David Lynch’s Art Life

David Lynch

Shortly after David Lynch’s family announced last Thursday that the director had passed away a few days short of his seventy-ninth birthday, the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard contacted a group of filmmakers and asked them if they had any stories to tell. What they shared is by turns touching and funny, and all of the participants express sincere gratitude to the man for his singular body of work. But it’s actor, writer, and director Alice Lowe (Sightseers, Prevenge, Timestalker) who gets at something close to home.

“To me,” says Lowe, “he’s just always been there. And that’s when a cultural loss feels hard: when you’ve not met someone, but their work feels personal to you, part of your psyche. But what’s strange is how many feel that way. The strangeness and intimacy of his work is counterintuitive to its popularity.” Lynch’s “work spoke its own language, but a language that was strangely universal. In a time when the very nature of film as an individual’s perspective and the human auteurship of art is in question, it feels seismic to have lost him.”

“What does it say,” wonders Adam Nayman at the Ringer, “that the first time I held my infant daughter, I thought of Eraserhead? What does it say that the friend I texted about it answered ‘same’? . . . With Lynch, it wasn’t just about seeing his movies, but living with them for days, and weeks, and years as they sat on your shoulder, making their way slowly up the back of your neck, through your ear, and into your mind’s eye. The scenes don’t go away, even the ones you sometimes wish would. You can’t get rid of a Lynch movie, but it’s never quite yours, either. What does Patricia Arquette whisper near the end of Lost Highway? ‘You’ll never have me’? That sounds about right.”

Lynch’s films, paintings, sculptures, and music can be as elusive and baffling as they are enthralling and unshakable, but his work is never cryptic. He didn’t make puzzles to be solved. He refused—often with a genuinely polite smile—to discuss the meaning of his films. As Laura Miller writes at Slate, “he wanted viewers to arrive at an understanding of his work on their own, but it also seemed that he could not articulate his intentions—indeed he seemed, at times, not even to have any. Of the blue box and its blue key—the ominous MacGuffin in his 2001 masterpiece, Mulholland Dr.—he simply said, ‘I don’t have a clue what those are.’”

Especially in his later years, though, Lynch was an open book when it came to discussing his process and his evolution as an artist. In countless interviews and in his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish, he explained how ideas came to him, emphasizing the vital importance of remaining true to those ideas as he worked to realize them as well as—for him—the life-saving merits of Transcendental Meditation.

In the 2010s, codirectors Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm spent a few years with Lynch, recording more than twenty conversations and filming him as he worked on his paintings and built furniture in the studio set up in his Hollywood Hills compound. With surprising candor, the subject of David Lynch: The Art Life (2016) speaks with love and admiration for his father, a scientist who was always eager to meet his son halfway, even when he couldn’t grasp all that he was up to, and his mother, who insisted that young David not be given any coloring books so that he wouldn’t be constrained to drawing within prescribed lines.

The family moved from Missoula, Montana, where Lynch was born, to suburban neighborhoods in Washington, North Carolina, and Idaho before settling in Virginia. Lynch painted in the studio of the artist Bushnell Keeler, the father of a friend who realized that this young Eagle Scout was seriously dedicated to his art. Nothing clicked between Lynch and art schools in Washington, DC, and Boston, but a friend and future collaborator, the great production designer Jack Fisk, recommended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

In the late 1960s, Lynch and the city, with its gray sights and hollow sounds of abandoned industry, hit it off. “There was violence and hate and filth,” he once recalled. “But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.” Staring at one of his paintings, Lynch felt “a wind,” as if the image were calling out to move. He began experimenting with animation, creating his first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), in 1967.

He married a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, who appears in The Alphabet (1968). Still living hand-to-mouth, the couple freely admitted years later that they were hardly ready to become parents when their daughter, Jennifer Lynch, was born in 1968. Their reluctance, bordering on dread, would become the crux of Eraserhead (1977), but before he spent four years working on it, he landed a modest grant from the American Film Institute to complete The Grandmother (1970). The budding family then headed west to Los Angeles.

“An untempered blast of sickly comic, black-and-white body horror, Eraserhead is dauntingly abstract in form yet in other ways perhaps the simplest and most emotionally accessible of Lynch’s movies,” writes Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee. Looking like a male bride of Frankenstein with his levitating shock of hair, Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer, the father of a terrifyingly malformed baby that cries incessantly, refuses to eat, and develops pus-oozing sores. Among Henry’s hallucinatory visions is a Pillsbury Doughboy–sized Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near) who sings, “In Heaven / Everything is fine.”

Artist and designer John Coulthart notes that composer Paul Schütze has credited sound designer Alan Splet’s work on Eraserhead as a foundational influence on dark ambient, the genre of postindustrial music that emerged around the time of the film’s release. Some of Coulthart’s “favorite Splet moments in Lynch’s films” include “the industrial sounds that accompany Treves’s walk through the East End in The Elephant Man; the visit from the Guild Navigator at the beginning of Dune; Jeffrey’s dream in Blue Velvet.

Along with such films as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), Eraserhead was for years on end a staple of midnight screenings in big cities and college towns. One of its many admirers was Mel Brooks, who eagerly agreed when producer Jonathan Sanger proposed that Lynch was the man to direct The Elephant Man (1980). “To this day,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2018, “it’s one of Lynch’s best movies; as such, it’s also evidence that Lynch himself is a victim of his times—his ideal calling would have been as a studio director, applying visionary artistry to such a varied range of classical stories that his sensibility would expand and deepen.”

Set in Victorian London, The Elephant Man stars John Hurt as Joseph Merrick, a man suffering from severe deformities of skin and bone and condemned to a life as a freak-show attraction—until he’s rescued and befriended by the surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins). The Elephant Man scored eight Oscar nominations, throwing doors wide open for its thirty-five-year-old director.

George Lucas asked Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), but Lynch opted instead to take on producer Dino De Laurentiis’s offer of an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic, Dune. Released in 1984 and starring a young and barely known actor, Kyle MacLachlan, as Paul Atreides, Dune became the only feature Lynch disowned. He would never again agree to a project without being guaranteed final cut. “Why would anyone work for three years on something that wasn’t yours?,” he asked years later. “Why? Why do that? Why? I died a death. And it was all my fault for not knowing to put that in the contract.”

Writing for the Guardian, Charles Bramesco suggests that there’s “one view of Dune as a warm-up of sorts for Twin Peaks, another vast spiritual odyssey in which the forces of good and evil wage war in the subconscious of Kyle MacLachlan between indecipherable prophecies. The same enigmatic orbs carrying unknowable messages to Agent Dale Cooper in Peaks’s complex melange of Jungian psychology tease Paul Atreides with wisps of enlightenment in his hallucinations, and there’s even a link be to traced from the constant whispered voiceover to Agent Cooper’s stream-of-consciousness tape recorder memos.”

Dune flopped, and Lynch still owed two projects to De Laurentiis. The Dune sequel was going nowhere, and the producer had his doubts about Blue Velvet, a screenplay Lynch had been working on for around ten years. “De Laurentiis told David he’d pay me to rewrite the script,” Paul Schrader tells the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard, “and David gave it to me. It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I told Dino there was no way I could improve it. David thanked me and Dino financed the film. The rest is film history.”

MacLachlan stars in Blue Velvet (1986) as Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student back home in North Carolina, where he discovers a severed ear. Investigating with fellow amateur sleuth Sandy (Laura Dern), Jeffrey stumbles into the world of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a lounge singer being kept by the abusive gangster and psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).

Blue Velvet has lost none of its power to derange, terrify, and exhilarate,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2016. “Lynch’s fourth feature ingeniously plumbs the discordances inherent in many American myths: of idyllic suburban life, heroism, adolescent romance,” and “much like Mulholland Dr., its closest cognate, [it] exists in a bizarre present never quite untethered from the past.”

Each time she rewatched Blue Velvet, Anderson was “most fascinated” by Laura Dern, whose Sandy is “sunny but still inscrutable, a forerunner to later enigmas the performer would embody for the director: The same ghastly grimace Sandy makes when she discovers the true nature of Jeffrey’s relationship to Dorothy also creeps across the face of the terrorized actress Dern portrays in Inland Empire (2006).” Anderson later delved deeper into this fascination in her 2021 book Inland Empire.

Dern and Nicolas Cage star in Wild at Heart (1990) as Lula and Sailor, two outlaw lovers on the run from killers sent by Lula’s mom, played by Dern’s own mother, Diane Ladd. Cage’s Sailor has a thing for Elvis not unlike what Martin Sheen’s Kit has for James Dean in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Sailor’s vision of Glinda the Good Witch—played by Sheryl Lee, already known to millions as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks—is only one of several of Wild at Heart’s nods to The Wizard of Oz (1939), a favorite of Lynch’s so influential on his body of work that Alexandre O. Philippe had critic Amy Nicholson and filmmakers such as Karyn Kusama and John Waters explore the conscious and unconscious connections in his 2022 documentary Lynch/Oz.

Wild at Heart may be the least critically acclaimed feature in Lynch’s oeuvre, but it did win the Palme d’Or in Cannes less than a month after Twin Peaks premiered on ABC and became “not just a hit but also a monster pop-culture sensation,” as James Poniewozik writes in the New York Times. A prime-time soap opera set in a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest, the series featured a haunting score by Angelo Badalamenti and multiple melodramatic storylines spun from the discovery of the dead body, wrapped in plastic, of local high school student Laura Palmer. Poniewozik calls Twin Peaks, cocreated with Mark Frost, “the work of an earnest odd bird driven to dig deeper—underneath the grass, into the woods, even beyond the bounds of the earthly plane—to get at the horror and transcendence of being human.”

A forerunner to the now-bygone era of prestige television, Twin Peaks had all the world talking about the Log Lady, the Red Room, and the cherry pie served up, 1950s-style, with a damn fine cup of coffee in the Double R Diner. But once the murder mystery was solved in the second season, ratings fizzled and the last episode aired in the summer of 1991. Lynch, though, was not through with Twin Peaks. He wrote and directed a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), tracking the last week in the life of Laura Palmer.

Initial reviews were terrible, and in 2013, Calum Marsh wrote in the Village Voice: “The film is alarmingly dark. It isn’t especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece . . . Adopting conventions from the police procedural, daytime soap operas, post-war noir, and 1950s melodrama, Fire Walk With Me is a postmodern hybrid in flux.”

Its polar opposite within the oeuvre tells the true story of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), an elderly vet who lives with his daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek). When he hears that his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke, he sets out on a tractor (maximum speed: five miles an hour) on a 240-mile journey to pay him a visit. “G-rated and Disney-distributed though it may be,” wrote Leo Goldsmith for Reverse Shot in 2008, The Straight Story (1999) “is not an unconventionally conventional film in a career filled with nonsensical oddities, but merely the most extreme example of Lynch's linear tendencies. In fact, there has always been a strain of the square, the normal—even, the perversely normal—in his work.”

Goldsmith observes that Alvin’s world is “one of simple, straightforward pleasures—wieners, lightning storms, the sounds of grain elevators, making birdhouses, a donut while sunbathing. But it's also representative of ‘straight’ values: an emphasis on family and community, as well as a strong sense of individuality; simple, practical solutions to problems, no matter how dire; and above all, a pragmatic acknowledgement of one's death.”

When the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis first heard that Lynch had died, it “felt fitting that my city was burning,” she writes. “Few filmmakers grasped the complexities of Los Angeles better than Lynch did and fewer still seemed so at home with its distinct, otherworldly mix of beauty and disaster, sunshine and noir.”

For John Lopez, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, “Lynchian is the feeling you get as you hug the curves of a foggy Mulholland Drive at one in the morning. Or sip black coffee with a delicious cherry pie in a Googie era diner after a great movie . . . Certainly, as we recover from the brutal infernos that consumed whole neighborhoods without pity, David Lynch felt like a prophet who was telling us this day would inevitably come . . . He was the poet laureate this city never knew it had.”

Lost Highway (1997) is the first of his three features set in Los Angeles, followed by Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. Bill Pullman plays a jazz musician who may or may not have killed his wife (Patricia Arquette) when he becomes someone else, a garage mechanic played by Balthazar Getty. Lynch referred to Lost Highway as a “psychogenic fugue,” and for Filmmaker, Stuart Swezey asked him about that. A psychogenic fugue is a dissociative state in which a person “creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything,” Lynch explained.

“But the story unfolds on a supernatural level at the same time,” noted Swezey. Lynch: “Well, sometimes mental things could appear that way outside the condition.” Swezey: “Can you expand on that?” Lynch: “No.”

“Although steeped in the romance of a bygone Hollywood, Mulholland Dr. throws in its lot with the city’s unhappy ghosts, spinning a cautionary tale around an actor’s professional and romantic disillusionment,” writes Dennis Lim in his 2015 book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place.In Lynch’s best-reviewed film—#8 in Sight and Sound’s 2022 “Greatest Films of All Time” poll—Naomi Watts plays Betty, a blond who arrives in LA from Deep River, Ontario, and meets a brunette (Laura Harring) who’s forgotten who she is. Across town, a director (Justin Theroux) is being ramrodded by producers.

“Was Mulholland Dr. anti-Hollywood or pro?” asks Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “It was definitely a condemnation of the town’s greed and dishonesty. But Lynch was also luxuriating in its world of legends—its Spanish stucco mansionettes, its insistence that a girl from a tiny town could be discovered at a lunch counter and become a star—and found that he, like us, just couldn’t let any of that go.”

Mulholland Dr. is “the greatest movie about people who seem to be aware they’re in a movie,” writes Nathan Lee at 4Columns. “Inland Empire is equally preoccupied with the nature of cinema, albeit from a perspective of intensified technological and aesthetic estrangement.” For a director of Lynch’s stature, to go digital in 2006 was still a bit like taking a dare, never mind manning the camera himself and shooting without a screenplay. For Lee, “however erratic the film’s detours and whimsies, the sovereign empire being traversed is ultimately the sublime topography of Laura Dern.”

In the chronological timeline of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is last seen telling Dale Cooper that she’ll see him again in twenty-five years. Miraculously, that actually happened. In a four-part essay for Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton called Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) “the artistic apotheosis of one of the greatest living filmmakers, David Lynch, who directed and cowrote every episode.” There were eighteen of them, each running just short of a full hour, and in a decade when cinephiles still met and chatted in real time on a single social-media platform, it was possible to see Part 8 recognized as an instant classic on the very night of its broadcast (Sunday, June 25).

“With its narrative fissures and variety of abstract mise en scène, The Return has blown established forms of television wide open and generated some of the most sublime digital artwork of all time,” wrote Aliza Ma for Film Comment. Keith Uhlich wrote episode recaps for the Notebook, and Filmmaker ran a series on The Return with contributions from Gina Telaroli, Andrew Bujalski, Larry Gross, and Vadim Rizov. Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay is also a producer, and he writes that “one mark of a good director is the ability to get what’s in their head onto the screen in the most unmediated way possible, and nobody did that better than Lynch.”

Throughout his career, when he wasn’t painting, carpentering, or writing and directing features or episodes of Twin Peaks, Lynch carried on making short films, television commercials, web series, music videos, and, of course, music. He also honed his unique persona as a performer, playing the FBI’s Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks; a mysterious television network string-puller in Louis C.K.’s Louie (2012); and a friend of Harry Dean Stanton’s in Lucky (2017), directed by John Carroll Lynch (no relation). In what will likely be remembered as his most endearing on-screen performance, Lynch appeared as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s mostly autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022). Anthony Breznican tells the story behind that casting coup in Vanity Fair.

“And his showmanship was filled with empathy,” says Alice Lowe. “I’m going to try to find something in the wreckage of this loss: a promise to be creative, to trust in art, in humanity, that there is a collectivity to our experience, and it’s worth sharing it. I hope his family are comforted by the love pouring out for this wonderful human.”

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