Before I learned Kabbalah, I learned from David Lynch
There are many layers to our experience of reality, some hidden from view — David Lynch helped reveal them.
David Lynch stands outdoors in front of Packard vehicle in Los Angeles in 1986. Photo by Getty Images
By Jay Michaelson January 17, 2025
David Lynch taught me how to be Jewish.
That claim may seem bizarre – perhaps as strange, oracular, and inscrutable as many of the lines in Lynch’s films, music and art. After all, Lynch, who died this week at 78, wasn’t Jewish. He was a brilliant, challenging, independent filmmaker and artist, not a teacher of religion or spirituality (unless one counts Transcendental Meditation – more on that below).
But when I was a young adult, Lynch was one of my heroes. In his work, he depicted the utter strangeness of the world we inhabit, teaching me to see in new ways. Like a Kabbalist, he peeled back the layers of reality to reveal hidden worlds. He fixated on the poetry (and often absurdity) of everyday objects: a steaming radiator, a hot cup of coffee. In many ways, he taught me how to be a mystic, which is how I most like to be a Jew.
I think I first encountered Lynch through Blue Velvet, the 1986 film that, in some sense, established his reputation. Older Lynch fans knew him since 1977’s Eraserhead, his amazing, unsettling first feature, which was followed by two mixed attempts to make it as a mainstream Hollywood director, The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984). But Blue Velvet was Lynch being Lynch, with enough resources and acclaim to make a film that was entirely his own. Blue Velvet was a depiction of America as seemingly normal on the surface, but deeply, profoundly weird just underneath. Its opening shot, in which the camera zooms into and then falls through a severed ear, was (as Lynch said in interviews at the time) an invitation to look beneath surface appearances, to gaze on the darkness lying underneath.
To 15-year-old, suburban me, this was the world I inhabited. Florida in the 1980s was a place of superficiality and surface, in which everything was cleaned, polished, and air-conditioned. Yet right underneath that squeaky-clean exterior was violence, corruption, and, well, weirdness. One of our neighbors on the happy, ordinary suburban street I grew up on came home to find her husband in bed with another woman, and proceeded to shoot the both of them before jumping off the Sunshine Skyway in a failed suicide attempt. Our seemingly ordinary suburban synagogue had all kinds of scandals within it, which even 40 years later I feel uncomfortable describing. And of course, all this was built atop the very recent pasts of segregation, racism and antisemitism. Yet everyone acted like everything was normal.
Blue Velvet, and the television series Twin Peaks which came a few years later, reveled in both the normalcy and strangeness of America. When Agent Cooper, the ultra-straight-laced FBI agent sent to investigate a murder, rolls into the town of Twin Peaks, he finds not only damn fine coffee at the Double R Diner but also a woman who carries around a log that speaks to her, a soldier investigating UFOs on behalf of the government, and a pillar of the community with an extremely dark secret. (Even the name of the diner hints at the doubleness of this world, and the most wholesome girl of all, cheerleader Laura Palmer, was enmeshed in layers of criminality, sex, violence, and abuse.)
Yes, Yes, I thought at the time, this is a world I recognize.
I think that recognition paved the way for my later work in spirituality, meditation and psychedelics. Things are not what they seem to be, and even what they seem to be is, if seen clearly, somehow pervaded by mystery. (Check out the koan-like frames of Lynch’s cartoon series, The Angriest Dog in the World. Somehow even mundane words seem to ring with absurdity.) With Lynch, the numinous is only a gesture or silence away. The world is suffused by magic, and not all of that magic is benevolent.
This doesn’t mean his films were entirely intellectual or symbolic. His characters wrestled with loneliness, loss, and grief. His human monsters were terrifying, somehow evocative of archetypes that hadn’t been invented yet. And often, his films and TV were funny as hell. Perhaps Lynch’s most realized film, Mulholland Drive, twists around itself like a metaphysical ouroboros, but is also a tragic work of stirring emotional resonance.
At other times, Lynch’s uncompromising artistic vision could be simply opaque. I sat through his last proper film, the three-hour long Inland Empire, often not knowing what was going on. His 2017 return to form, Twin Peaks: The Return, fastidiously denied to provide fan service, instead taking viewers on wild tangents and incomprehensible sequences that defied any expectations of nostalgia. I always admired Lynch’s integrity; he followed his genius where it led him, even if no one else could follow what was happening.
In the last two decades, Lynch devoted much of his energy to music, shorter films, and above all, promoting Transcendental Meditation. TM is a complicated phenomenon whose double-sided nature mirrors Lynch’s art. On the one hand, its core mantra meditation practice has been shown to improve focus and reduce stress, and is now widely practiced on Wall Street, in Hollywood, and even in some schools. It does work. And its emphasis on the transcendent aspect of consciousness resonates with many spiritual traditions, including Jewish ones. On the other hand, the TM organization and mythology are as peculiar as any Lynch film, involving claims of supernatural abilities, bizarre hierarchies and rituals, and a whole lot of money going around. (To take but one example, practitioners are supposed to purchase a customized mantra for up to $980, but it was revealed in a court case that these mantras were derived by simple formulas based on the person’s age and birthday.)
Trying to make these contradictions cohere is like trying to make too much linear sense of Lynch’s films; it doesn’t hold together. In TM, as in Lynch’s films, the rational and non-rational coexist uneasily, in a kind of metaphysical tension.
I suppose, had I never encountered David Lynch’s films, I’d have found other paths to the mystery. Eventually, of course, I did. But at the right times in my life, his distinctive ways of looking askew at the world showed ways of seeing, and ways of being, that I had never before imagined. For that, I will be forever grateful.
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