As I sit here frozen, trying to put words to all that I feel about David Lynch on his birthday, I keep thinking that it’s too soon — too soon to express what I’m feeling, all while heartbreak surrounds us in our city right now.
Too soon to navigate through this grief or to sum up art’s greatest dreamer, as well as my dearest friend. As I think about how he lived, by truly diving into the unconscious, I reflect on his book “Catching the Big Fish” and how he wrote that catching ideas was like fishing. The extraordinary Isabella Rossellini (who I share in this life, thanks to David) recently reminded me that David always considered ideas like fragments that come to us and that by trusting them, we follow those ideas “like a seed.” So today, David, on your birthday, I will write you a love letter of fragments. Like meditation, I will remember our story by allowing all the delicious, awe-filled moments to float in, and I will try to reach toward them.
You leave us amid utter brokenness in our city, our beloved Los Angeles, the place we both called home. I know you were worried for everyone’s heartbreak and loss, and yet still, like your films, while horror is happening, you always believed in the light and the goodness in people and held hope for our city and all those who live here. It somehow doesn’t shock me that gratitude and despair are so closely aligned at this moment for our city and our loss of you — a genius who gave us not only some of our most iconic imagery and impacted our dreams but also forever wove Los Angeles into them.
Artistically, I found my person in you. Well, you found me. At age 17, I walked into a casting office in 1985 to meet you for “Blue Velvet.” You were the most unique and light-filled person I had ever seen. And you instantly felt like my family. We had a conversation that included topics as varied as “The Wizard of Oz,” Bob’s Big Boy, turkey sandwiches on white bread, transcendental meditation (which you guided me to, as you have done for so many around the world) and then, of course, we discussed our shared love of Los Angeles.
I was raised about two blocks from where you lived at the time, near Tail o’ the Pup. We often shared memories of magical places that held deep stories for us: Du-par’s, the Beverly Hills Amusement Park, the Doheny Mansion (the American Film Institute’s former home), where you created “Eraserhead.” We talked about Chasen’s, where we had both seen Jimmy Stewart; Marie Callender’s; the Hollywood Bowl; driving on Mulholland Drive and cruising Ventura Boulevard; old Hollywood studio lots and Musso & Frank and the Beverly Hills Hotel coffee shop; Norm’s; Hollywood Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills; and fishing at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. When you chose to cast me, I quickly traded college for following you to the ends of the Earth. I never looked back. This is when my soul’s education began.
Dern and Lynch on the set of “Wild at Heart,” released in 1990.
(AMPAS)
I had been raised by actors, bearing witness to collaborations that I watched my parents find. It was in those friendships, with a language understood only by them and their maestros, that had me fall in love with acting as a dream profession. When I met you, I knew I had found mine. I just never imagined when I was a teenager that I would be so blessed to spend all these years shapeshifting and growing, directed by your guidance on the life ride of art. You gave me an opportunity to explore every aspect of the female psyche, to play out archetypes and then shatter any former understanding of them. You pushed me toward fearlessness. You brought me to haunted spaces of terror, also holy ones, and you even helped me find the hilarious in tragedy. You made me believe in all that is good in our country and fear all that lies beneath.
On “Blue Velvet,” you took me and Kyle MacLachlan under your wing and treated us as essential collaborators. Your deep inclusion of us as partners and peers profoundly shaped us both. You believed in the ritual of art and the grace that deserves to be given to it. My first memory of this was a warm wind floating over us on a Wilmington, N.C., summer night where you played Shostakovich while we filmed so we could understand the feeling of mystery you longed for. You and Kyle introduced me to the chicken walk.
As we sat together in Sandy’s childhood bedroom on “Blue Velvet” and you demanded perfect quiet to honor an emotional moment because you were happy with the take, you looked at me with such love and said, “Beautiful, Tidbit.” And I asked you, “Why did you call me Tidbit?”
And you said, “Because you’re a tidbit — a little bit of tid.” And I agreed: “Then that makes two of us.”
You taught me about using music as a muse and took me to a Texas sunset in the desert, where Nicolas Cage and I exploded to Powermad’s speed metal song “Slaughterhouse,” which then transitioned into love bursting open with Richard Strauss’ “Im Abendrot.”
I remember sitting with you in that hotel bar in downtown L.A. on “Twin Peaks: The Return.” We were about to shoot a moment where my character, Diane, was pulled toward a room upstairs, where she would express her story in monologue and experience deep horror. What struck me with such awe, as I sat, cigarette in hand, was how much you cared about Diane’s journey — how much you loved her and were willing to stay with her. I expected you to cut straight to the hotel room, but no.
“We will be with you every step of the way,” you whispered. “We will be at the bar. We will go to the elevator. And we will travel with you up to the 11th floor while you walk down the hall to that door. You can’t make the decision until you’ve made it and we will be there ready for you, whenever it feels true.” The respect for character, the magic you brought to the story and the truth that you demanded we find in even the most extreme or absurd places opened my eyes, not to the surreal or even unique individualism in your art but to your humanism.
I remember staring at you with your yellow legal pad in a Paris hotel lobby while we drank cappuccinos and you wrote that four-page monologue for my character in “Inland Empire.” Then we ran down to the Monoprix to find the perfect shade of red lipstick. No one has taught me more about lipstick shades than you. You actually mixed colors together to create a color of a yellow lip for “Twin Peaks.” (You were shocked it hadn’t existed before.) You cared so much to take 15 minutes to get a character’s lip color just right. You would repaint a hallway just so it was perfect for a moment. And when I say repaint, I mean you, yourself, with a paintbrush.
So back to the red lips of “Inland Empire” and us filming. Just you and me and a Sony PD150. An experience I will treasure forever. We finished the scene and felt so happy. Proud of myself, I sat down to enjoy a treat: the macaron on the bedside table that housekeeping must have left in the room we were filming in. As this pink delicacy was halfway down my gullet, you screamed out, “Tidbit, that’s the prop! We still need to shoot a closeup from another angle.” After that, you always said, “You gotta watch that Tidbit. She eats the props.”
You’d been teaching me more and more over the years to swim in the unknown, like when my character arrives at the burlesque club and you wanted me to walk in this empty room and watch a woman pole-dance. You placed a screwdriver in my hand, and said, “Rolling!” And I whispered to you, “One quick thing — why am I holding a screwdriver?” And you said, “Stop asking so many questions.”
“Tidbit, keep still while I do your makeup,” you once told me. “But David,” I asked, “why black tempera paint? Not just on my face but in my ears and nose?” And you said, “You need to look really dirty.”
And then, as you escorted me to Hollywood and Vine in the middle of the night, you proudly let me know you’d scrubbed the sidewalk stars that I would lie on with bleach and said, “Now get down there.” Then you said, “Just promise me on the next movie you’ll shave your head. I need you bald.”
You were always the kindest inventor, always listening, always excited. Every day was of equal value. If we lost a location, you would start building a new set to use. If the weather was a problem, you would say, “Even better.” Everything to you was some universal conspiracy to make the art that much more true. My mother (Diane Ladd, whom you gave me the luxury of acting alongside) reminded me the other day, “David wasn’t just kind. He never seemed angry. And he never cursed — ever. He just made us do it in his movies all the time.”
I’ve had the privilege of watching your incredible children grow up, and you have loved and embraced mine. I remember when my Ellery was 4 and he found a penny on the road and asked me why David Lynch was on the penny. And when I explained that was Abraham Lincoln, he only called you Abraham Lincoln throughout his childhood.
Through you, I’ve learned what it means to be loved without judgment, just pure acceptance. You have forever transformed all of art, be it film or music or painting or cartoons or giving the weather report — all of it became a space for dreaming. All of it brought you equal joy and creative bliss and was led in the moment by deep instinct and creative consciousness. You made art every day because you had to. You meditated every day as a dedicated act of service. You lived in gratitude and grace. You never knew bitterness. In life, you always felt lucky.
I remember walking offstage linked arm and arm with you at the Governors Awards where you had just received your honorary Oscar. I looked at you and said, “Tidbit, you just won an Academy Award.” And you said, “But they aren’t my ideas, I’m just lucky to catch them.”
What a miraculous journey you continue to unfold for me. I love that when you left, you were planning your next great adventure. I will miss and love you for the rest of my life.
Dern is an Oscar-winning actor and the star of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart” and “Inland Empire.”