By Stuart Mitchner

There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole. It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

—from the announcement of David Lynch’s death

If David Lynch were still delivering daily weather reports on his YouTube channel, and if he’d lived to see Inauguration Day, his January 20 forecast would have ended with his usual cheery, heartfelt “golden sunshine and blue skies all the way” closing line, topped off with a smile and a vigorous salute, regardless of the actual weather in L.A. or D.C. Unfortunately, actual earthly weather in the form of the Santa Ana winds driving the wildfires devastating his city forced the mandatory evacuation of Lynch’s home on the night of Wednesday, January 8. The timing and the circumstances were, as some online bloggers have noted, “Lynchian.” Not only was the director of Mulholland Drive living adjacent to the street that gave his most celebrated film its title, he was homebound, seriously ill with emphysema, and in need of “supplemental oxygen for most activities.” Even though the evacuation order was rescinded the next morning, the damage had apparently been done. Less than a week later, Lynch’s family announced his January 15 death.

Smoking

David Lynch may not have been the master of his fate, but he clearly understood that the cause of his poor health had to do with something more personal than weather. “Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me,” he told Sight and Sound magazine in September 2024. “It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful…. Meanwhile, it’s killing me.”

Lynch made a grisly connection between smoking and death in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) when the paranormal assassin called the Woodsman repeats the phrase “Gotta Light?” just before crushing the skull of a radio station receptionist and terrorizing a DJ who was playing “My Prayer” by the Platters, a situation not unlike that of Lynch’s radio alter ego the weatherman, who frequently recommends songs, including several by the Platters. In fact “Gotta Light?” is the title Lynch used for The Return’s strongest, strangest, scariest episode.

Remembered on Accuweather

Has the death of an artist ever been reported with the weather news? It happened on January 17 when accuweather.com remembered David Lynch “for his work in film and television and his hundreds of daily Los Angeles weather report videos,” the last of which had been posted on December 16, 2022. As the accuweather notice Lynchenesquely words it, “After that day, the reports disappeared into the ether as mysteriously as they had suddenly begun 940 episodes earlier.”

Having seen only a fraction of those videos, I’m assuming that Lynch usually stuck to the weather, except for his habit of mentioning a song whose lyrics sometimes could be perceived as a sideways reference to the political moment, as on January 6, 2021, when he cited another song by the Platters, “The Great Pretender.” On February 25, 2022, after saying “Today I was thinking about the Ukrainians and the song ‘Roads’ by Portishead,” Lynch directly addresses “Mr. President Putin” about a “hard and fast law of nature … there’s no escaping it,” which is that “you shall reap what you sow” and “right now you are sowing death and destruction … and all this death and destruction is gonna come back and visit you. There’s plenty of time, life after life after life, for you to reap what you are sowing.”

While it’s unlikely that Putin ever got this warning message from the sunglass-masked white-haired man speaking with the authority of a wrathful prophet, thousands of Ukrainians posted their thanks on YouTube. The message of the Portishead song Lynch mentioned still resonates: “Oh, can’t anybody see / We’ve got a war to fight / Never found our way / Regardless of what they say / How can it feel, this wrong? / From this moment / How can it feel, this wrong?”

January 20

After being quoted out of context in 2018 suggesting that Trump “could have” gone down “as the greatest president in history,” Lynch felt compelled to post an open letter to POTUS that at times strayed into the rhetorical territory of Martin Luther King: “You are causing suffering and division. It’s not too late to turn the ship around. Point our ship toward a bright future for all. You can unite the country. Your soul will sing. Under great loving leadership, no one loses — everybody wins. It’s something I hope you think about and take to heart. All you need to do is treat all the people as you would like to be treated.”

Coming upon that statement on Martin Luther King Day 2025, I was especially struck by the line “Your soul will sing,” which sent me to a transcript of the “I’ve Been to the Mountain” speech King delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed. Early in the speech he said: “The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”

It was somewhat wrenching to read an inadvertent echo of King’s “stars” in a transcript of the 47th president’s inaugural address: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

In Lynch’s Diner

Now it’s time to join FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) at the Twin Peaks diner for “a damn fine cup of coffee” and a slice of to-die-for cherry pie while keeping a line open to other worlds. Lynch sets the scene in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Penguin 2006): “There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

On Christmas Day 2017, out of the nowhere/somewhere of Twin Peaks world, I was surprised by an email message from FBI agent Dale Cooper/Kyle McLachlan, about my December 20 piece, “Stars Fell on Alabama: David Lynch, Doug Jones, and the Twin Peaks Connection.” Since McLachlan is the central actor in the master’s life’s work, it was almost as good as hearing from David Lynch himself when Coop said “Enjoyed this perspective. Thanks!”

The column in question opened with my reference to Doug Jones beating Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election for the Senate seat once held by Attorney General Jeff (“I refuse to recuse myself”) Sessions, and the connection to the outcome felt by viewers who had lived and died through all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return waiting for the real Dale Cooper to emerge from his robotic double Dougie Jones. The moment he finally wakes up from an electrocution-driven coma, movingly delivered by the music of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme, is well worth the wait.

The Return ends with agent Cooper on a mission to nowhere. As he and Laura Palmer’s double (played by the original Laura, Sheryl Lee) stand staring at the house of horrors Laura once lived in, the all-American FBI agent, who knows the Tibetan Book of the Dead by heart, is asking a woman who is about to scream what year it is.

Rather than end by making the obvious connection suggested by The Return — that of a nation standing outside the White House wondering where we’re headed — let’s give the weatherman the last word. In his hybrid biography-memoir Room to Dream (Random House 2018, with Kristine McKenna), David Lynch ends the first chapter about Twin Peaks by observing that although “most people’s lives are filled with mystery, … things move superfast nowadays and there’s not much time to sit and daydream and notice the mystery. There are fewer and fewer places in the world now where you can see the stars in the night sky, and you’ve got to go a long way out of L.A., to the dry lake beds, to see them now. One time we were out there shooting, … and at two in the morning we turned off the lights and lay down on the desert floor and just looked up. Trillions of stars. Trillions. It’s so powerful. And because we’re not seeing those stars we’re forgetting how grand the whole show is.”