How to describe David Lynch? Is he a genius filmmaker? An iconoclastic multimedia artist? The dude who fumbled Isabella Rossellini? Well, I have another question: if the so-called David Lynch is truly such a brilliant maverick of cinema, why won’t he face me like a man and fight me?
That’s right, David Lynch, I’m calling you out as both a writer-director whose works have debatable artistic merit and as a lily-livered coward with admittedly great hair who is afraid to face me and my fists. You can’t pretend that there isn’t a connection between your reputation as one of the most singular cinematic voices of your generation and your press agent Naomi not calling me back when I gave a list of dates and locations where I would kick your Eagle Scout ass.
It took six years for ‘Eraserhead’ to get made, Lynch. How come it takes just as long for Naomi to return a voicemail?
Maybe you think it’s me, Davey Boy. Maybe you think I won’t use my hands, feet, elbows, and teeth to take down a giant of American film, just out of respect. Trying asking Marty Scorsese how that worked out for him. He’s currently eating gelato through a straw, which is admittedly not that hard.
No, this is all on you, Lynch. Despite your ability to simultaneously work in the mediums of film, painting, industrial music, and mediocre whole-bean coffee, you’re afraid. You don’t have the Bob’s Big Boys to strip down to the waist, put on one of my custom-made celebrity auteur fight mixtapes, and face me.
Some modern master of dream imagery and noted practitioner of Transcendental Meditation! What’s that, David? You’re trying to catch the big fish of your mind in pursuit of profound meaning in your own depths?
Well, trying catching these hands, motherfucker.
You’d think being able to heartbreakingly capture the humanity and sensitivity of the Elephant Man would make you able to face some hard realities, like how you’re going to get your butt kicked when I catch you out in the streets. As if. You can’t even get his name right!
His name was Joseph Merrick. Not John, you insensitive Army brat.
And if you can revolutionize modern television by creating a complex, genre-defying work like ‘Twin Peaks,’ how come you can’t come to the empty lot behind the Ralphs in Glendale and bring the fucking noise? Is it that Mark Frost had all the guts in your long and fruitful artistic collaboration? Because that dude has a wicked left hook, and he doesn’t give a shit.
I’ll put it to you plain, Lynch. You fucked up adapting ‘Dune,’ you couldn’t get Netflix to buy ‘Snootworld,’ and using low-res digital video to shoot ‘Inland Empire’ may have had financial advantages and created an eerie sense of unreality in an already disjointed and fragmented nightmare narrative, but it straight-up looked terrible.
David Lynch, if you don’t fight me, you are acknowledging before Hollywood, the ‘Blank Check’ podcast, and the entire world that you don’t have what it takes to put me in my place. I’ll be waiting for you whenever you grow a pair.
And don’t think you can send Kyle MacLachlan in your place, either. I respect him too much to beat his ass.