David Lynch (1946-2025)
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critic’s notebook
Fans of the late American filmmaker built a distinctly Lynchian shrine outside the Burbank restaurant Bob’s Big Boy.
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Tejal Rao is a critic at large for Food. She filed this story from a table outside Bob’s Big Boy, fueled by a chocolate milkshake.
Since the death of the filmmaker David Lynch last week, fans have been driving to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, Calif., to pay their respects, building a spontaneous, snowballing shrine at the feet of the restaurant’s mascot. Among the roses and teddy bears you might expect at a memorial, a casual observer waiting for a table might be horrified to spot a severed ear.
Fans, however, understood that the severed ears — at least four, all fake — were tender if gruesome references to his 1986 film, “Blue Velvet.”
They also knew that Mr. Lynch was a regular at this location of the chain for seven years beginning in the late 1970s, arriving each day at 2:30 p.m. for a chocolate milkshake and several cups of coffee. They knew that he saw the diner as an extension of his own office, writing down movie ideas on napkins as the double-whammy of a caffeine and sugar high kicked in. And fans had created a distinctly Lynchian memorial to the man and his magnificently weird body of work.
Red matchbooks and to-go boxes marked by hand with the letters “RR” referred to the Double R diner in his haunting show “Twin Peaks.” Spiky logs, both wooden and plush, which the show’s mysterious “log lady” character would cradle propped up handwritten letters and printed stills from the director’s other films, including “Eraserhead,” “Wild at Heart” and “Inland Empire.”
Next to framed pictures of Twin Peaks’s murdered homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, some of them marked with lipstick, there was plenty of owl imagery — stained glass pieces, drawings and small statues.
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