proved to be the one I left behind for picks like Mulholland Drive or even Lost Highway, films I found to be much more interesting and worthy of dissection than Blue Velvet was. Now, however, sitting in that room full of people and finding myself laughing with them brought to mind how long it had been. It felt like coming home.
Each of Lynch’s idiosyncratic choices got a response, from the fireman waving slowly to us while holding a dalmatian on the side of a classic, cherry red fire truck, to Kyle McLachlan’s answer of “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” when Laura Dern’s Sandy asks the question of whether he is “a detective or a pervert”. The laughter in that room was the kind you find yourself doing when your best friend does something that of course your best friend would do, and you just can’t help but love them. But of course no Lynch movie is meant to be viewed this way. Scenes like the abuse scene between Dennis Hopper’s Frank and Monica Belluci’s Dorothy Vallens were met with a true sense of breath-holding. It’s not just Lynch’s personality that shines through, but his uncompromising artistic point of view and craft, too. It’s things like that which remind people how earnestly Lynch approaches dialogue like Sandy’s “There is trouble, ‘till the robins come,” monologue. It’s on the nose, yes, but Lynch just isn’t the kind of artist to make us work to see love in his films, he wants it to be there for us to reach out and touch.
In the final scene of the film, we hear “Blue Velvet” playing softly in the background once again, and we see the fireman waving to us from his truck, still holding his dalmatian with a smile on his face. I felt myself begin to tear up. It felt like goodbye, and it felt like I had wasted time getting to know my friend better than I should have.
When the blue curtain faded onto the screen and the credits rolled, everybody began to clap, slowly, uncertainly, before getting faster. Nobody spoke a word, and we all stood up and marched out of the theater and into the lobby. Outside, it seemed to have been snowing for some time, and sidewalks, cars, and buildings were covered. Beside me, two girls stepped off to the side of the doors, underneath the marquee, to share a cigarette. At least I knew Lynch would have loved that.
No ratings yet.
You must be logged in to rate this post.