The Darkest, Sunniest Director in America

They all talk about him the same way.

“He kind of hypnotizes you.” —Sherilyn Fenn, porcelain ideal of Lynchian beauty

“There’s nothing bigger than David. We all submit.” —Jim Belushi, new to the Lynch universe

“It just makes me smile when I get to see him.” —Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer

“He breathes through the moment, and everything is alive in that moment.” —Laura Dern, five-time collaborator who has “spent [her] life working with him.”

“I felt tremendous gratitude to be there, seeing his face.” —Kyle MacLachlan, on-screen alter ego

“He was just radiating warmth and friendliness.” —Michael Cera, who’s in Showtime’s Twin Peaks reboot with the rest of them

“You just fall into that love for him.” —Naomi Watts, returning muse

“Today is a torment,” David Lynch says, tugging melodramatically at the collar of his shirt like a kid who’s been forced to stop digging up worms and put on stiff church clothes. The flash of a neon yellow watch hidden beneath a black suit sleeve offers the sole ray of the playful, beatific sun god who’s been gushed over in brochure-worthy terms by all his friends and collaborators. Here in the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont, Lynch seems cornered, physically resisting interrogation by folding up like an insect. When Lynch is asked a question about himself, his eyes squeeze shut. He bows his head and clasps his hands, somewhere between prayer and severe pain. Not surprisingly for an auteur whose work is defined by its elliptical mystery—from early lo-fi creepfest Eraserhead to humanity-is-the-real-freak-show allegory The Elephant Man to sapphic showbiz horror Mulholland Drive to the reason he’s being tortured today, Showtime’s 18-part revival of Twin Peaks—David Lynch really hates explaining things.

What’s more, Lynch complains, he had to get all dressed up for this inquest, which meant the arduous task of emptying the stuff from the baggy khakis he wears every other day and placing that stuff into a whole new set of pockets. There’s the suit, which necessitated putting on a tie, an interloper to his strict uniform of a white dress shirt buttoned to the top. Even Lynch’s hair—a volcanic-ash cloud the musician Questlove describes as “the cool white-guy version of Bobby Brown’s Gumby with a flip”—has begun to droop from the sheer exertion of so much self-examination.

For someone who has been practicing Transcendental Meditation since 1973 and adheres to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s reported belief that “life is a festival of disruption” (even borrowing the phrase for the name of his recent two-day event at L.A.’s Ace Hotel), Lynch doesn’t seem particularly jazzed about today’s upset of the natural order. It’s clear he’d rather be anywhere else, doing the things he normally does: filmmaking or building furniture, taking photographs of burned-out warehouses or painting nude women wielding electric knives. Anything that might give him the comfort of humdrum routine. And absolute control.

Of course, anyone who’s seen Lynch’s work knows that control is just an illusion. That the safe routines of your existence can be disturbed at any time by a mysterious stranger breaking into your home, an unexplained videotape turning up on your doorstep, a severed ear discovered in a forest clearing, GQ asking you to do a photo shoot. This sudden meeting of the mundane and the macabre, often set in cheerful, terrifying daylight, is the classic “Lynchian” twist. It’s the moment when the mask of life’s banality slips to reveal the labyrinth of madness that was always just underneath, when Dennis Hopper bursts into your living room all hopped-up on amyl nitrite, screaming about shitty beer. “A kind of a honeycomb world—an underworld that exists simultaneously with the reality we see with our eyes every day,” says Twin Peaks star Ray Wise. This is the place where David Lynch’s work lives.