David Lynch’s daily weather reports provide very useful information. Even if you don’t live in Los Angeles like he does, it’s good to know what kind of weather the filmmaker and artist is living in as he works on whatever projects he’s got on the docket. Beginning with Lynch using his June 3 report to show support for the Black Lives Matter protests, these reports are also beginning to branch out to include even more worthwhile news.
Take, for instance, an update from this weekend where Lynch marked the anniversary of the 1944 Normandy landings by sharing a dream he once had about being a German soldier who was killed on D-Day.
But before we get to that, Lynch’s video tells us about the weather. Los Angeles was, on the morning of June 6th 2020, “a chilly 61 degrees Fahrenheit, 16 Celsius” and would hopefully see its cloudy skies replaced with “golden sunshine” into the afternoon. That finished, he reminds viewers that he’s speaking on the same day when, 76 years ago, the Allies invaded Nazi-occupied France.
“I had a dream one night that I was killed in Normandy on that day,” Lynch remembers. “I was a German soldier, 16 years-old.” He goes on to describe how his “mother was so sad to see me go” and that his dream-self walked through foggy sand dunes before getting shot by an American soldier. “I dropped my rifle and grabbed my stomach, and I could feel this warm blood coming out,” he continues. “And the next thing I knew my body got very, very hot. And the next thing I knew, I was on my knees. And the next thing... lights out.”
The dream’s details are almost like a Lynch film or TV series in brief: The depths of humanity’s self-perpetuating horror is captured in dream-cloaked imagery that comes to an abrupt, nightmarish conclusion whose simplicity invites us to dwell on the complex networks of history and culture it stands in for. They’re also, more simply, a creative way to segue from delivering a weather update to memorializing a historical anniversary.
Local news anchors, take note.
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