David Lynch’s (Possible) Realism
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In his memoir, “Room to Dream,” from 2018, David Lynch recalled an idyllic time in his life. He was in his late twenties and had just finished shooting his first feature film, “Eraserhead.” After living on set, in the stables behind the American Film Institute, he’d moved into a proper little house, with an orange tree in its yard. He’d taken a job delivering the Wall Street Journal, earning enough to support himself while he edited the movie, and to pay for occasional milkshakes with his daughter, Jennifer, at Bob’s Big Boy. While he delivered papers, Lynch kept an eye out for pieces of wood left with the garbage on the curb. “I’d leap out and load this stuff up and I got so much found wood,” he wrote. “My landlord, Edmund, collected wood, too, and he let me use it, and I built a whole shed in the backyard with found wood, found windows, found everything. It was a beautiful world.”
If any other director—Pedro Almodóvar, Steven Spielberg—were to share such a story, it would be merely eccentric. But Lynch, who died last week, at seventy-eight, made films in which every cheerful surface seemed to obscure an eerie reality. People who knew Lynch often described him as sweet, charming, even beatific: “He’s a loving, charismatic, funny genius,” the actress Laura Harring, who played Rita in “Mulholland Drive,” has said. But his exuberance was made strange by his art.
Many of Lynch’s movies travel from a familiar outside world into a strange inner one. The structure of “Room to Dream,” which alternates between third-person accounts of Lynch’s life written by Kristine McKenna, a journalist, and first-person reflections by Lynch, promises something similar. But Lynch’s sections, while charming, are rarely revealing. He tells innocent stories about filmmaking, painting, and woodworking; reminisces about the forests of the Pacific Northwest; recommends Transcendental Meditation; and describes his creative process mainly in passive terms. In “Catching the Big Fish,” his book on meditation and creativity, he recalls how, during the making of “Twin Peaks,” he touched a hot car in the parking lot and “ssssst!—the Red Room appeared,” as though he’d found it on the curb, too.
Lynch wasn’t a secretive artist: he spoke happily and at length about his work. If he didn’t explain where his ideas came from, it’s probably because he couldn’t. “Room to Dream” suggests that he was as mysterious to himself as to the rest of us. And yet, although he may have been mysterious, Lynch wasn’t elusive. His movies struck viewers in direct, intuitive, and uncomplicated ways. It was hard to say what his films were about, or why you liked them; what you knew, mainly, was that they moved you. You were as mysterious as Lynch was. You had something in common. But what?
Lynch, by his own account, “started out just as a regular person, growing up in the Northwest.” He was born in 1946, in Missoula, Montana, to a forest scientist and an English teacher. The Lynch family lived in Idaho, then Washington State. Like other postwar boys, Lynch spent his days riding bikes, building bombs, and exploring the woods with his dad; likable and outgoing, he was elected president of his seventh-grade class and was popular with girls. He had a memorable kiss, in Boise, Idaho, nestled among pine needles in the forest. “It was so dreamy,” he wrote. “That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.”
At home, the atmosphere was decorous, curious, gentle; outside, the culture of the nineteen-fifties was tougher, valorizing war and papering over a darker, more furtive kind of violence. In his suburban neighborhood, Lynch distinguished between the well-lit houses of people he knew and the darkened houses of people he didn’t; he wondered what was going on in those darkened houses. Once, he and his brother were out at night when they saw a naked woman emerge from the black space between the street lights. “Maybe it was something about the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the color of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth,” he wrote. Transfixed, the boys watched her sink slowly to the curb; Lynch wanted to help, but didn’t know how. In searching for a word to describe “that fifties small-town thing,” Lynch again concluded, “it’s dreamy, that’s what it is.” But “dreamy,” for him, was a shadowed word: in “Twin Peaks,” Donna Hayward tells her mother that she’s “having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.”
When Lynch was fourteen, his family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. There, a friend named Toby Keeler mentioned in passing that his father was a painter. As soon as Lynch visited the studio, he knew that he wanted to live “the art life.” With a friend, Lynch rented a studio of his own and all but dropped out of high school to make dark, Expressionist paintings. Around the same time, as an Eagle Scout, he attended the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy. He joined Alpha Omega Upsilon, a fraternity for high-school students; in that capacity, he attended slow-dance parties in friends’ basements, played bongo drums in a Beat-style jazz band (his friends called him “Bongo Dave”), and dated a series of “fast” girls, one of whom later died by suicide. “I knew how to behave at home, and it was different from how I behaved at the fraternity, and that was different from how I was at the studio,” he recalled. The stress of living so many different lives gave him stomach spasms, for which he sought medical attention.
In 1964, Lynch went to art school—first at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Boston left him uninspired; he preferred Philadelphia’s industrial wastelands and abundant lunatics. In Philly, his neighborhood was so dangerous that, when he went out, he carried a wooden stick studded with nails. An apartment he lived in was near a morgue, and Lynch met someone who worked there at a diner; the man offered him a tour, after which Lynch sat among the corpses. (The body bags he saw hanging from both ends to drain became the “smiling bags” described in “Twin Peaks.”) One night, he was at the art institute working on a painting of a figure standing among foliage when, in a hallucinatory moment, he felt a puff of wind and saw the leaves flutter. He decided that he’d try to create a “moving painting,” and made a short film, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times),” in which animated figures swell, their bellies filling with red liquid, until they throw up. He was twenty-one.
In Jon Nguyen’s documentary, “David Lynch: The Art Life” (2016), Lynch shares a story from around this time. His father had come to Philadelphia for a visit and, as it drew to a close, Lynch took him into his building’s unfinished basement to show off some “experiments” he was conducting. On the earthen floor, he had set up a number of small platforms. “I wanted to see what fruit would do after a long period—different stages of fruit, and how it would decay,” Lynch explains. “And I had some dead birds, and I had my mouse in plastic, and I had, you know, a bunch of stuff I’d collected. So I wanted to share this with my father.” Afterward, ascending the stairs, Lynch smiled with pride and happiness, only to turn and catch his father’s pained expression. “Dave?” his father said, on the way to the train station. “I don’t think you should ever have children.” (In fact, around that time, his girlfriend, Peggy Reavey, became pregnant with Jennifer.)
“He was worried about me,” Lynch says. “Inside me, I felt there was nothing to worry about. But I still understood why he said it. He misunderstood my experiments for some kind of . . . like, diabolical, you know, man who needs serious help mentally and probably emotionally.” Lynch had collected the raw materials for his work: a sensitivity to suburban and arboreal beauty; an eye for bio-industrial decay; a Boy Scout’s martial playfulness; a musician’s sexy cool; a soaring, scared romanticism; a knowledge of secret violence; the experience of living a hidden life; a sense of a world behind the world. What he lacked was a method for assembling them into art.
In his book “Mad Love,” from 1937, André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism, describes a trip to a flea market with his friend the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. They wander among the stalls, searching for objects that speak to them; Giacometti selects a metal mask with slats across its eyes, and Breton chooses a wooden spoon resembling a heeled shoe. Breton explains that, for a Surrealist struggling with an artistic project, finding a resonant object is like having a prophetic dream: It “comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle he might have thought insurmountable is cleared.” It’s as though he’s retrieved an artifact from an invisible world that, briefly, made itself visible. Such an artifact can center the imagination, and direct one’s intuition back toward that space. Objects that resonate with more than one person are especially valuable, Breton writes, because they reveal that our minds are connected.
After some trial and error—a few more short films, created in the years before “Eraserhead”—Lynch arrived at his own version of the Surrealist method. He didn’t browse flea markets but looked for what he called “ideas”—sounds, places, images, vibes—in his dreams and imagination. Some of Lynch’s ideas ended up being used in many of his films: jazz clubs (the Radiator, the Slow Club, the Roadhouse, Club Silencio); the color blue (the blue box, the Blue Rose); unusually small or large people (the Arm, the Fireman); the hum of obscure machines (one of his early drawings showed “a garden with electrical motors in it that would pump oil”); tiny, curtained rooms (“There’s nothing like a beautiful contained space,” he wrote); the sound of wind (when Lynch asked actors for “more wind,” he meant “more mystery”). “Blue Velvet” began with a dream in which he saw a police radio and a gun; to these ideas he added “red lips, green lawns, and the song. . . . The next thing was an ear lying in a field.” Only very occasionally did Lynch find ideas in the outside world. During one “waking dream,” he envisioned a videotape left on a couple’s front stoop; later, an unknown man rang Lynch’s (real) doorbell and, speaking into the intercom, said, “Dick Laurent is dead.” These ideas, along with the O. J. Simpson trial, which was unfolding at the time, inspired “Lost Highway.”
Where did the ideas come from? Did they mean anything in themselves? Lynch never described himself as having formative experiences in small, curtained rooms, or identified jazz clubs as having great symbolic significance. Many artists try not to domesticate or psychologize their creative processes; for this reason, Lynch saw a therapist only once. (“I asked him, ‘Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity?’ And he said, ‘Well, David, I have to be honest: it could.’ And I shook his hand and left.”) But Lynch sought to do more than keep the inspiration flowing. He resembled the Surrealist filmmaker Maya Deren, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and make a movie about voodoo dancers, learned to dance herself, and became possessed by the goddess Erzulie. Seemingly possessed by the materials of his art, Lynch saw them as signs pointing outside of himself.
Lynch’s ideas weren’t pictures on a mood board. They were experiences, which could only be realized cinematically, through combinations of performance, visual composition, music, sound, and an often dilatory use of time. Because the ideas went beyond language, it wasn’t easy for Lynch to explain them to collaborators; he developed strategies for helping them embrace his vagueness. Transcendental Meditation, which he began practicing in the seventies, had both a creative function—it helped Lynch regard his ideas nonjudgmentally—and a social one: it smoothed out his rough edges, lending him the aura of a benevolent guru. (“Your anger. Where did it go?” Reavey asked him, a few weeks after he began meditating.) Practitioners of T.M. chant individualized mantras; in “Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks,” by Brad Dukes, the actress Wendy Robie recalls how, similarly, Lynch “would go to each actor in a scene and he would have a word for you, a private magical word, and it was yours to use.” Mädchen Amick recalls a moment when Lynch “put his hand on my arm, and looked at me, then he sighed and walked away, and it was as if he’d infused me with the emotion the scene called for.” Kimmy Robertson, who played Lucy Moran, describes an on-set atmosphere of “palpable magic.”
With his meditator’s aversion to preconceptions, Lynch embraced collaborative improvisation. After a cameraman working on the “Twin Peaks” pilot accidentally caught the image of Frank Silva, a set dresser, in a mirror, Lynch cast Silva as Bob, the series’ main villain. Sherilyn Fenn remembers coming to the set of the Double R. Diner with her lines prepared, only to have Lynch tell her, “You’re gonna just stand up and start to groove to this really cool, sexy, jazzy thing that Angelo and I just wrote!” (Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch’s longtime composer, died in 2022.) For the second-season finale of “Twin Peaks,” the show’s writers had produced an elaborately plotted, painfully literal script, in which Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper finds himself in a dentist’s office where Bob, disguised as a dentist, tries to extract his soul with a giant syringe. According to the fanzine Wrapped in Plastic—a collection, “The Essential Wrapped in Plastic: Pathways to ‘Twin Peaks,” was published in 2016—when Lynch arrived to direct the episode, he ignored much of the script, and improvised something new. The result was a drifting, enigmatic episode, set mostly in the Red Room, in which many of the best moments consist of wordless hand gestures. It’s one of the most compelling hours in television history; Lynch appears to have made a lot of it up on the spot.
The completeness with which Lynch realized his own creative vision made it possible to see his films mainly as reflections of his peculiar mind. They are appealing, in part, because they are so “Lynchian,” often in metafictional ways. In “Twin Peaks: The Return,” a spectral, soot-covered hobo known as the Woodsman murders the staff of a small radio station while it broadcasts “My Prayer,” a song performed by the nineteen-fifties group the Platters; one of the band’s bassists was also named David Lynch. Later, Agent Cooper tracks Laura Palmer to Odessa, Texas, the town where Roy Orbison, whose song “In Dreams” was featured in “Blue Velvet,” began his career. “We live inside a dream,” Agent Cooper says, as the series draws to a close. We know whose dream it might be.
And yet the ostentatious Lynchness of it all is counterbalanced by a sense of inner conviction—of serious, spiritual purpose. Lynch was a magician who believed his own magic, and he made others believe it, too. The actor Michael Horse, who played Hawk in “Twin Peaks” and describes himself to Dukes as “the most un-new age guy in all of freaking Berkeley,” recalls filming the scene in which it’s revealed that Leland Palmer, played by Ray Wise, has been possessed by Bob. “We were all in that room and I knew we were calling on evil,” Horse says. “When Bob was going to come out of Ray Wise, the director said someone would go for help and I said, ‘I’ll go!’ . . . It had become that real to me. I had a chance to get out of that room and I took it.” In Paris, at the Bureau of Surrealist Research—the real-life version of the Blue Rose—Breton and his contemporaries didn’t see themselves as inventing fictions but as investigating a higher reality. They believed in what Breton called “the omnipotence of dream.” It may sound like nonsense, but to the Surrealists, it was true. That’s why their art was so good.
“The world and our culture within it have become rational,” Karl Ove Knausgaard writes, in his novel “The Wolves of Eternity.” “We live and have lived now for a long time in an age governed by the paradigm of science, in which all that contradicts rational thought is gradually expelled.” Our rational impulses are so automatic, and so strong, that we’re now faced with the problem of what to do with the irrational. The way people lived for much of human history can seem alien to us. People used to experience the world through the prism of shamanism, for instance, believing that shamans were “in contact with the dead, with demons and spirits of nature,” Knausgaard writes; in such a world, it was possible for prospective shamans to “be taken to the underworld, to remain there for three days while their bodies were dismembered, their heads put on a stake, their flesh cooked,” before being “reassembled” and resurrected. (Something similar happens to Agent Cooper in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”) In Knausgaard’s novel, which is set in a realistic, modern-day Norway, rationality is suspended when an actual miracle occurs: a new star appears in the night sky. People have visions, and see demons. Suddenly, anything seems possible, and experience replaces thought. The world can’t be analyzed or understood, but only lived through and intuitively explored.
An acquaintance of mine is an energy healer: she sees spirits and auras, describes her past lives, goes on journeys out of her body at night, and converses with the dead. I can’t bring myself to believe in her experiences—I’m too rational—but I’m moved and fascinated by David Lynch, who explored the world she inhabits. In fact, if you could convene all the people who have ever lived, almost all of them would probably have inhabited a Lynchian world. It wouldn’t have had jazz clubs, or pretty girls in cardigans, but it would’ve contained invisible, abstract spaces, souls that are disassembled and reassembled, evil that possesses people, secret signs, shadow selves and doppelgängers, all woven into reality, emerging from the everyday, the way Bob is glimpsed in a mirror. “Life is filled with abstractions, and the way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition,” Lynch once said. By articulating those abstractions, he went on, a film can give viewers “room to dream”—that is, room to exercise the intuitions we might have expelled from everyday life.
But exercise them to what end? Lynch’s art felt provocative, even dangerous, not just because of the violence it contained but because of the challenge it posed to our rational selves. It presented viewers with a choice: one could interpret it as an inward-looking product of a creative process based on daydreams and fantasies, or as a serious effort to explore the unknowable nature of a spiritual world that was full of beauty, peril, and meaning. The first choice was unsatisfying; the second, impossible. Yet our own powerful reactions to the work tempted us to take the second route. We wanted to believe—possibly, because we do. Lynch knew that the old ways of being were still inside of us, waiting to be found. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com