What are the most Lynchian items in the David Lynch auction?
David Lynch has made frequent appearances on Lit Hub over the years—my colleague Brittany wrote a touching ode to his work when he died—and now you have the chance to own some of Lynch’s things, thanks to an upcoming auction from the artist’s personal archives.
Everything is for sale: dishes, furniture, coffemaking stuff, lots of camera equipment and musical instruments and recording equipment. There are some really unique items that would be interesting if anyone owned them, like this piece of the Berlin Wall or this signed Man Ray print.
But which are the most Lynchian? That is, which have the qualities we know from his films? What objects are the moodiest, the most surreal, the most possibly haunted? A sitcom starring rabbits or a percolator that seems normal, but has a fish in it. Which auction items have that Lynchian juxtaposition of horror and quotidian, the strange, everyday object?
The items for sale related to his movies are literally Lynchian, but not in the sense we’re looking for. I guess if you put up the Twin Peaks red curtain and rug in your place it would be pretty weird, but that feels like more of a reference.
Most interesting to me are the scripts, like a second draft of Twin Peaks, still titled “Northwest Passage,” the Fire Walk With Me scripts and the script for The Straight Story, which I think is a really underrated Lynch film.
The more Lynchian scripts are the unproduced ones, like The Dream of the Bovine and another called Ronnie Rocket. Discovering a lost and unproduced script, maybe one you had a dream about—why was that cow wandering around my old high school?—is very Lynchian.
There are lots of books, though I didn’t check if his five favorites are up for auction. The books are mostly art and reference books on tons of subjects: cinema, photography, art, France, architecture, cars, medicine, science, pop psychology, Hollywood, woodworking, and more. Some of his obsessions, like Max Ernst and Transcendental Meditation, are over represented in his stacks. Nothing is jumping out as simultaneously mundane and macabre though.
There are three different lots of fiction with some good, classic titles: Kafka, Chandler, Kosinski, Nabokov, Marquez, Vonnegut, Pynchon. What stood out to me as a Caro head is his collection of the LBJ books, and I’d also love to read his notes in an advanced copy of J.I. Baker’s The Empty Glass.
One of the coolest and most unique books is this scrapbook by an actress named Madeleine Reynolds , an actress who worked for the “Federal Theatre Projects” division of FDR’s Works Progress Administration. I have to imagine this was inspiration for his “young actor who’s new in town” projects, but it looks like a cool window on working for the WPA as an artist. It’s another very Lynchian object: the ephemera of an old, forgotten artist.
I have to say some of these things are really only of value because Lynch owned them, like this homemade wheeled cabinet, which looks pretty well made but not really all that remarkable. A weird old cabinet could be a Lynchian object, sort of exuding a dark and foreboding energy into your woodshop. But I think it would be upstaged by this this old shop vac, which looks like it might turn on by itself in the night.
A friend pointed out that you could probably pick up some of these lots and be set on holiday and birthday gifts for a long time. You’d spend a lot up front on these hats or these Lost Highway prop matchbooks, but then you’d be set for years to come.
But it’s the random things, the stuff you’d just spot on a shelf somewhere, that are the most Lynchian by a mile. These “Handmade Wood Creations” have an unsettling presence and seem pulled from a dream, are very but they’re almost too obviously uncanny valley to be my top pick.
David Lynch’s dreamcatcher is also the perfect intersection of something pretty everyday but that is infused with strangeness: what dreams, what nightmares has this thing caught in Lynch’s home? Do you risk bringing them home with you?
But the most Lynchian object by far, is the “Lunchbox with Trinkets.” It’s a profoundly weird assortment of toys and other little things. What dreams and nostalgias are locked away amongst these baubles? The collection feels compiled by a kid, but the logic connecting them all seems a little out of reach. There are no easy answers here, but ultimately that’s what Lynch’s art was about. Maybe we don’t need to understand exactly what’s going on with this metal lunchbox. As Lynch reminded us, art is something you have to meet on its own terms:
The film is the thing. You work so hard to get, you know, after the ideas come, to get this thing built, all the elements to feel correct, the whole to feel correct, in this beautiful language called cinema. And the second it’s finished, people want you to change it back into words.
Happy bidding!
