"...and when you became denise, i told all of your colleagues -- those clown comics -- to fix their hearts or die."
it's impossible to quantify the impact david lynch has had on my life. the TWIN PEAKS obsession began at age 7 while the show originally aired (seriously!) when i overheard an adult watching it and was immediately captivated by angelo badalamenti's breathtaking music.
in another house, same age, where unlikely as it may sound TWIN PEAKS may have just been left on television in an empty room... i witnessed BOB for the first time, i witnessed BOB crawling over the the couch into the palmer living room and then he kept crawling right through the screen into THE ROOM I WAS IN and he crawled into my terrified MIND and BOB never left did he oh no no no, BOB came back many times in many nightmares for many years to come.
i never said a word about it to anyone.
years later, no doubt having run out of esoteric X-FILES apocrypha to read, i stumbled upon the internet theories about the TWIN PEAKS mythology. i learned the series ended with the cliffhanger of dale cooper being trapped in the black lodge, and that hidden in FIRE WALK WITH ME* were the seeds of the time loop that would eventually set him free -- laura palmer had seen a glimpse of the future before she died and written about it in her diary.
*i'd seen ads for the movie in the newspaper a year or two after the BOB haunting, and just like with angelo's music, my young mind was captivated by that phrase -- fire walk with me.
thanks to late night canadian television, i would get to see the movie soon enough... a beautiful, fucked-up, painful work. it would still be ages before i'd actually watch the series in full, but FIRE WALK WITH ME gave me more than enough to think about over those years -- and i maintain that starting with the movie is actually an excellent way for a newbie to begin the TWIN PEAKS journey.
a lifetime later, after the shocking return of TWIN PEAKS in 2017 -- eighteen fucking hours of pure, unfiltered lynch, answers to thirty year old mysteries, and the long overdue comeuppance for the evil BOB who haunted my childhood nightmares -- i was pondering what to name my website. considering the times we were living in i couldn't possibly come up with a more fitting title than FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE.
david lynch's gordon cole speaks what must be one of the most beautiful lines ever written to david duchovny's denise bryson in a showing of solidarity for his trans colleague. the image/gif of lynch saying it has since become iconic. i remember my eyes welling up with tears when i first heard it, and they still do just thinking about it now. i'm proud my website will carry that quote until it gets sucked into the endless purple sea of dead sites and social networks.
lynch's movies are all varying degrees of fascinating, but they never fully captured that ephemeral LYNCHOSITY the way TWIN PEAKS does. his films get dark, they get surreal, they get confusing, they get sexy, they get violent -- but TWIN PEAKS gets all of that while also capturing lynch's joy, the joy at getting to exist, getting to create, the joy that he exuded every time he opened his mouth.
there'll be nothing like it ever again, and no one like him.
2025.01.22