Hello, everyone. Your old pal Will here. If you're at all interested in the culture side of this

politics and culture podcast, you've probably been thinking a lot this past week about David Lynch,

director, writer, actor, artist, coffee merchant, transcendental meditation guru, and Eagle Scout,

Missoula, Montana.

Lynch's passing has led to a surprising unanimity of grief from seemingly every corner of my

social media feeds. For someone who made films that could be difficult and abrasive,

and which regularly dealt in transgressive subject matter, he managed to tap into a collective

unconscious and articulate certain universal truths in a way that touched many people very deeply.

Lynch has been an important figure to this podcast, and we'll have more to say about him

in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I'll observe that Lynch's small filmography feels so much larger than it is,

because every movie feels so different every time you see it.

Some movies change based on your age or where you are in life.

The issues raised by Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway definitely mean different things to me in my mid-30s than they did when I was 18.

Other movies reveal themselves over time. When Inland Empire was released in 2006, few were

prepared for how it would anticipate the tectotic shifts in how movies are distributed and moving

images are produced over the subsequent decades. Lynch's work is specific enough to have

generated the term Lynchian, but open-ended enough to be constantly shifting and evolving. His movies

are terrains for thought and feeling, still deeply rooted in his singular vision. Here's a case in

point. The notorious casting of Richard Pryor in Lost Highway.

Pryor, the greatest comedian of his generation, by then seriously ill, appears in Lost Highway for maybe a minute or two,

so little time that any viewer could only think of his debilitating multiple sclerosis.

This casting famously rubbed the writer David

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