The Weekender: David Lynch, missed connections, and Nosferatu’s Romanticism
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
This week, we’re remembering David Lynch, lying about recipes, and kissing too many people at parties.
IN MEMORIAM
Lynchian moment
Substackers across the platform reacted to the news of David Lynch’s death, at age 78, with an outpouring of love for his work. In this post, Phil Christman considers a classic moment from Twin Peaks, in which a straightforward showdown between two TV archetypes is turned on its head.
On a Moment That Shouldn’t Work
—
inAlbert’s speech to Truman makes no sense. Nothing we have seen him do before prepares us for it. It is comprehensively unearned. And it doesn’t really resolve their conflict: Albert is a little nicer afterward, but he does not really, precisely apologize to Truman, even though he definitely should. Any screenwriting teacher would tell you to take it out and make the characters work their way up to it. Any literary critic would. And I don’t just mean that some plodding mediocrity like that “rescue the cat” guy would find this scene objectionable on paper—Aristotle would tell you to take this out. The lump that forms in my throat every time I watch this clip makes no sense. The tears that well up in my eyes when I think about it, which I do often, flout the laws of dramatic math. If I were to get a tattoo, it would be these lines, which exist in defiance of everything we know about storytelling.
Why does it work? If you have ever seen Twin Peaks, you know that it does work. People’s attachment to this moment is fierce; I am anything but an outlier among Twin Peaks watchers in feeling a religious awe toward it. After the fact, I can sort of account for why it works, in the same way that a theologian can make sense of a miracle but would never anticipate it. Twin Peaks is a thoroughly mystical show that takes place in a mystical world—David Lynch had to get something from all that meditation. And so the idea of a startling irruption of grace, powerful because neither Albert nor Harry has earned it, makes sense in the show’s spiritual economy. Impossible evil, impossible decency, and impossible weirdness all abound, and David Lynch never tries to resolve them into some overarching mythology, though co-creator Mark Frost does, which creates an endearing tension.
PAINTING
CORRESPONDENCE
I promise that your future correspondence will be returned to you unopened
—
inI would rather read an unwritten novel by you than a written one by almost anybody else. I keep trying to discover what it is (what mysterious thing) that elevates writing to the level where combustion takes place, and I guess it is simply that in writing there has to be an escape of gases or vapors from the center—Core Gas, that is. And even this explanation is unreliable, because God knows there was always gas escaping from Hemingway but a lot of the time it reminded me of the farting of an old horse. This mystery is not going to get solved in a hurry.
E. B. White
Letter to John Updike
12th January 1962
—Letters of E. B. White
ART
FRESH START
Pantry adventures
Heather Havrilesky has embraced healthy living in January with gusto—possibly too much gusto. Here, she manages to turn a failed grocery run into a successful dinner, thanks to her “sober brain, which runs as smoothly and efficiently as an integrated circuit—as opposed to, say, an ancient subterranean sewage system, sluggish and stinky and prone to catastrophic failures.”
Dry
—
inWhen it was time to make dinner, I discovered that I had purchased a completely random assortment of groceries that didn’t form an obvious meal. I thought we already had black beans and cheddar cheese and salsa. We did not. We only had flour tortillas and two cans of chickpeas, plus an onion and some old carrots and a few stalks of celery.
I didn’t panic. I started by cubing up a butternut squash I had purchased and roasting it. Who doesn’t like roasted squash? I thought. I diced up the onions, carrots, and celery and cooked them in olive oil. All good meals start here, I thought. I added chickpeas. These are exactly like black beans. The same exact thing. There was some feta in the fridge. Everyone likes tacos. Literally no human dislikes a taco.
My chickpeas were very bland. They were nothing like black beans. So I added vegetable broth. I added red pepper. I shook in some habanero sauce. Still too flat. I added tomato paste. Better but not great. Finally, I broke out the random refrigerated bottle of cilantro chutney I’d purchased earlier, and added about three tablespoons, maybe four.
PERFECT.
As I transferred the brown mush into a serving bowl, I thought, “I’d better tell them this is some kind of Indian-Mexican fusion recipe I found online, or else everyone will hate it.”
Sure enough, my younger daughter sat down at the table and looked skeptically at the tortillas, the pale mush, the squash, the feta.
“Did you make this up?” she asked.
“No, it’s a recipe,” I replied without hesitation.
“Where did you get it?”
“I found it online.”
“Oh!”
“Yeah, they’re called Dubai tacos.”
“Dubai tacos,” my older daughter said, spreading chickpeas on a tortilla.
My younger daughter took a bite. “This is really good,” she said.
“Dubai tacos,” Bill said, “Wow.”
That’s when I realized that I meant to say Mumbai tacos. But Dubai was even better. Less crowded trains, more shiny skyscrapers. Who knows what kind of tacos they serve in Dubai? Literally no one has any idea.
That’s excellence. The sober microchip inside my head produced a beautiful lie, and the next thing you know, three humans go from eating canned bean mush to discovering the delights of fusion cuisine from the Arabian peninsula.
PHOTOGRAPHY
DATING
Missed connection
August Lamm opens an in-depth recounting of every romantic encounter she’s had in the new year with a story of startling eye contact, self-doubt, and errant vegetables.
Casual dating
—
inI was walking past a coffee shop when I noticed a man sitting at a table by the window, writing in a notebook. He looked up. Our eyes met. We stared at each other for a long moment: a rare instance of animal connection in this frigid prison of civility known as a British sidewalk. In other words: it was hot. But what could I do? I continued walking, my thoughts growing frantic. Should I go back and talk to him? Is that insane? I decided to stop at a grocery store, just to have something in my hands when I inevitably returned to the window. That way, I would look as if I’d been out running errands, not pursuing strangers. I bought my groceries and walked past the window again. Our eyes met, the intensity magnified by my unexpected reappearance, our connection so obvious, so mutual, that I almost thought he would step out of the cafe and come running after me. He didn’t. I got to the end of the block. I looked back. What was I doing? I was late for an appointment. I checked the time. It was 2 p.m. on a Sunday. I would need to return to this spot every Sunday afternoon for the rest of my life. I boarded a bus. I briefly considered calling the cafe and asking them to give my number to the man by the window. A half hour passed in transit. Surely he had left the cafe by now. Why hadn’t I just gone in and said hi? The bus reached my stop. When I stood up, I dropped a zucchini on the floor and its stem fell off like a little hat.
OIL PAINTING
POETRY
A poem by Isabelle Correa
ACRYLIC
FILM
Gothic romance
Viv Chen explores the origins and influences of the new Nosferatu’s visual style, from its “bruise-colored palette” to the artistic movements that inspired its cinematography.
Why does Nosferatu look like a German Romantic painting?
—
inWhile the film’s most apparent stylistic influence is all things Gothic, I was struck by the subtler nods to the visual (and philosophical) codes of the German Romantic movement.
[...]
OK, brief art history lesson.
The German Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th century was a revolt against the values of capitalist industrialization, manifested through artistic mediums like poetry, music, and painting. It was a reaction to the European Enlightenment, which ushered in a new world order that prized rationality and logic.
You could think of it as the original anti-STEM movement.
The “romantic” in Romanticism doesn’t refer to love, but rather the condition of being prone to emotional intensity and chaos. Of standing on a cliff with crashing waves, overcome with the awe and fear of the elusive sublime. If Beethoven’s later life works were the sound of Romanticism—stirring “mists of terror, of grief,” then Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings are its visual embodiment.
As I watched Nosferatu, I kept thinking—this looks exactly like a Friedrich painting.
Indeed, [director Robert] Eggers mentions in an interview that he looked at Friedrich’s paintings as mood-board inspiration.
I argue that Nosferatu uses the visual language of German Romanticism to convey the movement’s values to a contemporary audience. This is the message I took away from the film:
A society ruled by rationality and industrial progress (ahem, AI and climate change) is at risk of self-destruction, as it fails to value the mystical, the folk traditions, and the deep cultural wisdom that technology cannot convey.
PHOTOGRAPHY
FOOD
A “mulligatawny-adjacent winter warmer”
This video of Nick Curtola making a chicken and lentil stew is almost as comforting to watch as it is to eat.
Chicken and Lentil Stew
—
inI was having a bit of a creative block this week that turned into me frantically trying to decide what to cook. This time of year is always a bit tricky, and although there are plenty of fun ingredients to play with, it’s tough to get motivated given the shorter days and the bone-chilling weather. The fun and excitement of the holidays are behind us, and the immediate threat of winter is all of a sudden clearly apparent.
Seeing my inability to decide on a recipe to flesh out, one of my sous chefs gently suggested mulligatawny, which I had admittedly never had … or made. But in doing a bit of research, I found this dish to be exactly what I was searching for. With all that’s going on in the world right now, the dish of the moment is undoubtedly comfort food. So without further ado, here is my rendition of a lovely stew that should start you off on the right foot in 2025.
Also, don’t be intimidated by the length of the ingredient list. You’ll have most of this stuff in your pantry, and a lot of it can be omitted or substituted. I’ll give some suggestions below.
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography:
, , , , , ,Video & Audio:
Writing:
, , , , ,
Recently launched
Inspired by the writers featured in the Weekender? Creating your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
Such a wealth of talent in the world. It's gratifying and humbling.
I cannot help myself. The fresco is fabulous!