On January 16, 2025, the baseball community lost the beloved figure of Robert “Bob” George Uecker, a one-time fringe baseball player turned colorful broadcaster and actor. Uecker died ten days away from his 91^st birthday. When I heard the news, I probably let out a sound like “aww.” A brief utterance of disappointment, but also a recognition of the inevitable. Uecker was 90. He had lung cancer. We all knew this was happening sooner rather than later.

A few hours later the news regarding the passing of David Lynch broke. Lynch was also mere days away from a birthday, what would have been his 79^th. We also knew he was sick, with him announcing in August of 2024 that he was essentially confined to his home due to emphysema. His lifelong love affair with tobacco resulted in a finality that his artistic output rejected. We would not be left to contemplate Lynch’s fate in a stew of abstract uncertainty. This ambiguity made me love his work. He refused to speak to the meaning of his art, and I admire this. There is so much in life that we never get answers to. Why should a film or a TV series have to answer every question it conjures in our minds?

My reaction to Lynch’s death was much more visceral that my admittedly flippant response to Uecker’s demise. I took all my Lynch Blu-rays off the shelf and admired them. I cried quite a bit. I looked around in silence at my apartment, my personal space I chose to decorate like Twin Peaks’s nexus of evil: the Black Lodge. You might think such devotion to a TV show to be ridiculous, to be what the kids call cringe. You are probably right. I would counter that I have had at least three strangers I have hooked with in this apartment compliment the décor, fully understanding the reference. That’s right, three. I’m clearly crushing it over here.

_{I wake up here every day.}

The difference between my reactions on January 16^th speaks to the power of uncompromising art. Bob Uecker could get a chuckle out of me. Everyone loves his performance in the movie Major League. During the baseball season I usually fall asleep to a West Coast game’s radio broadcast. Therefore, I have my own internalized hierarchy of baseball radio booths. The Brewers’s booth with Uecker was near the top of that totem pole. His voice was familiar, a source of comfort before passing from the waking world to the realm of dreams.

David Lynch operated in the space of dreams. No other filmmaker utilized as effectively the absurdity and beauty of dream logic in a visual medium. Mulholland Drive could be considered the crowning achievement of his efforts in this regard, that is until he blew away that monumental triumph with one even greater, Twin Peaks: The Return.

Twin Peaks: The Return is perhaps the purest distillation of Lynch’s artistic worldview. A complete rejection of the stagnant cultural landscape we currently find ourselves in. Everyone complains about remakes, reboots, and sequels taking up space in our megaplexes and on our streaming services. The Return recognized that among all this complaining, fans of the original show wanted more. They wanted answers. Lynch heard these calls at the end of the show’s original run and answered them in the only way he could in 1992, the byzantine and ethereal prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Did fans really expect him to play a different hand in 2017?

If they did, what’s wrong with them? Are they paying attention to anything? Lynch was not going to give any definitive answers to any of the mysteries in the Twin Peaks story. The mysteries are dreams. They are not cryptographic messages in need of a decoder ring. They are that scene you wake up from where your friend’s dad is banging on your door demanding to use your stove. These vignettes of slumber feel like they should have meaning, and maybe they do, but we have to sit with ourselves to find it. We must look inward and question our own consciousness.

Lynch managed to continue his artistic passion for enigmas and transience while also sharply critiquing the state of television in 2017. The Return has all the sheen of prestige TV but with none of the tidy storytelling. Characters enter the narrative and disappear without resolution. You will never know what became of that woman with the rash. Just like how your friend’s dad at the door became your 5^th grade teacher later in the dream. Nothing gets resolved in this world, the scene only changes. It moves on.

I am currently watching the TV series Severance. I enjoy its Lynchian qualities and I’m always a sucker for a good mystery. However, I recently made the mistake of visiting the subreddit dedicated to the show. It is full of fans making the same usual mistakes. Everyone has a theory. Everyone has a solution to the mystery. Every peculiarity and oddity the show displays must be part of some larger whole, factors in a grand equation that will yield a definitive answer.

Maybe Severance will wrap up everything in a nice and neat package, as sterile and off-putting as its Backrooms-esque setting. If it does, it will not linger in my mind the way something like Lost Highway or Eraserhead does. I will not be left contemplating the meaning of its people in animal costumes the way I think about The Lady in the Radiator every few days.

Bob Uecker was primarily a play-by-play baseball radio announcer. Every game he called had an ending. One team walked off the field as the victor, the other team the loser. A land of absolutes. David Lynch played in the field of uncertainty. A place where art does not seek to tell us what was right, what was good, but instead forces us to ask what our personal definitions of those very concepts are. We lost a funny and comforting voice in Uecker. We lost a challenging and inspiring voice in Lynch. Apologies to Bob Uecker, but I howl a bit louder for the latter.