On June 18, five months after David Lynch’s death, Julien’s Auctions will hold a live auction in Gardena, California, of an eclectic and intimate assortment of the late director’s tools, furniture, and memorabilia. The auction, which is already open to bidders, includes nearly 450 objects from the David Lynch Collection, ranging from his personalized director’s chair ($30,000; all prices reflect the highest bid at the time of reporting) to an unopened EcoloBlue Atmospheric Water Generator ($300).
Much like the desire to own Lynch’s items, the public’s hunger to understand and ascertain the artist is ravenous. Fortunately, there’s enough of him to go around. As the New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman wrote following the director’s death from complications related to emphysema: “Lynch wasn’t a secretive artist: he spoke happily and at length about his work.... Although he may have been mysterious, Lynch wasn’t elusive.” Lynch’s work has entranced, compelled, and challenged me all of my life. His collection hardly offers closure, but it does provide a glimpse inside the life he led in his three-house Hollywood Hills compound.
Many of the objects included in the auction are the stuff of fans’ dreams: the script ($10,000) for the Twin Peaks pilot labeled with its original title, “Northwest Passage”; three scripts ($15,000) for Mulholland Drive, including one annotated by Lynch’s ex-wife and frequent collaborator Mary Sweeney; prop menus for Winkie’s ($4,000), a diner and the site of the scariest scene in Mulholland Drive. Want to enter your own personal Red Room? A Twin Peaks Black Lodge–style red curtain and zig-zag rug ($15,000) can be yours—as long as you don’t mind stains. Fans of Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a film Lynch famously abandoned after losing control over the film’s final cut, may seek to answer the call of the movie’s production-office vintage telephone ($2,750). The auction’s most direct hit of pure Lynchian strangeness and humor is “Socks for ‘Bobby’” ($600). Per the catalog: “Presumably, these are socks either worn or were considered to be worn by Dana Ashbrook as he reprised his role as Bobby Briggs in Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Lovers of Lynch’s prodigious music output will admire the many guitars for sale. There’s the Epiphone Emperor hollowbody electric guitar ($10,000), which Twin Peaks heartthrob James Hurley (James Marshall) uses to play “Just You and I” in a scene from The Return. But the Danny Ferrington custom five-neck console guitar ($7,000) offers more mystique; the catalog entry includes a quote from Lynch: “I taught myself and I play upside down and backwards, like a lap guitar.” This is followed by the auction house’s prudent disclaimer: “While studio footage of David is scarce, it’s conceivable that he played this five-necked Ferrington in a similar manner.” Either way, I’m sold.
Some lots in the auction are almost too personal—a pillaging of the nooks of Lynch’s private life and upbringing. There’s a monogram ($1,750) of Lynch’s initials adorned with nude women—made by his childhood hero and mentor Bushnell Keeler—which contains an adolescent prurience. Lynch’s childhood copy of I Will Build My Church ($1,750), with the director’s little-boy handwriting inside the cover. Same with his father’s outdoor-related gear ($1,000), a selection of items belonging to Lynch’s late father, or the collection of Transcendental Meditation items ($6,000) that were presumably part of Lynch’s mindfulness practice. As a lifelong Lynch devotee, I both covet these items and am somehow embarrassed by their intimacy. (Learning that the famously coffee-loving Lynch owned a Keurig [$600] somewhat punctured his image.)
I currently pay preschool tuition, so I won’t be able to bid. It’s hard to picture the current lowest-bid objects—power tools ($500), home electronics ($350), or a copy of Freakonomics ($600, in addition to other titles)—in my two-bedroom apartment. If we had the cash, my partner and I say that we’d go for Lynch’s fog machine ($2,000), which contains “a 1 gallon jug of Party Fog Liquid...majority of liquid still present inside.”
Thanks to Lynch, I have become preoccupied with Los Angeles. Shortly after moving to the city in 2009, I briefly met the man himself, at an art opening, on a first date that would turn into my first marriage. Loving Lynch is special, but it is not unique—something that has never been clearer than in the many memorials following Lynch’s death, at 78. Today, his grave at Hollywood Forever is completely covered in tributes—flowers, cigarettes, Coke cans. On my first visit last month, I laid down a lily and spent some time in quiet thought; I recently learned Transcendental Meditation thanks to a scholarship from the David Lynch Foundation. Then I drove across town to get a tattoo of Laura Palmer’s hands on my bicep. It is my first tattoo that I didn’t design, but the first I share with others, which feels right.•
Lisa Locascio Nighthawk is the chair of the Antioch MFA and the executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times, and Electric Literature. Her first novel, Open Me, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. She writes a newsletter called Not Knowing How.
