Lynchpins | George Evans

The Unrealized Projects of David Lynch

… are twenty-eight in total according to Wikipedia. 

For those keeping count at home, that’s nearly more than on Lynch’s finished projects page, it’s definitely more projects than most directors make in a lifetime, and for many of Lynch’s ardent fans, it’s far, far too many lost opportunities. 

Some of Lynch’s greatest never-gems include: 

• Antelope Don’t Run No More: “a story set in Los Angeles [that] features space aliens, talking animals, and a beleaguered musician named Pinky.”

• Snootworld: “An animated fairytale.”

• Woodcutters from Fiery Ships:  A video game from 1998, which Lynch described by saying “Certain events have happened in a bungalow which is behind another in Los Angeles. And then suddenly the woodcutters arrive and they take the man who we think has witnessed these events, and their ship is… uh, silver, like a ’30s kind of ship, and the fuel is logs. And they smoke pipes.” 

• The Metamorphosis: Yes. That Metamorphosis.

I’m very sad The Metamorphosis is trapped forever in the ether, but the greatest of Lynch’s incomplete works is Wodcutters from Fiery Ships. The game was scrapped in 1999 over “concerns that its “conundrum”–like story would be uninteresting to computer game players.” But 1999 was six years after the impenetrable conundrum Myst made waves in the video game world. The idea that Lynch’s game would turn players off because it was… confusing? sounds like putting lipstick on some executive’s swinish kiss of death. 

Looking over his incomplete work now in the shadow of his passing, I see why Lynch is regarded as a master.  

When projects this close to completion, this funny, this wild are left in the bin, the artist often hangs up their beret and mustache, goes home, lies face down in bed and whispers: “I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.” 

David Lynch was (apparently) a master of failure and rejection, but he was also a comeback king. 

To have idea after idea quashed by the cold financial oligarchy of our creative world only to resurrect oneself artistically and try again? That, in itself, is good art.

---

George Evans is a querulous nuisance from Birmingham, Alabama. When he isn’t teaching English (and sometimes when he is) he writes. You can find him on his substack: Fourth Castle on the Left.