The Magician

My mind is filled with memories of movie screenings. It's how my brain is organized. Small and large life events are all tied together with movies.

I can remember when I took the PSAT because I know that I took it the day after seeing Fight Club and the same day that I saw American Beauty. I can remember what year it was when all my Oregon family moved to Arizona because I saw Traffic at the Clackamas Town Center as we were cleaning out my great grandmother’s house.

Some of the best of these memories are of watching David Lynch films. Like being in middle school watching Lost Highway with friends because we heard there was nudity in it, and we got much more than we bargained for. Or in high school watching Mulholland Dr. in the limo on the way to senior prom. But the most memorable David Lynch screening was the first time I saw The Elephant Man.

Each fall in the late 90's and early 2000's, Cal State Long Beach would convert The Carpenter Performing Arts Center into a big movie theater and screen films shot in Scope. Over the years I got to see Halloween, A Shot in the Dark, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, etc. Some I had seen before. Some I had not. The Elephant Man was a first time viewing.

It was during this inaugural viewing, that the print caught and burned. Typically an event like this would be greeted by angry jeers from the audience. But as I recall, we all just waited in the dark silence. This film had us so thoroughly in its grasp that not even this unexpected delay could break its spell.

In a manner of what felt like only a few minutes, the movie was back on and we all dove seamlessly back into the sooty blacks of Victorian England. The impromptu intermission in no way lessened our emotional catharsis at the end of that film.

It takes a special magician to cast a spell that strong. David Lynch was such a magician.

In 2017 he was able to keep countless viewers, the whole world over, under his spell for the length of an entire summer. Just like that audience I saw The Elephant Man with all those years before, as Twin Peaks The Return gradually unfurled over the course of eighteen chapters, audiences just dove right back in. Week after week.

Now the magician himself is gone. But his spell will go on forever.