There haven’t been many filmmakers more elegant than David Lynch, except perhaps Robert Bresson or Jean Cocteau. For a long time this elegance was combined, as with true dandies, with an unfathomable shyness. Witness his modest cameo in Dune, more or less agreed in the middle of the basket full of snakes that this disowned blockbuster was for the filmmaker: “I didn’t like it, but I’m happy about it because I know what the actors go through.” He had three lines.
Overcoming this necessary evil for good “phenomenally frightening”, by accepting the first male role of the forgotten Zelly and Me in 1988 with his partner Isabella Rossellini, Lynch revealed himself with federal agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks. Equipped with visible and defective hearing aids, Cole is a burlesque character, a sort of Professor Tournesol always responding to the side, speaking too loudly, using unintelligible codes. The gag is not devoid of irony, or even a certain political resonance: the emissary of the secret services has the discretion of a pachyderm. Cole is above all an emissary of the filmmaker: he is an authority in
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