January 20 is David Lynch’s birthday.
To date, our only dedicated post on this great director focused on The Elephant Man (1980), for the obvious reason that our jumping off point with the blog was vaudeville, and this movie concerned a real-life human anomaly. I also mentioned him as among my favorite directors in this post about cinema in the 1980s. Today, I was moved to do a more expansive post, because the recent film Lynch/Oz moved him to the front of my brain. If you liked that movie, don’t get all excited, because I found it a disappointment and only stuck with it about 20 minutes. The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie, and there’s an entire L. Frank Baum/ Oz section of this blog that has over 50 posts though that doesn’t begin to include all the mentions and references I’ve made on this blog over the years. I had high expectations for Lynch/Oz given how much I love the two subjects. But I found the film unconvincing in the extreme, less (far less) than the sum of its parts. It was dopey, and reminded me of that idiotic thing of playing The Wizard of Oz along with Dark Side of the Moon. There’s nothing profound or significant about these undergraduate comparisons. It was like some kid’s lazy term paper.
But we were speaking of David Lynch! My friends, I am old enough to remember when he was just the Eraserhead guy! I knew of its legend a few years before I finally saw it, because nearby Providence was an Eraserhead kind of town, home to RISD, Brown, gritty post-industrial ruins, and the Goth ghosts of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe (who mostly came to town to be near his sweetie Sarah Helen Whitman). It’s a town where nightmares can get a toehold, and where dark and disturbing art is embraced. Still, I was only 12 when Eraserhead came out; Close Encounters of the Third Kind was much more on my agenda at the time. I knew Jack Nance’s haloed tower of hair from posters and ads in the Providence New Paper long before I ever got to see the movie.
I probably first caught it in the early ’80s, either on cable or on home video, and naturally found it to be right up my street…a dark and desolate street full of garbage and puddles of toxic waste. Stream of consciousness, black and white, full of mood and atmosphere, and hilarious non sequitur, I loved it with my entire heart and soul, as only an alienated teenager could. I don’t think David Lynch gets enough credit for being funny. Nothing tickles me more than unusual stuff that happens for no reason, and such are the very filaments that Lynch weaves into his weird tapestries. A guy looks at the chicken dinner on his plate, and the chicken’s legs start to move around. There’s some little show with tiny people happening under the radiator. A guy’s girlfriend gives birth to a sickly, mutant, lizard baby.
Lynch had begun the film in 1970 when he was a student at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies. It had taken Lynch a seven years to complete both for financial reasons and because of the complexity of realizing his visions. It’s impeccably lit, and an enormous part of the experience is a dense, layered soundscape that took years to edit. He claims to have been influenced by Kafka and Gogol (both of those register) as well as The Bible (less apparent). Prior to devoting himself to cinema, he had intended to become a painter, studying at the Corcoran School, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He never actually ceased painting, he engages in it to this day. He transitioned to feature length films by making shorts, many of which are closer to what we think of as visual art than narrative.
So this is his orientation. He is a stylist, but the images are usually so intense that they they feel profound and spiritual. They feel emotionally meaningful even when we have no idea what is happening or why, and when we are also fully cognizant that no rational or literal explanation will ever be forthcoming.
That said, there have been a few occasions when he has bitten the bullet and produced what is for him a conventional story. The Elephant Man (1980), which I’m pretty sure I saw prior to seeing Eraserhead, is one of those. Technically, so is Dune (1984), although the glory of that film is that it is nearly as incoherent as all his other films. His adaptation refuses to hold the audience by the hand and introduce them to the time, place, and characters of Frank Herbert’s fantasy novel. So audiences and critics rejected the film, which had been anticipated to be a hit on the scale of Star Wars. I find this doubly amusing because I was just as bewildered by Star Wars when it came out. Interestingly, George Lucas had approached Lynch to direct the first Star Wars sequel. Lynch chose Dune himself so that he could put his own stamp on it. He did that indeed.
This is the place where I mention Lynch’s comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, which he turned out weekly from 1983 to 1992. I first read in our local underground newspaper, the Providence New Paper, and then kept up with it in the Village Voice once I moved to NYC. This is a good place to mention that today is also the birthday of Bill Griffith, author/artist of Zippy the Pinhead, which I would read in those very same papers. The Angriest Dog was hilariously deadpan and downbeat, the opening text title and most of the panels never changing from week to week. The only things that would change were what was said in the house, and whatever happened in the last panel. I love the perverse disregard for expectations. Haha! “How do you like my comic strip?”
Blue Velvet (1986) represented a new phase, and this is where (I think) Lynch premiered a voice that was his own that could speak to wider audiences. It’s where he first latched on to the strain of Kitsch/ Americana that so defined that decade, and seemingly became a permanent part of his style. The 1950s were relentlessly evoked, often nostalgically, but with Lynch it was invariably mixed with menace and violence. It was like seeing the Fonz walk into Arnold’s and crack Richie Cunningham over the head with a motorcycle chain. This motif wasn’t exclusive to Lynch, but it’s a major part of his vision, starting with this film. Considering it from this perspective, it is interesting to look at Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983) as an intermediary pivot point. Rumble Fish seems influenced by Eraserhead; Blue Velvet seems influenced by Rumble Fish. Though it’s his fourth feature, it’s Blue Velvet that feels like Lynch’s UR-vehicle, where he first cooked up a cocktail combining the horror film, murder mystery, sexploitation, the Hitchcockian double chase, popular music of the past (not just vintage rock and roll, but also torch songs), and surrealism. And though Lynch professes not to be “political” (and for the most part, isn’t, in a literal way) there is something powerful about the recurring drumbeat of rot, abuse, and monstrosity underneath the veneer of cheerful America that permeates most of his work since that time. It feels even truer in the age of Trump (now that the genie is out of the bottle) than it did in the age of Reagan (when we knew or suspected that it was there somewhere beneath the mask).
I share the photo above purely as proof of fandom. It’s my tee shirt proclaiming my approval of Wild at Heart (1990). This baby:
I loved that movie when it came out, though most other people seemed not to. It’s probably the closest thing Lynch has made to a comedy and it seemed in tune with other movies of the time like Something Wild (1986) and Raising Arizona (1987). I don’t think we’d have gotten Pulp Fiction or True Romance without Wild at Heart. It’s more literal-minded than a lot of his films, and this is the movie, more than any other, that’s full of Wizard of Oz Easter Eggs. I haven’t seen this one in over 30 years. The factor I remember more than any other was that Laura Dern flipped every one of biological switches in that one. Hoo, boy!
Next, the TV Phase. Naturally, I was a rabid fan of Twin Peaks (1990-92) as well, and was flabbergasted that it was a wide, mainstream success on network television. Co-created with Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues) it was a parody of soap operas more subversive than Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and it made no compromises as to weirdness (I mean, it had Michael J. Anderson talking backwards), even if the sex, violence, and language had to be toned down substantially. (Naturally the 1992 movie that emerged Fire Walk With Me, had more opportunity to explore those darker elements). We think of TV as an impersonal medium, and films as being more expressive. But with David Lynch it seemed sort of the opposite. Like, it feels more autobiographical than any of his movies. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest, where Lynch had lived for part of his youth. His personal habits and enthusiasms (coffee, donuts, smoking) are reflected. And Lynch was in it himself! He has expressed a liking for Jacques Tati. To me, the most Tati-like presence in his movies is his own awkward persona as an actor. (I’ve scarcely touched on the MANY amazing actors in Lynch’s movies. It’ll have to be saved for another day. Many of these screen productions deserve posts of their own as much as The Elephant Man does).
I mentioned a TV phase here. It wasn’t just Twin Peaks. Many folks don’t know that there were a couple of very short-lived Lynch TV shows after this. With Frost, he created On the Air (1992), theoretically a sit-com but much weirder, set at a radio station. With producer Monty Montgomery he also created a show for HBO called Hotel Room (1993) that was like a cross between Plaza Suite and Mystery Train. Neither show lasted more than three episodes.
Here’s where I want to give a little shout-out to Boxing Helena (1993). The film was directed by 19 year old Jennifer Lynch, the director’s daughter, but then, as now, it feels like part of the wider Lynch oeuvre. Jennifer may have served as partial inspiration for the baby in Erasehead, after all. Boxing Helena with its themes of amputation, sex, and will, is definitely a sick one, but I’m just sick enough to remember enjoying it. Jennifer Lynch has stretched her legs (ha!) somewhat since this movie came out, and is far less in her dad’s shadow. This one was definitely case of “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree!”
I mentally group together Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), as the “Incomprehensible Trilogy”, not meaning to imply that as a criticism, but these movies are dense and require very intense and repeated engagement. You could explore any one of them for months and never get to the bottom of them. I have no bandwidth for that today! In 1999, Lynch also surprised everyone by doing a relatively straight story called… The Straight Story (1999), a true tale about a man named Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) who rode 300 miles to visit his sick brother (Harry Dean Stanton) on a LAWN MOWER.
Okay, I really have to wind down now. I call this post incomplete because though it has been seven years I have not yet seen Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). It’s not so much an oversight as an outcome of the fact that in 2017 I was busy going to protest marches, consuming news, and vomiting screeds of anguish. Then in 2018, Lynch actually had the bad judgment to say some positive things about Trump (apparently) and so he was dead to me for a time, though he has subsequently walked his remarks back a little and clarified what he meant. To me, it was completely comprehensible that he would say what he said. Chaos, nihilism, those are in there. And I’m reminded of Salvador Dali and his support for Franco’s Fascism. Champions of the irrational sometimes walk the walk. I’m good if it stays on the canvas or the screen. When it charges up the Capitol Steps — not too cool. We’ll see how this nightmare plays out.