I believe that part of modern Filipino life today means recovering from the strangeness of pandemic times. Last week, on January 23, marked five years since the Chinese city of Wuhan imposed the world’s first lockdown of the novel coronavirus — a highly contagious and deadly disease that spread across the world, one we now conveniently call Covid or COVID-19.
On January 15, David Lynch, the inimitable filmmaker and artist, passed away at age 78 — just five days before he would have turned 79.
Lynch was all about strangeness. His 1969 short film, The Alphabet, depicts a woman reciting her A to Z’s in a hypnotic sequence of transforming landscapes and characters. His 1977 debut feature film Eraserhead centers around Henry, a reluctant father whose lizard child won’t stop crying. My personal favorite is Lynch’s ode to Los Angeles — Mulholland Drive — starring Naomi Watts as Betty, an aspiring actress who unpacks the mystery of a damsel in distress named Rita, played by Laura Harring.
“Some films are so artful at being incomprehensible, they become pregnant with meaning,” I wrote in a Letterboxd review of Mulholland Drive in August 2020, seven months into the pandemic. “A rare breed of cinema. Real life be a lot like that, though.”
In November 2020, I began to document the homes in front of my balcony — the way it sprawled along the Pasig River was fascinating to see. When my partner and I rang in the new year for 2021, fairy lights lit up the corrugated metal roofs where the fireworks shimmered. The nasally horn of budots chirped through tinny speakers in one home, heard from my balcony many feet above it.

My neighbors brimmed and pulsed with life — a setting that resembled Lynch’s American suburbia. In fact, Metro Manila is eerily similar to the industrial hellscape of Eraserhead — a film smeared in the oily debris of Manila’s smog after a long, drudgerous day. There is an epidemic of decay in this city; entire business districts littered with abandoned developments, boarded up with even more corrugated metal.
Urban living is a strange thing, which Lynch often alluded to in his work. His 2017 painting Philadelphia depicts a disfigured male (evident from the bulging groin) holding what appears to be a heart. He towers over an apartment block with a ballooning speech bubble that spells out “Philadelphia,” along with “FucKin heLL” faintly scribbled in stray, scrawny letters. Living in the city can also feel like hitting your head with a hammer — like in Lynch’s 2001 short film Head With Hammer, where a man in a suit sits across a table with a wheel whirring behind. Beside him, a propped-up hammer clicks in place as the wheel spins, hitting his temple before letting out a squeaky horn sound; his head bobbling like plastic.


“Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was… a hellhole,” Lynch said in an interview with Philadelphia Weekly in 2022. He began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1965, before dropping out in 1967; he continued living in the city until 1970, just before making Eraserhead. “It was filled with fear, and corruption, and it was filthy, there was soot on the buildings and there was a lot of kind of insanity and a feeling in the air that was very uneasy.” This environment inspired much of Lynch’s twisted sensibilities; the spectral buildings of Manila, and the derelict homes outside my balcony, bore this same irony — a symptom of the modern, urban condition.
In February 2021, a fire raged through some of the homes, affecting roughly 100 families, according to a news report. Residents alleged their houses were part of a demolition effort by a developer, who, they say, bought the land they lived in. Surely enough, the homes were torn apart one by one. Wooden scraps and concrete rubble made way for bulldozers. The heavy machinery pulverized the ground to dust, paving a road that would later connect a bridge over Pasig River.


Within a span of five months, this once lively organism decayed in real time — a melodrama that mirrored Lynch’s final moments as he suffered from emphysema, a respiratory disease that meant he could “hardly walk across a room,” according to a People’s Magazine interview in 2024. Before he died, he reportedly evacuated his home due to the Los Angeles wildfires. This mental scene is so grotesque to me that the thought he might have suffered is painful to think about. Similarly, the fact I may never know what happened to my neighbors is an injustice I’m powerless over.
But frankly, it is the most Lynchian display of our uncanny reality: One discordant memory after another in close and disturbing proximity — like in his 2017 painting of a Mickey Mouse-shaped balloon floating over a defaced figure holding a dog’s dentures, titled Billy Sings the Tune for the Death Row Shuffle, or in Blue Velvet where Frank Booth, a psychopathic drug dealer who huffs an unknown gas from a tank, is compelled and shouts, “Mommy! Baby wants to fuck!”
What Lynch has to do with modern Filipino life cannot be explained, as he was never one to do so for anything. His indelible works offer ways of seeing that are mostly felt, not articulated. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense,” Lynch told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. Modern life can be a nightmare that is hard to shake off, and it will continue to palpitate way beyond we are gone, when there are no more “beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine along the way,” as Lynch often said in his YouTube series, Weather Report.
But the incomprehensible journey — one that just makes perfect sense in nature — is what Lynch would’ve wanted us to persevere through. “I have no idea where this will lead us,” Dale Cooper tells Harry Truman in Twin Peaks, written and directed by Lynch, “but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
1946-2025
David Lynch