David Furst: This is All of It. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart. Coming up on today's show, we'll brainstorm some hearty cold weather meals, and we want to hear about your favorite recipes. We'll hear about a groundbreaking exhibit at the Whitney focused on the late choreographer Alvin Ailey. Plus, we'll get caught up on the Oscar nominations which came out this morning. Hey, head to our Instagram, @allofitnyc, for links to some of the conversations that we've had with some of the nominees. That's the plan, so let's get this started.

[music]

No, that is not the All of It theme song, but if you had a TV bit between 1990 and '91, chances are you will recognize it as the theme to Twin Peaks, the seminal and surreal horror mystery series from the late David Lynch. Lynch passed away on Wednesday of last week. In 2024, he announced he'd been diagnosed with emphysema. He would have been 79 this past Monday.

He leaves behind the legacy of a hugely influential artist, just as important to the modern television landscape as he was to the world of film. He was a surrealist who found broad appeal creating a hit TV show and several commercially and critically successful films. In an article about the 2017 Twin Peaks sequel, The Return, film and TV critic and Pulitzer finalist Matt Zoller Seitz opened with the line, "David Lynch rearranges your brain." Following his death, Seitz has written for Vulture about the life and legacy of the director and about how his films them considered death. Matt Zoller Seitz joins us now. Welcome to All of It.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Thank you for having me.

David Furst: Listeners, we'd love for you to get involved with this conversation, too. What did David Lynch mean to you? Do you remember the first Lynch film that you watched? Do you have any stories or connections to his work? Call in 212-433-9692, that's 212-433-WNYC, or message us on socials, @allofitwnyc. Matt, you're both a TV and a film critic. You've written books about Mad Men and Wes Anderson. As someone covering both worlds, what made David Lynch special in each of them?

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, I guess for starters, it seems, in retrospect, remarkable to me that he ever found any kind of popular audience at all, let alone that there were various points where everybody knew his name, you know, different points in his career. He's certainly one of a handful of filmmakers to have inspired an adjective, Lynchian, which I guess nobody can really quite agree on what that means. I mean, it seems to be sort of a catch all for unusual, weird, or not what you expected, I guess, but there's nobody who can be Lynchian except Lynch, and unfortunately, he's no longer with us, but he leaves an incredible body of work that--

David Furst: Impossible to define that, the Lynchian. Right? It's like a surreal thing, a tone that puts you on edge. There's also humor involved. It's hard to define it.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, one of the things that I thought was most interesting about that was that the period when David Lynch started to have a popular breakthrough, which I think was roughly the period from Blue Velvet through the end of the Twin Peaks, the original Twin Peaks, like '86 to '91. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. Twin Peaks, it's easy to forget was it was a legitimate hit. I mean, at least at the beginning it was until people realized that they weren't going to solve the mystery of Laura Palmer for quite some time, and that it wasn't what interested the people who made the show.

I think what strikes me the most is that everybody understood that the David Lynch's name meant darkness, surrealism, violence, something disturbing, perhaps a kind of humor that was off balance and that you might laugh at ironically, but they thought that he was making fun of innocence and light and goodness. Over time, it became clear. No, no, he was absolutely sincere about that, and it was an extension of his own personality and values.

David Furst: Your 2017 article about The Return, the Twin Peaks sequel begins with that line, "David Lynch rearranges your brain." Did he rearrange your brain?

Matt Zeller Seitz: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I think the first movie of his that I saw was probably Eraserhead. No, actually, I think it might have been The Elephant Man on cable. I wasn't aware of directors, I didn't think about film in that way. I was too young, but there was something different about that. I had seen biographies of famous historical figures before, but I'd never seen one like that that felt like I was having a dream about a historical figure.

I think it was Blue Velvet, like a lot of other people probably would say this, that that made me go, "Oh, this is a personality. This is a brand. This is a distinctive way of seeing the world in the manner of somebody like Hitchcock or Spielberg." Nobody was ever able to 100% capture what Lynch was able to do. I think he strikes beyond the rational mind. He's able to plug into that in just the way he tells a story or in the way that he tells around a story.

David Furst: Well, the Oscar nominations are out this morning, and let me just touch on that for a moment. David Lynch was nominated for several Academy Awards, but aside from an honorary award, he never won an Oscar. Did he care about things like this? What are your thoughts about that?

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, I'm sure he cared very much about it as a way to get attention. From that funding, he always struggled to get funding for his movies and except in that really brief window that I mentioned where he was hot. He didn't do anything. The Twin Peaks third season was kind of a miracle that that happened. It was a weird confluence of events that allowed it to exist. He didn't do anything after that. No feature films, no television shows.

The fact that somebody as major as him struggled with funding is a really sad indictment of the industry, such as it is, but I just felt like going back to your original thing about Lynch rearranging your brain. Lynch was, for a lot of people and certainly for me, one of the first directors who showed me, not just told me, but showed me that there was something to send beyond telling a story, that it wasn't just ABC. You start at the beginning, you go to the end, and everything is all wrapped up neatly. The digressions, the side alleys, the dreams, the images that were lingered on for their own sake. The dissonant use of sound, the contrarian use of music. All of these things opened my mind and I'm sure a lot of other people's minds as well.

David Furst: Well, if you'd like to join this conversation about David Lynch, give us a call. 212-433-9692, that's 212-433-WNYC, or message us on socials, @allofitwnyc. Let's hear from Joshua joining us from the Upper West Side. Welcome to All of It.

Joshua: Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my call. I teach Transcendental Meditation. I've been teaching since 2005, which is the start of the David Lynch Foundation. I feel that no conversation about David Lynch and his legacy would be complete without some discussion of his interest and passion for bringing Transcendental Meditation to at-risk groups. I work for the David Lynch Foundation as well.

David Furst: Thank you so much for adding that comment. Matt.

Matt Zeller Seitz: I was going to say good for you. I mean, that's terrific. In fact, Lynch, in an interview that he gave for Vulture about-- oh gosh, I guess it was 2018 when his memoir came out. He talked about that, and he often talked about that. The idea that whether you get at it through Transcendental Meditation or through some other means, the idea that you kind of go beyond the surface, that you go beyond your set patterns, and sort of open yourself up to the possibility of something else is really important not just for artists, but for everyone. I do believe that's true. I think that he had a really, really rare ability to access those things, to go beyond the often limiting lessons that are taught in the systematized way that we understand a film school such as it is.

He's a painter. He was a painter. He was always a painter at heart and a musician. What do non-representational painting and music and multimedia installation, what do these things all have in common? They're not necessarily linear narrative based art forms. They're about experiences, sensations, and emotions. To introduce that into a format like feature filmmaking where there's just kind of tyranny of narrative and of neatness and of explaining things, he stood in opposition to all of that, but in a gentle kind of kidding, at times, almost silly way.

David Furst: Well, David Lynch died at his home in Los Angeles, but he was born and grew up in Montana. What is important to know about where he came from, to understand him as a filmmaker?

Matt Zeller Seitz: I mean, that's literally right in the middle of the coasts. I think probably if you measured the geography of it, truly, genuinely, a middle American and also a little bit up north. It's not like he was from Missouri or something. People who come out of that world, particularly in the middle part of the century. Remember he was a kid in the '50s. That's a very, very different sensibility than you get if you say grow up in a showbiz family, multi-generational, that's based out of Hollywood, or if you're the son of a stockbroker from New York City or something like that.

He was just like an apple pie, Boy Scout type of mentality, and interestingly so was Spielberg. We think of them as being in opposition to each other, but I think they probably have more in common than we might think. Both of them were not, they were not creatures of the coast. They were not. They were not sophisticated as kids, although they later became that way. I think that made them immune to a lot of the received wisdom about what made a good movie, what made a good TV show.

David Furst: Wasn't David Lynch's final on screen appearance in a Steven Spielberg movie?

Matt Zeller Seitz: It absolutely was. He played John Ford, which I just think is so wonderful.

David Furst: In The Fabelmans.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes, in The Fabelmans. There's a John Ford. There's a direct line from John Ford to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, in some ways, is maybe the last living major practitioner of that kind of classical narrative filmmaking that was exemplified by John Ford. Even his compositional sense is similar. David Lynch is totally the opposite of them in a lot of ways, except maybe his interest in Americana to some degree, but it's just so great, the idea of David Lynch playing John Ford. I can't even think of what would be the equivalent of like maybe John Cage playing Aaron Copeland or something.

David Furst: Interesting comparison. Well, we have a question for you. We're speaking with film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, and we have a text from someone saying, "I've watched Twin Peaks multiple times over the years. I am a huge fan of David Lynch. However, I do find his treatment of women to be troubling, and I have had to suspend my disbelief over the years." What is your take on his treatment of women?

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, I don't want to speak for the entire human race here, but I would say it's complicated, and that to say that he was reductive or misogynistic or something is just not borne out by the evidence. You can't see it because this is radio, but I'm sitting in front of a bookcase. My partner and I have a bookstore called MCS Press. It's all arts books, and we have a dedicated section to David Lynch. A good number of these are not only about women, they're about feminist readings of his work. Many of them are written by women, female film scholars.

I think, at the very least, we could say that opinions differ as to that. I personally have found there are a number of people who are survivors of gender specific or sexual violence who really appreciated the way that he delved into that kind of trauma, particularly in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which was the feature film continuation of the original series. I think there's something to be said for that. I think he certainly was on a lot firmer ground than, say, Hitchcock.

David Furst: Let's take another call. Mario in Brooklyn. Welcome to All of It.

Mario: Hi, Matt. I'd like to ask you about how David Lynch used, a lot of times, a troupe of actors in the same way as Wes Anderson, and how he may have influenced many directors by using people like Laura Dern over and over again. He's used actors like Brad Dourif, Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance, and Dean Stockwell even, and how that kind of an important influence it was to have a troupe.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, I think a lot of them, a lot of filmmakers assemble what are essentially repertory companies. There are people who speak to them and that they can communicate with easily, and so they tend to work with him again and again. We mentioned John Ford. John Ford certainly had a number of people that he went back to again and again, including John Wayne. It's not unprecedented, but certainly the types of people that David Lynch chose were very much plugged into his sensibility.

There weren't a lot of cases where he used really big stars. He often seemed to gravitate towards people who were not quite big stars yet and people who were either veteran character actors or had been stars at one point or on the verge of it. He would use people like Robert Loggia, Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Jack Nance, who was mentioned, and Dean Stockwell, was a kind of a quiet MVP in the early part of his career.

It was always somebody who was a little off kilter, who didn't seem to have gotten the memo, whatever that was. Those were the people he responded to. MacLachlan and Dern, probably more than any two lead actors. It seemed like he was communicating with them on an almost molecular level. I interviewed MacLachlan a few years ago, and he said that David Lynch would direct him and say things like, "More like the wind," or, "More Elvis," or something like that.

David Furst: More Elvis. Turn up the Elvis.

Matt Zeller Seitz: He would know. Just MacLachlan would just know. He said that one of the most satisfying things that would happen when they were shooting was they would get done with a scene. While they were setting up for the next scene, he and David Lynch would go and stand next to each other side by side, and not talk and just stand that way for like a minute. He said it was really profound, peaceful feeling.

David Furst: Wow. I mean, yes, Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, actors he used a lot. I have to mention Dennis Hopper, he did not become a regular performer in David Lynch films. Maybe because the character that he played in Blue Velvet was a one and done kind of a character, but 100% revived his career.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes, absolutely. In fact, a lot of people, not just me, believe that Dennis Hopper's Academy Award nomination in 1986 for Hoosiers, well, certainly deserved, was actually a nomination for Blue Velvet, which was so scary that nobody even wanted to touch it.

David Furst: We are speaking with film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz about David Lynch, who died last Wednesday. We will continue this conversation in just a moment here on WNYC on All of It. You can join the conversation. Here's that phone number once again. 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Be right back.

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This is All of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart. We're talking about David Lynch with film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz. We're going to get to more of your phone calls and comments. Matt, I want to read this one. Someone texting in to say, "I'm 55 years old and I completely missed the David Lynch boat as I was going through my teens and early adulthood. If I wanted to take a deep dive, what would be your suggestion as a place to start?"

Matt Zeller Seitz: Well, it's funny, I've been asked that by a number of people since David Lynch passed. My impulse originally was to say Blue Velvet because that's where I really became aware of David Lynch as David Lynch, but now I've changed that. I think I would say The Elephant Man. I think The Elephant Man has all of the hallmarks that we associated with David Lynch as a stylist.

There's the dissonant sound, there's the unexpected use of music. There's the odd rhythms like he gets into and out of a scene in places you wouldn't necessarily expect. It's in black and white. It's quite frightening and confusing at times, but there's this emotional, this deeply emotional backbone of a story of a man who doesn't fit into his society because of these physical attributes of his and who is exploited but who never loses his essential goodness and is a gentle soul and trying to survive in a harsh universe. It's really, really moving.

I think people who might not necessarily enjoy some of the harder edge stuff like, say, Wild at Heart or Lost Highway, I think that's a good gateway. I also think it's appropriate for kids, like not really young kids, but like 10 or 11. It could be their first adult movie. I don't mean adult in the way that people usually mean. I mean, when I say an adult movie, I mean a movie that only adults would understand. I saw that when I was 10 or 11 and it made me realize that there was more to cinema than what I was allowed to see.

David Furst: You saw that at 10, maybe 11 years. That's what made you a film critic right there.

Matt Zeller Seitz: No, there were other ones before that, but certainly, I think that might have been my first filming exposure to surrealism, actually.

David Furst: I'll throw out another recommendation here. Someone else texting in to sa Mulholland Drive was his first David Lynch film he saw and it sold him 100%, "My favorite film of all time. I've seen almost everything else he did and now feel that I have to see the last few films that I haven't." Says, "An absolute genius on another level."

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes, well,anybody who started David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, I don't even know what to say. That's like your first drink of alcohol, it's like moonshine brewed out in the hinterlands or something. The kind where in Looney Tunes where they take the sip at the bar and the cowboy's hat flips on top of his head. I mean, that's 100% uncut David Lynch right there.

The progression is really fascinating to me, and I've written about this. Lynch, it's almost like there was like a bell curve of how responsive he was to the idea of giving people a linear narrative with relatable characters that they could latch onto. He started out very much out of the mainstream and then that Blue Velvet early Twin Peaks period, he was about as accessible as he was ever going to get.

Then after the failure of the Twin Peaks movie, I feel like with the exception of The Straight Story, which is a very sweet, it's his only G-rated movie, he moved away from that and he became more and more aggressively abstract to the point where when he did season three of Twin Peaks, people who tuned in expecting like a nostalgia fest with fan service with lots of cherry pie and coffee, boy, were they confused. They didn't even know what they were saying. The first couple of episodes, I mean, even I was going, "What the hell?"

David Furst: Well, Matt, I want to ask you a little bit more about sound and music, and Gretchen. Unfortunately, we lost Gretchen. She was calling in from Jersey City, but she was talking about watching David Lynch as a young 20-something. She says, "The music moved me in a nostalgic way." His music and composition gave her nostalgia for a time that she didn't even experience.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes, I certainly understand that. His movies were so strongly shaped by his childhood and adolescence in the '50s and early '60s. As a result, you get to a movie, particularly something like-- well, Twin Peaks is an example, but so is Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. Really, all of them, they seem to be set in this time that is no time and this place that is no place. The only time that he gets really super geographically specific in his later career is Los Angeles. He was very much a poet of Los Angeles and an interpreter of the idea of Los Angeles, but really every David Lynch production takes place in dream space.

The music, I love them. The use of music was great. I mean, I think he's right up there with Scorsese and Spike Lee among modern film directors. He's never using the music in an obvious way. The fact that he uses something like Roy Orbison's In Dreams in Blue Velvet, and he has it being performed by Dean Stockwell singing into a work lamp. Well, Dennis Hopper's character is off to the side acting like he's Squeaky Fromme and Dean Stockwell is Manson. He's crying. He's so moved by this lip syncing. There's no explanation of what this is about. You're just presented with it.

David Furst: It certainly changed our perception, changed the way we heard that song if we saw that movie from that point forward.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes, exactly. I want to lock my doors now every time I hear it.

David Furst: Oh my goodness. Well, we have a call. Tom from Staten Island also wants to talk about David Lynch and his use of music. Hey, Tom.

Tom: Yes, hello. I agree about the Roy Orbison song was very interesting. At first, Roy Orbison was somewhat confused, but then the juxtaposition of the song and the new visuals, it did reignite Roy Orbison's career, and so he did appreciate that. In the age of MTV, he gave a different twist on non-typical. I mean, you wouldn't pull that clip out of the film and make it an MTV rotation video, but it was very interesting and different.

At one point, he said something about the lyrics of In Dreams are-- you can interpret a dream a different way, and that's kind of how it was a inexplicable video. It's interesting. Like you say, Manson and Squeaky Fromme. Most people wouldn't think of that, but Lynch took apple American pie and made it a little bit surreal. Plus he had his own music and he always made an interesting soundscape for his films. It was a very important part of his films.

David Furst: Well, at the risk of forcing Matt to lock his doors, let's hear a little bit of Roy Orbison In Dreams right now.

[MUSIC - Roy Orbison: In Dreams]

Just a little bit of the great Roy Orbison right there. Since we're talking so much about the music, there's so many other things I want to get to, but I have to mention the long-standing relationship that David Lynch had with the composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Yes. The death of Angelo Badalamenti really, really hit him hard. He talked about this. That was another case where his relationships with people like Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan, there seemed to be an understanding that went beyond words. The story that he tells about the music for Twin Peaks, how he was able to essentially give Angelo Badalamenti like a handful of words. It's like a couple of nouns and a verb. Badalamenti would come back with this completed piece of music that was perfect. Lynch was like, "Okay, no notes." That's really unusual.

Again, I keep going. It's weird that I keep going back to Spielberg, but I think about the story of how Spielberg and John Williams came up with a five note theme to Close Encounters, which was, it was originally seven notes. John Williams invited him over to the house and just played seven note combinations for him. He said, "None of these are working." They said, "Well, why don't we try fewer notes? Let's do five." He just played a combination after combination of five notes until finally they got to, "Da, da, da, da, da." Spielberg said, "That's it." There's no way you can quantify that. You can't explain something like that. It's just two people that click for some reason. Lynch and Badalamente clicked. Absolutely.

David Furst: If you've never seen the clip of Badalamenti talking about the way they worked on music together. It's very, very widespread online. It's really incredible. I'll just read one more text. Someone writing in saying they saw Eraserhead at Cinema Village in 1977, "Blew me away. It was like falling asleep, having this dream, then waking up. It really impacted me." By the way, they say Montana is not in the middle of the country.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Okay.

David Furst: What else can you say? Okay. Any final thoughts? David Lynch, at this moment--

Matt Zeller Seitz: While you're playing that song that you're playing In Dreams, that little section, was that the acoustic, I think, right? Yes. Really, really touched me. Really touched me. I think coming out of Blue Velvet for the first time when I was in high school, I don't think I ever could have imagined that David Lynch would be somebody whose death would move me.

Lynch, like a lot of great American artists was a prophet without honor in his own country. There were always people here who loved him. He had a small but adoring fan base. There were people who maybe appreciated him because his name meant something, even if they didn't understand it. There should be parades in honor of him. He should have memorials. It should be the kind of thing where once they rebuild Los Angeles, the first thing they should do is have a tribute to David Lynch and let him walk down Hollywood Boulevard. It should be like he's a hero. He's an American cultural hero, the likes of which we'd never seen before and that we're never going to see again. Boy, do I hope that his legend continues to grow and that more and more people appreciate him.

David Furst: Let's finish with some music. This is Laura Palmer's Theme from Twin Peaks, composed by Angelo Badalamenti. Matt Zoller Seitz has written about David Lynch for Vulture, written about the life and the legacy of the director. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Matt Zeller Seitz: Thank you for having me.