Today, Monday January 20th, Lynch would have turned 79 and to honor him, his children and granddaughter have organized a global meditation meetup.
Just shy of his 79th birthday, we lost a legend. David Lynch, the iconoclastic filmmaker and thinker behind such brain tangling masterpieces as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune, the 1984 version, Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Most of us got to know his particular, unorthodox way of thinking through the series Twin Peaks, which we watched religiously in our living room, on our TV on ABC each Sunday night starting in the spring of 1990 for two seasons. It returned in 2017 on Showtime for another season, titled then, appropriately, Twin Peaks: The Return.
But Lynch was also known for his music videos and commercial ads. Among the former, Chris Isaak’s 1990 video for ‘Wicked Game’, which I’m playing as I type this up, and ‘Came Back Haunted’ the 2013 video by Nine Inch Nails, which is introduced by a trigger warning due to the flashing images.
As far as ads, those are extensive! There is a series for Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance, which in the 1990’s was the perfume to wear, thanks to Lynch and Richard Avedon who each worked on a few ads. Lynch’s uses models — you’ll recognize Benecio Del Toro, Heather Graham, Lara Flynn Boyle, and James Marshall among them — while a voiceover reads passages from texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Gustave Flaubert.
From good scents to bad odors, Lynch also worked on the ad for the NYC Department of Sanitation, and then went back to perfumes with Gio by Giorgio Armani, Opium by YSL and Lancôme’s Tresor. But he also didn’t shy away from doing spots for Alka-Seltzer Plus, Honda and Barilla Pasta, featuring Gerard Depardieu. As a personal aside, that six degrees of separation thing we’ve all got going with our fellow humans, my uncle in Naples made all the boxes for Barilla pasta, during the time the ad ran, so those boxes in Lynch’s commercial, are his boxes.
His latest ad, in 2014 was for Rouge Louboutin, the nail color line by famous French cobbler Christian Louboutin.
But personally, what I’ve always loved most have been his acting cameos. Among those, two roles — both in his later life — are my faves. The first was as Howard in Lucky, the 2017 film starring another now gone genius Harry Dean Stanton, and directed by actor John Carroll Lynch — no relation. Howard is one of the characters that Stanton’s Lucky meets daily, and he’s lost his tortoise in the film. That diner in the middle of nowhere America, where the two older men hang out is my definition of heaven, by the way.
And later, Lynch’s turn as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans in 2022 is of course, the stuff cinematic dreams are made of. Smoking of course, as Lynch must be doing now for all eternity in film heaven.
“When the horizon is in the middle, it’s boring as shit!”
Now, about that global meditation meetup in David Lynch’s honor. Here is the link to the event, on FB, and it takes place on Monday, January 20th at Noon PST, for ten minutes.
And here what the family wrote about it: “David Lynch, our beloved dad, was a guiding light of creativity, love, and peace. On Monday, January 20th—what would have been his 79th birthday—we invite you all to join us in a worldwide group meditation at 12:00pm NOON PST for 10 minutes.
Let us come together, wherever we are, to honor his legacy by spreading peace and love across the world. Please take this time to meditate, reflect, and send positivity into the universe.
Thank you for being part of this celebration of his life.
Love,
Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lula Lynch and granddaughter Sydney Lynch”
See you all at the movies. Rest in greatness, Mr. Lynch.