Opinion | Kyle MacLachlan: How David Lynch invented me

No, I didn’t always understand what we were doing. Sometimes I would get a feeling for it and then it would disappear in an instant. Other times it seemed to exist on a level that I wanted to reach but couldn’t quite articulate.

But at some point I realized it didn’t matter.

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

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

That’s why he never wanted to explain his work. He wasn’t trying to be grumpy or dull. That was never David’s style. He loved connecting with people, meeting them where they were, sharing time, space or consciousness. It’s just that the explanation of his art, in retrospect, seemed to be the opposite of the actual point of its creation.

I sat next to him in interviews and on panels and could see him struggling with questions about the meaning of things. I often felt the urge to pick up the baton and talk in circles for a while until the questioner moved on.

David knew that anything he said would get his thumb on the scale. And he wanted people to be able to experience his work for themselves and take away what they wanted.

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

David didn’t quite trust the words because they captured the idea. It was a one-way channel that did not allow the receiver. And for him it was all about the receiver.

This distrust of words presented him with a unique challenge on set, as a director’s work is all about communication. With the producers, the managers, the craftsmen and of course the actors.

David got around this problem by inventing his own way of speaking to actors. I wonder if that’s why he enjoyed working with the same people – me, Laura Dern, Jack Nance, Harry Dean Stanton, Naomi Watts. We understood his secret language.

Since David and I were vaguely similar in appearance, had similar childhoods, and roots in the Northwest, I think he found it natural to channel ideas through me. Sometimes it was as if I were a creation of his mind.

I don’t just mean that Jeffrey Beaumont or Special Agent Dale Cooper were creations of David Lynch. I also mean Kyle MacLachlan. This version of me doesn’t exist without him.

As for the secret language, he gave me instructions like “more wind” or “think of Elvis.” Another time, after a take, he stood next to me and we both just looked into the distance and somehow – I can’t explain it – communicated in this quiet space. I received him. I knew what he wanted and he knew that I knew it.

How could words do justice to such an experience?

That’s why David wasn’t just a filmmaker: he was a painter, musician, sculptor and visual artist – speechless media.

When you are outside of language, you are in the realm of feeling, the unconscious, the waves. This was David’s world. Because there is room for other people – like the listeners, the audience, the other end of the line – to bring something of themselves.

What you thought was important to David too.

He didn’t want to give his actors a clear direction because he saw us as artists and knew that the process of getting there was an essential part of art. He behaved the same way with his audience. He valued you as a unique individual and made you what you wanted.

He was drawn to mystery because he understood mystery as a conversation – a collision of differences, interpretations and perspectives. Not a message sent down from an all-knowing source.

A secret goes Space for other people to get in there. It is a two-way communication.

When David was a child, his mother wouldn’t allow him to use coloring books because she thought they would kill his creativity. I think of this as the origin story of David Lynch. He was given a world without lines and set out to create his own.

It was one of the greatest joys of my life to be included in these lines.

I have long marveled at the trust David placed in me: from my first screen test in 1983, when I froze as I delivered a text directly to the camera. To hire me as the lead actor in his next film “Blue Velvet”.,, after “Dune” landed with a thud. Building a TV series around me – “Twin PeakS” – this premiered when I was 31 and not particularly well known. Accompanying me into a mysterious, windowless room in 2015 and handing me the 500-page script for Twin Peaks: The Return, in which he asked me to play three different roles, two of which were light years outside my wheelhouse .

In our work together, he entrusted me to bring these things out into the world in his spirit. To bring them to life. So I could have been his avatar on the screen. But he was also mine. He was the hovering presence on my shoulder that told me I could do it.

I was ready to follow him anywhere because I wanted to accompany him on his journey of discovery, in searching and finding together. I stepped out into the unknown knowing that David was floating out there with me.

It’s like Agent Cooper says to Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks.: “I have no idea where this will take us, but I definitely have a feeling it will be both a wonderful and strange place.”

I will miss my dear friend. He has made my world – all of our worlds – both wonderful and strange.

Kyle MacLachlan is an actor. He appeared in five David Lynch projects: “Dune”; “Blue Velvet”; the ABC series “Twin Peaks”; his previous film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”; and Showtime’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

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