The first anniversary of David Lynch's death was two days ago. One of the more magical parts of being a human is experiencing art made by a stranger that feels like the dreams you have but can't describe. Or what was scribbled in the journal you kept when you were thirteen and lived on a culdesac.
In July of last year I moved back to the suburb I'm from. I haven't lived here in 20 years. The first few days after I moved had an amber haze over them. I got in my car and went south, and it was if my car was driving itself past all the places I knew so well - that I remembered in some lizard part of my brain. I wondered if this is what it feels like when birds and butterflies migrate, you just go and you wind up where you need to be. The path is rooted in deeper than any lost memory could touch. And things are different, of course. The Blockbuster is a vape shop, the mall with the movie theatre was demolished in 2017, there is an IKEA nestled on the side of the highway. My childhood did not have the fog of nostalgia drifting across it, high school was not the peak of life for me. But still I was happy in some kind of way in 2005, driving down Carrier Parkway in my little green Ford Ranger listening to Thursday and AFI, feeling free as any teenager ever did.
I never thought much about suburbia until I read the play A Cheever Evening by AR Gurney when I was in college. I should read it again and see if I still like it the same. I'm sure someone has written about it, but I always felt like Mad Men and Draper's double life as family man and ad man had to be inspired by John Cheever's work. Does he romanticize the suburbs? Did David Lynch? Do I? Why is it when I watch Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet I feel this ache behind my eyes? The shot of the ceiling fan in Laura Palmer's house felt like a portal to teenage me draped halfway off my bed, starting at my own cream-colored ceiling fan, listening to the radio, thinking about death. Or how the parking lot at the Denny's always had a crackling weird energy at 2am when me and my friends would go get coffee and mozzarella sticks. Being at the park late at night, far into the woods where there was an old pony corral, listening to the shots from the neighboring gun range. My city is old in the north and young in the south. The roller rink and bowling alley and those motels with neon signs in the northern industrial area never made me afraid, but I knew behind closed doors things were happening I didn't need to know about. And the countless hours I spent sitting on a curb in a subdivision watching the boy I liked skateboard, my flat ironed hair curling in the humidity.
I see shades of all of that in Twin Peaks. The wall between the collective dream of the suburbs and the collective madness that can wind through it is bone thin. What does it mean to grow up in a town built to be a liminal space - half an hour to the big city, even less to wide open pastures? I still don't know, only that it is familiar in the way running your finger over the old scar from when that dog bit you is familiar. David knew, I think.
