Watch 950 Weather Reports Presented by David Lynch, Straight from His Los Angeles Home

Los Ange­les is hard­ly a city known for its var­ied weath­er, but if one lives there long enough, one does become high­ly attuned to its many sub­tleties. (Grant­ed, some of the local phe­nom­e­na involved, like the noto­ri­ous San­ta Ana winds, can pro­duce far-from-sub­tle effects.) The late David Lynch, who spent much of his life in Los Ange­les, was more attuned to them than most. For a time, he even post­ed dai­ly YouTube videos in which he talked about noth­ing else. Or rather, he talked about almost noth­ing else: much of the appeal of his weath­er reports, 950 of which you can watch on this playlist, lies in his unpre­dictable asides.

In addi­tion to announc­ing the date (in a slight­ly eccen­tric form, e.g. “June one, two-thou­sand and twen­ty”), read­ing the tem­per­a­ture in both Fahren­heit and Cel­sius, and remark­ing on the pres­ence or absence of “blue skies and gold­en sun­shine,” Lynch would some­times men­tion what was on his mind that day. “Today I’m think­ing about tin cans,” he declared in his weath­er report for Octo­ber 11th, 2020. A cou­ple of months lat­er, he was remem­ber­ing Per­cy Faith’s theme from the San­dra Dee and Troy Don­ahue vehi­cle A Sum­mer Place, which to him encap­su­lat­ed the “roman­tic, won­drous feel­ing of the fifties” at that decade’s very end.

The weath­er-report­ing Lynch showed an aware­ness of his audi­ence as well, occa­sion­al­ly pre­sent­ing them with a hand-drawn Valen­tine’s Day card or expres­sion of thanks for view­ing: “What a great bunch you all are, those of you who come each day to check out the weath­er.” But as Ali Raz writes in the Believ­er, one views Lynch’s weath­er reports “not to learn about the weath­er but to watch Lynch per­form — even though, pre­cise­ly because, he doesn’t per­form in any actor­ly way. Instead, he per­forms him­self.” And he’d been doing it in that form longer than many real­ized, hav­ing begun his reports as a call-in seg­ment on Los Ange­les radio sta­tion Indie 103.1 FM in 2005, then post­ing them as videos to his own web site.

Lynch returned to weath­er reportage on YouTube dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which made the at-home set­ting fash­ion­able. His videos inspired some of their view­ers, who pre­sum­ably had more time on their hands than usu­al, to do the hard work of exe­ge­sis. One user of the David Lynch sub­red­dit found the weath­er reports key to under­stand­ing Lynch’s work, specif­i­cal­ly through “the idea of aware­ness. What does it mean to look at the world around us?” In his films, “this is accom­plished by sur­re­al­ism, vio­lence, and a gen­er­al sense of the unset­tling or men­ac­ing. But those are vehi­cles for the idea of aware­ness, not its essence.” His Weath­er Reports show that “aware­ness does­n’t have to come through an extreme men­tal state, but could be part of our dai­ly life,” in times of blue skies and gold­en sun­shine or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wide-Rang­ing Cre­ative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Dis­cov­er His Films, Music Videos, Car­toons, Com­mer­cials, Paint­ings, Pho­tog­ra­phy & More

David Lynch Explains Why Depres­sion Is the Ene­my of Cre­ativ­i­ty — and Why Med­i­ta­tion Is the Solu­tion

David Lynch Tries to Make a List of the Good Things Hap­pen­ing in the World… and Comes Up Blank

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

Hear the Best of Ange­lo Badala­men­ti (RIP) from 1986–2017: Fea­tures Music from David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, Twin Peaks & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.