John Biscello

Visionary, cinematic shaman, and iconconclastic creative force, David Lynch was one of the most profound influences and inspirations in my life, someone whose work impacted me deep in my core and could move me to tears. Truly and thoroughly one of a kind. His spirit now travels through the Black/White Lodge and beyond. Journey well, maestro.

In 2018, I wrote a review/essay about David Lynch and his memoir, Room to Dream. To put words to the page, honoring this man’s work as an artist and cinematic phenomena, made me very happy. Here is the opening paragraph from that piece:

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— Edgar Allan Poe

For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making.