Celebrating David Lynch

I saw Eraserhead in Providence in late 1979, I think, and I suspect it was at the Avon on Thayer Street. I liked cheeseball, poorly-constructed horror films in those days and I think Lynch’s film was being sold as midnight cult film fare, a more horrifying Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I went. At a similar moment, in undergraduate school at Brown University, I was also taking, or had just taken, Keith Waldrop’s survey course on this history of the silent film, which had offered me my first interaction with Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. In my recollection these experiences are utterly conjoined. Like the Bunuel film, Eraserhead scared me very thoroughly—it was merciless and unforgiving and also very funny—and likewise it established in my mind a set of filmic values (for which Un Chien Andalou was also partly responsible), antithetical to the barbarous Hollywood values, and from these I never really strayed: 1) cheap is fine, 2) black and white tells you some things, 3) good sound design is crucial, 4) non-actors are very often better than actors, 5) subjectivity is in a circular container, and thus the reiterations, 6) linearity in storytelling is a con, and 7) when in doubt stick a lady in a radiator and have her sing.

I consumed every commercially available Lynch film in the years following. I never missed one. I also sought out the obscure stuff (On the Air, anyone?), the student work, the non-filmic projects, the comics, the visual art, even some of the albums. I had some mild resistance to Lost Highway, but in every other case the film work of David Lynch was eye-opening for me (and here I use “eye-opening” deliberately, having just cited Un Chien Andalou). There was always that worried scratching away at the malevolent core of human character at once intoxicating and inadvisable. Even during his 90s years of disrepute I was still an adherent. (I saw Fire Walk with Me at the Court Street Cinemas in Bklyn and I think there were only two other people there and I count that experience as great, powerful, transportative, and Vincent Canby just had no idea what he was writing about.) I even loved things about Dune, which had nothing to do with the book (not necessarily the worst thing). I think Inland Empire is a deeply powerful film, and I wish he’d shot more stuff on his phone in the later time when he couldn’t seem to scrounge up the money from the studios. We would have been better for it. Though I also admire, e.g., his YouTube defense of quinoa, etc., apparently watched 500,00 times! Sometimes, when a major studio project is unavailable, quinoa is enough.

I’m talking around the two projects that in a way had the biggest impact on me. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. When I was in my first year of grad school at Columbia I lived in an apartment on the UWS with two film-department types, and somehow we came into a copy of the screenplay for Blue Velvet—before release. I can’t remember how this came to pass. Maybe he was trying to get Dino di Laurentiis to do it and my friend who worked for that production company gave me a copy of the script? Howsoever it was, I studied this screenplay for all the clues. My recollection was that the script was really pulpy. It read sort of like a Roger Corman film, instantaneous, crass, unapologetic. One of my filmic roommates said: “That’s really exploitative!” Which I think was supposed to mean: not good. But I couldn’t wait to see the film, the finished thing! And, as you would expect, the secrets of Blue Velvet were not in the script—though it was great—but in the directing. Two moments stand out, now, from my first time seeing it: Kyle Machlachlan (looking like he’s in a Wyeth painting) finding the severed ear in the field, and Dean Stockwell singing along with Orbison’s “In Dreams,” during the gang/torture sequence in the middle of the film. As Dennis Hopper gives in to his sociopathic rage. In a way this latter passage taught me how to think about the meanings of films—about their reservoirs of artifice, non sequitur, futility, about their destitution of longing. The Plato’s Cave of it all! Think about that “candy-colored clown” from the lyric of the Orbison song! Films are the dreams rising to their discontinuous crescendo, or at least that’s how the Lynch movies seem to work.

A lot of ink has already been committed to Twin Peaks, and it’s too immense an accomplishment, too singular, too original, too resistant to comprehensive explanation, to require more exegesis from me. But: excepting a very, very few other television programs, most of them bearing the signs of some influence (True Detective, Six Feet Under) no television narrative has ever gripped me, dislodged me, the way season one of Twin Peaks did. (Well, I am the rare partisan who really likes season two as well.) And, in truth, I never gave a shit who actually killed Laura Palmer, and you shouldn’t either. The show taught me to go deeper than this. Needing narrative completion is a weakness, a con. The effect of Twin Peaks is otherwise. It never was a mystery! It was a spiritual journey in the realm of the dead, the underworld, in which no ending would ever be complete, in which the attenuations forever could unspool. For example: I was, in those days, also obsessed with Tibet and with China’s illegitimate claims to the possession thereof, the Dalai Lama’s mystical journey over the mountains and into Dharamsala, and it was a measure of Twin Peaks and its grip on the zeitgeist, the uncanny, that Agent Dale Cooper did in fact whip out a map of Tibet at one point-for some arcane explanation that seemed constructed for me, or at least for which I was a specially constructed node of ramifications. No doubt we all have similar reactions to the web of bizarre interconnections therein, flaring out omnidirectionally, toward the astral realm. Naturally, Dale Cooper explains Tibet, in episode two, by elucidating a dream he had “three years ago,” a dream that may have included Roy Orbison, and which may have been David Lynch’s own dream, as though Lynch were the red king in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, and we, stumbling upon him in his television program, were Alice.

Through my friend Gregory Crewdson, I did finally get to meet David Lynch once. Gregory was to appear at one of Lynch’s omnidirectional consciousness-raising festivals in Bklyn and he (Gregory) asked me to interview him there, in front of an audience, and then we hung around after to say hi to the man himself. He was late, maybe at some other festival with his name on it, or perhaps asleep, or meditating; anyway, it was some long, dead interval of waiting (as I have often found is the case with the very famous people), but then suddenly there he was coming into venue from the back entrance, from his limo, looking exactly like David Lynch, with the hair, and the button-up shirt, and Gregory introduced me, and David Lynch shook my hand, fixed me with his complicated gaze, and said, “Well, hello there, Rick, it’s sure nice to meet you,” and then moved on to five other supplicants. And thus were vindicated the many, many hours that I had spent in the consideration of David Lynch, and his dreams of Tibet.

These days I teach part-time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where Lynch matriculated briefly, before dropping out, saying he disliked it, in order instead to go to school in Philly, the city that eventually necessitated Eraserhead. He’s still there, though, in our building on the Fenway, in the art school weirdness of it all, the oddball undergrads with their sketchbooks and facial piercings and manga obsessions, the strange extrusions of art in the stairwells, the silence, the invention, the desperation, the smell of developing chemicals, the sound of the band saws. Oddly, Lynch’s roommate at the SMFA was Peter Wolf, the singer, who was also known to me at one time, from when he dated a housemate of mine in Providence. I bet Peter Wolf could sing a great rendition of Orbison’s “In Dreams.” And remember: 5) subjectivity is in a circular container and thus the repetitions, 6) linearity in storytelling is a con, and 7) when in doubt stick a lady in a radiator. Oh, and 8) in heaven, everything is fine.

Yes, Lynch, exceeds any description. There is still, and only, his accomplishments as an artist. The list of people who are capable of being this original is very short, and it cheapens their work to talk about it or them as humans too much, there’s no real explaining, the talk is just a sort of a tinny, treble-heavy warble, but I want to register, still, some reverence. That reverence was always there, in his work, too, along with the thrumming of the underworld, almost everywhere he touched down, even, daily, in the weather.