Kyle MacLachlan: How David Lynch Invented Me

No, I didn’t always understand what we were making. Sometimes I’d get a sense of it, and then like on a breeze, it was gone. Other times it seemed to exist on a plane that I wanted to reach but couldn’t quite articulate.

But eventually, I realized it didn’t matter.

Though my lifelong friend, collaborator and mentor David Lynch was as eloquent as anyone I’d ever met — and a brilliant writer — he was not necessarily a word person.

I think he just found them insufficient. One-dimensional. Not up to the job.

It’s why he never wanted to explain his work. He wasn’t trying to be surly or obtuse. That was never David’s way. He loved connecting with people, meeting them where they were, sharing time or space or consciousness. It’s just that explaining his art after the fact seemed antithetical to the very point of making it.

I sat in interviews and on panels next to him and could see him struggling with questions about what things meant. Often I felt compelled to pick up the baton and talk in circles for a bit until the questioner moved on.

David knew that anything he said would be putting his thumb on the scale. And he wanted people to experience his work on their own and take away what they wished.

If words were sufficient, why would he have spent the effort and the time and the millions of dollars making it? Wouldn’t words have been so much easier?