Like all of the internet’s weird little film guys (gender-neutral), I was surprised by how sad I felt when I found out David Lynch had died. But as I went about my day thinking of almost nothing else, it made me feel better to read loving remembrances from women he’d worked with. I’ve always been struck by Lynch’s ability to depict genuinely horrifying onscreen violence and abjection involving women characters while showing nothing but support and kindness for the real women involved.

“He put me on the map,” wrote Naomi Watts of Lynch on Instagram. “The world I’d been trying to break into for 10-plus years, flunking auditions left and right. Finally, I sat in front of a curious man, beaming with light, speaking words from another era, making me laugh and feel at ease. How did he even ‘see me’ when I was so well hidden, and I’d even lost sight of myself.” (She signed off as “Buttercup.” Lynch gave his actors a lot of cute little nicknames; Kyle McLachlan was Kale, and Laura Dern was Tidbit.)

Lynch’s ability to see Watts would be an inflection point in her career. She would go on to play the complex dual role of Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive, one of Lynch’s masterpieces. Mulholland Drive also happens to be one of the scariest movies ever made, both in terms of jump scares (the monster behind Winkie’s lives on in my nightmares years after watching it!) and the depths of human abjection and Hollywood misogyny it’s willing to explore. One of Watts’s best acting moments in the movie happens to involve the most depressing scene of female masturbation ever committed to film.

There are a lot of ways Lynch’s execution of his creative visions could have gone wrong. Look no further than a filmmaker like Bernardo Bertolucci, who gave actor Maria Schneider a cursory warning in advance of a graphic, unscripted simulated rape scene with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, a scene that she later said captured real surprise and violation rather than acting.

Lynch was different. His films did require actors to play out some truly horrifying material. (See: most of the scenes involving Frank Booth’s nonconsensual mommy kink in Blue Velvet.) But unlike a manipulative Bertolucci, Lynch trusted his actors to act. They were able to plumb the depths of human depravity because they were actually safe. Watts’s devolution in Mulholland Drive and Sheryl Lee’s prolonged suffering as Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks and in its movie prequel Fire Walk With Me are heartbreaking, but they’re the work of skilled actors doing their jobs. The horror is palpable, and all the more miraculous for not being real. 

It’s also clear that their characters’ suffering isn’t being used simply to shock viewers. Lynch frames their stories in a way that humanizes the women at the center, which is what makes him so difficult to emulate; without this sense of care paired, it’s easy to make something exploitative or just bad.

But Lynch depicts harm with the emotional intensity it requires. In the universe of Twin Peaks, the impact of Laura Palmer’s suffering is framed on a mythological scale. One teenage girl’s ongoing abuse is so incomprehensible and unacceptable that it requires a supernatural explanation. I have always considered this beautiful: Lesser directors would see Laura’s rape as a plot point, an edgy choice. For Lynch, it’s the end of all the good in the world.

I have always loved Lynch’s legible and extreme empathy for women like Laura and Watts’s Betty/Diane, how clearly offered. In real life, victims of sexual assault and other forms of misogyny are often disbelieved or marginalized. In the mythology of Twin Peaks, Laura’s suffering is not only acknowledged and recognized as harm on a surreal scale but she herself is framed as a force of strength and goodness. In Fire Walk with Me, Lynch sends Laura Palmer an angel. The angel appears in the film’s cathartic apotheosis (spoilers for a movie that came out in 1992) as a sign that Laura has ascended to the mythical White Lodge, where she can finally be free of her pain.

The first time I saw Twin Peaks—on rented DVDs from Scarecrow Video, the pilot episode missing for arcane copyright reasons—it didn’t draw me in immediately, even if something about it felt true to the Pacific Northwest in a way I’d never seen represented before on TV. I laughed at the fish in the percolator and was charmed by the lonesome foghorn, but that was about it.

But as I got older and saw how frightening the world could sometimes be, how many Laura Palmers there really are out there, I fell in love with Lynch’s humanizing frame for survivors of sexual violence, his inventive dream logic, his maximalist ability to capture so vividly both the best and worst parts of being alive: the cups of wonderful coffee and the violent logger husbands, the roses against blue sky and white picket fences and the severed ears in the grass.

The night after Lynch died, KUOW played Angelo Badalamenti’s theme for Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks as bed music between shows. And as I wrote this column, the coffee shop around me buzzed with chatter about David Lynch’s movies: Inland Empire, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway. For a moment, it was as if we all had a line out to the White Lodge, that place between worlds. Unlike the terrifying Black Lodge, the White Lodge is a place of refuge and beauty. It’s also mysterious, like everything in the world of Lynch. We never quite see the whole picture. Perhaps Lynch is seeing it now. If so, I hope there’s endless good coffee.

And I hope more artists will see what I see in Lynch: the possibility of being uncompromising in your vision without compromising your collaborators’ humanity. That duality may be one of the reasons so many of us feel so sad that Lynch is gone. Playing Diane Selwyn could’ve been traumatic for Naomi Watts; instead, Lynch helped the actor see her own genius at a time when she couldn’t see it on her own. And when he lifts up the humanity of a character like Laura Palmer, it can make it a little easier to see it in ourselves.


The Beacon is celebrating David Lynch’s work with David Lynch: A Remembrance Both Wonderful and Strange, an exclusive collage of “interviews, oddities, documentary pieces, short films, music videos, rarities, and secret mysteries” through February 9.