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.
“The owls are not what they seem,” someone had written on a Bob’s napkin, quoting the actor Kyle MacLachlan as F.B.I. special agent Dale Cooper. A hand drawn portrait of Mr. Lynch’s topographical face with a detailed rendering of his dramatic swoop of gray hair was marked, not with a signature, but a symbol found in the owl cave.
Many of the roses, fresh and wilting, were blue, like the “blue rose” task force in the show. And dozens of cups of coffee threatened to spill onto the doughnuts, a favorite snack for the town’s police force as well as Agent Cooper.
Fans left packs and packs of cigarettes and loosies inscribed with tiny notes for Mr. Lynch, who loved the smell of tobacco — he took up smoking at the age of 8 — and suffered from emphysema in his later years.
You could find cowboy hats like the ones worn by the mysterious cowboy in “Mulholland Drive.” And hidden in the layers were a few cans of creamed corn, associated with a mystical substance from the 1992 “Twin Peaks” prequel known as “garmonbozia,” as well as bags of crunchy Cheetos — a snack Mr. Lynch loved and requested on the set of the 2022 film “The Fabelmans.”
A single unopened bag of quinoa, perched on the mascot’s tray, led me to rewatch a 20-minute long video of Mr. Lynch cooking it in which his enthusiasm for the mundane is particularly moving.
All week, the eerily beautiful shrine to Mr. Lynch continued to grow and bloom, even as it decayed. Some of the cherry pie slices fans had set down — sold at the Double R diner in “Twin Peaks” — were hit especially hard, withering in the sun, sweating through their boxes, crushed under the weight of bouquets. Ants worked furiously to gather the crumbs.
On Thursday morning, it seemed as if the shrine had mysteriously disappeared. In fact, Rory Scott MacDonald, a designer whose grandfather built this Bob’s location in 1949, and whose father owns it now, had teamed up with Kat Fox, an archivist and independent researcher who studied spontaneous memorialization at the University of California, Los Angeles, to catalog every nonperishable item and preserve it for exhibit and for Mr. Lynch’s family.
Mr. MacDonald wasn’t entirely sure if he’d made the right decision, clearing the site, but he was concerned about rain in this weekend’s forecast. And he’d noticed some objects from the earliest images of the memorial were already missing. The shrine was still growing, but if it wasn’t indexed now, it could be lost.
Mourners arriving now were disappointed, but undeterred. Within the hour, there was a single white rose and a mug marked “RR” outside. A small embossed napkin, torn and taped to the mascot’s feet read, “To the King of Flowing Abstract! You’ll be missed.” A roll of tape lay on the bench, ready for the next person who needed it.
At a glance, there was nothing special about the Burbank location of the Bob’s Big Boy chain, but over the course of seven years and several decades of filmmaking, Mr. Lynch had demonstrated that illuminating something ordinary could give it meaning and reveal its mysteries. In the same way, his fans had turned the restaurant into a tenuous shrine. It would exist for as long as they tended to it.
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