Gilgamesh and David Lynch

My wife bought me a copy of a new translation of Gilgamesh, really a poetic version of it taken from other translations, by Stephen Mitchell. I haven’t read this since college, so it was nice to go back to it today. When Gilgamesh goes to seek Utnapishtim, the man granted immortality, he must go to the underworld which you enter at a place called in this version Twin Peaks. I had never made this connection with David Lynch, but it makes sense. I’ve always thought that images and sounds in Blue Velvet paralleled elements in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, like the sputtering of lamps. I don’t think you can draw a one-to-one comparisons, so his film is not a depiction of the Book of the Dead, it’s just similar enough to suggest that he’s passing into or through the same realm, a realm of the dead or of immortals. Ditto with the TV show.