David Lynch, My Neighbor

When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his most indelible mark. But I mourn him as a neighbor.

I grew up down the street from David. Three doors down, to be precise. My parents owned a big blue wooden house in the Hollywood Hills, a stark contrast to David’s pink, brutalist box just up the lane. The neighborhood offered me a relatively normal childhood. There were kids to play with right around the corner. I learned to ride my bike in the street; I trick-or-treated. But I was also raised in a place organized by celebrity: by palatial homes, by immense creative success, by privacy as a hallowed virtue. After two decades in the big blue house, there were still neighbors within eyesight of my bedroom window whom I’d never met.

David wasn’t one of them. Though he ranked among the bigger names on the block, and his hermitry was legendary, he let us in. Our lives overlapped a good bit: His son Riley was in my sister Anna’s elementary-school class (they were good friends), his granddaughter Syd in mine (sworn nemeses, though we grew out of it). We went to David’s for the occasional pool party, where we kids were warned to steer clear of his workshop: the so-called Gray House, where the mad scientist conducted his experiments. He introduced my parents to transcendental meditation, a practice they maintain to this day. We attended his Christmas parties annually; he came to ours a grand total of once (in his defense, we required caroling). I knew David like I knew others in L.A.’s upper crust, as separate from his work—though, granted, I’m unsure how you introduce a child to his résumé in good conscience. To the extent that I knew him, I knew him as a neighbor.

It being Los Angeles, I mostly knew him in the car. David drove me to school a handful of times, along with Riley and Anna. Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air—he was a tallish guy with a weird voice and weird hair and a weird house, and we were certainly quieter when he was on carpool duty. He once commented as much, pulling up to school after we had spent the ride in a cramped, adolescent silence: “You kids are so quiet, I can barely think.” For all his idiosyncrasy behind the camera, David could be disarmingly plain in conversation. Another morning, he quizzed us on the rules of the road with utter sincerity: “So … if I’m putting on my right turn signal … which way do you think I’m turning?” (Anna, in perfect deadpan: “Right.”)

Once, David appeared at my family’s front door after hours, excited to share a new toy: a Scion xB, a truly hideous vehicle of which he was particularly, oddly proud. He whisked me and my parents through the neighborhood, showing off the wheeled toaster oven as though it was a Model T. Every time we hit a dead end—and there were many in our neighborhood—David would throw the thing into reverse and exclaim with delight: “Scion backing up! Scion backing up!”

As the years passed and we children learned to drive ourselves, I saw less of my neighborhood and far, far less of David. Only after leaving his orbit did I get to know his work. I didn’t become a die-hard fan, but certain creations seized my heart with a pitbull’s grip. I’ll never forget my petrifying first viewing of Mulholland Drive, during which, in a truly Lynchian turn, my friend’s little brother sleepwalked into the room and started speaking to me. My dad, also a filmmaker, was thrilled to screen Eraserhead for me one night, cackling through the baby scenes.

And then there was Twin Peaks. During my last few months living at home, my whole family gathered weekly for a profoundly un-family-friendly viewing of the third season revival, dubbed The Return. I was so infuriated after the final episode that I stalked up the hill in the dead of night and urinated on David’s retaining wall. Though I have warmed to it since, at the time I raged that The Return often felt more like a raised middle finger than a story. But part of my reaction may have also been a childish denial of the point David delivered so effectively in that finale, as Dale Cooper knocks on the door of what he’s sure must be the Palmer residence: Try though you might, you can’t go home again.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

A few years ago, my parents sold the big blue house. They had their reasons: Without kids to fill it, the space was too big; after 30 years in Los Angeles, they wanted to finally live by the beach. But beneath this was a much more practical motivation. Climate change had become undeniable, and they couldn’t shake visions of our neighborhood in flames.

It was a prescient move. Mulholland Drive—the actual street—abuts the back of David’s property and threads through the hills that bisect Los Angeles. It snakes past the entrance to Runyon Canyon, which recently caught fire about a mile away from my old house and David’s. The blaze was contained relatively quickly, thanks in part to the oasis of the Hollywood Reservoir. David evacuated, though neither his house nor the big blue one burned. Not this time, anyway.

Months before the rest of the city sealed its windows and fought to catch its breath, David was doing the same. Last year, he publicly disclosed his emphysema diagnosis. I had hoped to interview him: I reached out to Riley, asking whether David might be up for a chat on the record, neighbor to neighbor. It wasn’t to be. David’s weakened lungs made even crossing the room exhausting and COVID a grave risk, further isolating him from the outside world. I can’t remember the last time I saw David—it would have been many years ago now—but before my parents sold their place, I would visit home and picture him above me somewhere on that dark hill, shuffling through the Gray House, still tinkering.

I have always struggled with Los Angeles. Every time I go back, I confront a cocktail of familiar feelings: nostalgia, frustration at the city’s bad reputation, a sense that Hollywood’s long-dangled, covetous promise of “making it” is alive and well in me. In a lifelong attempt to make peace with one’s home, who better to turn to than a neighbor? Perhaps more than any other director, David rendered Los Angeles fairly: the glittering sprawl of the flats and the freeways, the canyons’ serpentine darkness. He understood the city’s hellish side. His films may have never depicted the place in flames, exactly, but more than one framed Hollywood as a surreal and monstrous syndicate.

Yet his love for L.A. still shone through. In Mulholland Drive’s most arresting scene, the protagonists find themselves at an otherworldly club in the middle of the night. As haunting music emanates from behind a red curtain, an emcee emerges and announces that all the sounds are prerecorded; the entire show is an illusion. But then an entrancing singer takes the stage, lip-syncing so convincingly that the audience’s disbelief is suspended all over again. It’s a tribute to my hometown as critical and unsparing as only true love can be. The whole city, this vast, thirsty project sprouting from the desert, is contrived—and no less beautiful for it.

Like all neighborhoods, mine used to be a lot wilder. When David and my parents first bought their property, about a decade apart, there were still vacant lots in the canyon, and the streets were a patchwork of homes and chaparral scrub where deer and coyotes roamed free. (One of my parents’ favorite stories from my childhood, for whatever reason, involves me nearly getting trampled by a wild buck tearing through our yard.) Years later, my dad found himself catching up with David at a graduation party for Riley and Anna’s class. One of the neighborhood’s last wild tracts had just sold, a fact Dad was bemoaning.

David was unsentimental. He was far more impressed with the element of human craftsmanship than conservation, marveling that anything, with enough ingenuity, could be sculpted from the sandstone. “Oh, yeah,” he replied with his signature squawk and an unmistakable pride, “it doesn’t matter how steep it is. They’ll figure out a way to build on it.”