The first long, proper kiss David Lynch had with a girl took place in a ponderosa pine forest in America’s north-west. Pine needles, incredibly soft, covered the floor to a depth of about two feet. High treetops pierced the blue sky. The feel of the woods he knew as a boy stayed with him all his life: the smell of them, their dim lost interiors, the crispness of the air. “Twin Peaks”, the mysterious TV series that made him wildly famous in the early 1990s, opened with a shot of pines, mountains and mist. The mist too lingered, drifting in deep bass notes across the face of Laura Palmer, the high-school homecoming queen whose dead body, wrapped up in plastic, lay at the heart of the story. Beneath the surface ordinariness, violent disturbance was going on.
That seemed true of most small towns. He grew up in them, especially in Boise, Idaho, and sometimes felt romantic for those neat yards and white picket fences, the scrubbed children and Sunday excursions. Yet under those lawns (as under the pine needles), insects were tangling and devouring each other. Entropy ate away at every new thing. As a boy he liked to walk the streets at night, curious not about the brightly lit windows but the low-lit, curtained ones. Curtains hid secrets. Behind them, a man and a woman might be sitting in silence in an atmosphere of coiled-up menace. Should he stay silent himself? Should he speak? What would happen next? In his film “Blue Velvet” (1986), one small-town field produced a newly severed ear, evidence, eventually, of a psychopath’s sexual rampages. A woman also appeared out of the dark at the end of a street, naked, with a bloodied mouth. That was something he had witnessed himself—in Boise. It was in such a tender state, all this flesh, in an imperfect world.
His view of what was ugly or grotesque was not like other people’s. Textures obsessed him, the very look and feel of mud, dust, scales and slime. Sores and wounds could be beautiful. He tried to concoct by himself the gruesome growths on the face of Joseph Merrick in “The Elephant Man”. And he loved abandoned factories in their full grime and ruination. As a young man, hoping to live “the art life”, he went to study painting in then-run-down Philadelphia. His enchantment with its smoky walls, stark shadows, broken windows and wailing trains was poured into “Eraserhead” (1977), a black-and-white film he produced while on a fellowship at the American Film Institute. Its very weirdness made critics notice him. The hero, Henry Spencer, the new father of a mutant-fetus baby, was an innocent whose wedge-shaped hair seemed to explode with confusion. He moved wide-eyed through the horror, beauty and mystery of the world, trying to figure out how everything could be the way it was, as did the straight-arrow-cherry-pie detectives of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks”. Their director saw himself in all of them.
It did not bother him that audiences were often left completely at sea. It was good to ask questions and compare interpretations. He himself knew exactly what he wanted; his task was to transfer his dreams and intuitions perfectly to the screen, turning fragile glass to steel. No detail—the placing of a cup, the dirt beneath a radiator, the precise orange hue of a lipstick—could escape his attention. But the plots, he felt, were simple. “Mulholland Drive”, the mesmerising tale of one aspiring actress unwisely befriending another, was a film that attacked the power structures of Hollywood. “Inland Empire”, which came later and did less well, was the story of an actress increasingly terrified by the death of the woman who had played the part before. At their simplest, almost all his films involved characters confronting the dark sides of themselves. And those were so dark that his lighting man struggled to produce a black that was black enough.
He himself, however, displayed no dark side. He seemed to come straight out of the 1950s, with his khakis, blazers and shirts buttoned right to the top because he didn’t like air on his collarbone. Male friends were “buster” and good things “peachy-keen”. For months and years he would eat the same breakfast every day, coffee and a chocolate milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy in LA, and the same lunch, a grilled-cheese sandwich. He smoked as though the practice had never been outlawed, getting emphysema in the end. With his actors he was no yeller, but gentle, indicating what he wanted with just a word or a touch on an arm. This went right to them. His aspect was so serene—the result of the meditations he had done twice daily since 1973—and he asked so nicely, that his actors would strive to do whatever he wanted, even when it involved ceremonial rape and sado-masochism (in “Blue Velvet”) or rolling in the dirt and masturbation (in “Mulholland Drive”).
The only thing that maddened him was loss of control of the work. In 1983 he agreed to direct “Dune”, a science-fiction epic based on a bestselling novel. Its scale and its setting, in the empty desert, did not suit him at all. He was a man of interiors, details and harrowing close-ups; this was a Hollywood production for the extra-wide screen. Besides, he was an artist, who could no more collaborate on directing than on doing his lumpy, child-like paintings. Consequently, neither Hollywood nor the TV companies really took to him. He won no Oscars. Another director got the final cut on “Dune”, producing a version he refused to recognise.
Worse was what happened to “Twin Peaks”, when halfway through the second series ABC thought it was going too slowly, and forced him to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was. All the narrative tension leaked out of it then, and ABC killed it off. That was Fate, perhaps. He made further visits to the town, a prequel film and in 2017 a hugely popular third series, because he seemed to love Laura too much to leave her. Her face was still appearing and disappearing in the mist. And it gave him an excuse to go to the forest again, braving the haunted depths, to celebrate what a strange, beautiful trip life was. ■