David Lynch, 1946-2025.
A true master of directing filmed fantasy.
Not long ago, David Lynch died. He was a hugely creative, independent, and influential filmmaker, and I've been a fan since I was a teenager. A lot of people got really sad about his loss online, and I was one of them.
If you read one of the many, many tributes to him, you might think he spent his life as a constantly beloved figure. Of course, this was not true. He made strange, polarizing art and films that lost lots of money, and there were long periods where he was considered a washed-up weirdo. He spent a lot of time out in the wilderness.
Yet, he left behind a difficult, strange, relentlessly cool body of work. I wanted to talk about the way he approached fantasy, my area of interest. There's a lot the genre should learn from how he approached it. He’s been an inspiration for me for a long time.
One Of The Good Ones
As an independent artist, David Lynch was a great role model. His one guiding rule as a director was to always get final cut. Whatever was released under his name was purely his product, for good or ill, with no interference.
Give up money. Give up marketing. Give us anything, but get the right to make the final cut. The overwhelming desire for this ability to communicate your own vision is what really defines "indie" to me.
Lynch made surreal movies. Some were truly elliptic and strange, while others took place in something like our reality, but heightened and altered. Intense, full of vivid imagery. (And incredible sound design.) If you see a movie or TV show get weird or symbolic, 99% of the time there's something lifted from Lynch. I've been rewatching his stuff and, when it's fresh in your mind, it's shocking how often you see another director crib one of Lynch’s images or tricks.
When most creators get surreal, the results are usually either impenetrable tedium or a misery wallow. However, Lynch was a kind-hearted person with a great sense of humor. While his films could be shockingly violent and disturbed, they were also cut with sincerity, joy, and hope. This could make even his trippiest experiments enjoyable.
Plus, as an unusual bonus, he was genuinely loved by his collaborators. No creepy or ugly stories have come out about him, which is a nice change of pace.
If You're Late To The Party
Some quick recommendations if you want to experience his work.
Good, less-surreal entry points are The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. Beautiful, heartfelt films but with a palpable, off-kilter edge to them.
In the middle is his classic, perverse 80s film noir Blue Velvet, which has some of the most indelible performances and scenes in all of filmmaking.
On the far end are Mulholland Drive (a masterpiece) and Eraserhead (his bone-jarringly strange first film).
But right now I'm focusing on his most successful, influential work, co-created by him and writer Mark Frost: Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks Is Mysterious
I like to joke that Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have the same story. There is a small town that is built on a cursed location suffused with pure evil. The town is constantly beset by monsters, and humans must fight them off.
For all of the weirdness of Twin Peaks, its basic story is very simple. There is a demonic being named Bob who lives in a hidden evil place called the Black Lodge. He emerges from time to time and wreaks havoc, and a motley group of FBI agents, well-meaning people, and the occasional angel fight to banish him.
Sounds pretty basic when written like that. And yet Lynch had a unique talent for making even the most mundane details strange and compelling.
When magic shows itself in Twin Peaks, it is never in a clear, direct way. The town is suffused with madness. Towers of donut boxes in the police station. Tolerable eccentricity elevated into total madness. Characters in the background suddenly have seizures, unremarked upon. The Black Lodge is a nice, clean room with a marble floor and red curtains, and yet it's intensely creepy. Clues are given by giants and mysterious one-armed men, with no clue of where they came from or where they go when they vanish.
And yet, it holds together. Hot fantasy tip: You don't have to reveal all the secrets of how magic works to your audience. You only need to make them believe that those rules exist. Somewhere.
Watching Twin Peaks is to be exposed to magic the way it should be: huge, scary, and impenetrable. I really love it. Even if the show can be painfully frustrating to watch sometimes, and some of it just makes no sense.
(If you want to see what I'm talking about without a huge time investment, just watch the pilot and next two episodes of the original Twin Peaks, two of them directed by Lynch. Bear in mind when this stuff premiered in 1990, it was phenomenally popular. Available legally on Paramount+.)
Magic Is Rarely Magical These Days
One of my big pet peeves of modern fantasy is when it becomes too concrete. I hate it when magic feels like just another sort of engineering. Just another set of systems to master, so that we know what gears go where and what levers to push to get the desired results.
The Harry Potter books are perfect examples of this. Magic is just another thing you learn in a class. At Hogwart's, a wand is basically a fancy gun.
(The main lesson of Harry Potter is that being forced to fight for your freedom is an inevitability, so as many children as possible should be competent in the use of powerful firearms.)
For good examples of magic that is spooky and mysterious, Game of Thrones handles this very well. The Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman is also fantastic.
Lynch is still my favorite for this, though. When I watch his characters interact with the many forces outside our world, I feel confused and scared, like I'm seeing a tiny portion of something huge and alien that I can't understand. Which is what I should feel. (2017's Twin Peaks: The Return is where it gets really wild.)
This Is Where I Must Fail
Whenever I criticize something, someone on the internet will "helpfully" rush forward to point out a time when I was guilty of it myself.
So I'll be clear here. I don't like how predictable and clear magic in video games, including mine, is. It's a necessary evil. After all, if you write a video game with magic, that magic has to be explicitly codified in software. Any rules I conceal can be discovered through experiment. No mystery is possible.
I don't really write fantasy in the end. I write wargames. It's just the artillery pieces are called “wizards.”
I do my best to work around this in the storytelling. I've tried, to the limits of my meager abilities, to occasionally create a sense of mystery. The Corruption in my Avadon games. The Sidhe in Queen's Wish. The strange cultures of infernals and eyebeasts.
But that's just storytelling, and game players typically don't care about that. Gamers are practical people, and they just want to know if the fireball will kill enough enemies to help them avoid the Game Over screen.
Nothing wrong with this. It's a game. It's fun. It's just not magical.
It's The End Of An Era As Well
I am confident some reading this are saying, "Yeah, I've seen Lynch's work. It wasn't that great." And I get it! He made weird, polarizing work, uncompromisingly sticking to his own vision.
When I mourn Lynch, I am also mourning a time when an oddball like that could claw his way up to the heights of culture. (David Lynch was seriously considered to direct Return of the Jedi. Can you IMAGINE!?) Like him or hate him, don't you want more variety to distract from the eight billionth iteration of Marvelstarwarsharrypotterstartrek?
I used to feel self-conscious about mourning celebrities. Why should I feel sad? I mean, I never met them! But when someone who meant something to your life goes away, feeling sad about that is natural.
So thank you, David, for sending your messages out to lonely young me in my little town and really weirding me the heck out.
I won’t be updating quite as often for a few months. Minor health issues plus I’m really deep into writing our next game. But I do have some fun articles coming up, including the return of Gamer Deep Lore.
Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.