On January 20th, while the world’s attention was focussed on the Inauguration, David Lynch quietly turned seventy-five. He spent the day the way he’s spent almost every day since the pandemic began: sheltered in his Los Angeles home, engaged with self-prescribed daily routines. “If you have a habit pattern,” Lynch told me, over Zoom, “the more conscious part of your mind can concentrate on your work, and you can get ideas and do those things, and the rest sort of takes care of itself in the background.”
It sounded practical and wholesome, until Lynch related an example: a “famous criminal case” that he’d heard about, involving a man who hacked up his parents with an axe. The mother was killed in the act, but, Lynch said, “the father didn’t die right away. He was wounded terribly, in the head, but, in the morning, when it was his time normally to wake up, covered in blood he got out of bed—he didn’t even notice that his wife was dead right next to him—he just woke up and made his way down to do his habitual program. . . . Fixed breakfast, but he spilled his cereal all over the place. He didn’t notice this! He made coffee, he made a mess of everything, but he knew the habits, he knew the routine. He went to get his paper, like he does every morning, and he came in with the paper and just bled out, right there in the foyer, and that was the end of him.”
The anecdote, not surprisingly, sounds like something that could be in a David Lynch film, where the details of everyday life are transformed into something hideous, surreal, ludicrous, and violent—or, by recent standards, what passes for normal. As far as cultural icons go, it isn’t George Orwell who should be trending—it’s this guy.
In what seems the far-distant past of 2018, the critic Dennis Lim wrote that “the primal terror of Lynch’s films is an existential one, stemming from the ever-present possibility of things falling apart—the daily state of affairs, in other words, of Trump’s America.” But then things really did fall apart, and that destabilizing, anything-can-happen feeling at the foundation of Lynch’s pictures became right for a time of mutating lethal virus strains, QAnon cult conspiracies, bomb cyclones, Rudy Giuliani’s dripping temples, and sports teams cheered on by the piped-in reactions of cardboard-cutout fans. In the course of the past year, the world of David Lynch—which has never made logical sense—made perfect 2020 sense.
Though Lynch is primarily known for his ten feature films and for the television series “Twin Peaks,” those endeavors represent only a fraction of his ongoing activities. For more than a half century, he’s been a fountain of relentless unconstrained creativity—it’s just that a good deal of what he produces doesn’t reach the manicured surface of popular culture. But the work is there, a teeming, subterranean reservoir of it. There’s music he’s produced, written, and released, some of which he performs himself. He’s made a seemingly endless catalogue of oddball short films and videos, including, from 2017, “What Did Jack Do?,” which is on Netflix and features seventeen minutes of Lynch shaking down a pugnacious talking monkey. He’s responsible for a long-lived comic strip (“The Angriest Dog in the World”) and an animated series (“Dumbland”). He’s written a book about his creative process and meditation (“Catching the Big Fish”). Perhaps most impressively, he’s created an accomplished, diverse body of visual art in the form of painting, sculpture, furniture design, photography, drawing, and installation, including what he calls “kits”—the disassembled, carefully laid out and labelled carcasses of animals that come with detailed instructions for how to put them back together, like model airplanes.
Lynch has been living what he calls a “farmer’s life” during the pandemic. “This morning, I woke up at around [long pause] 3:04 A.M.,” he told me. “Then I have my coffee and take a few smokes out on the deck” before meditating, shooting a daily weather report that he posts on YouTube, and moving on to whatever else the workday holds. Sometimes it’s painting or sculpture; other times it’s intentional daydreaming, when he allows his mind to cast about for ideas (“like fishing, I always say”). Occasionally, he designs contraptions, like a urinal that swings out from underneath the sink in his studio. Some of these activities are demonstrated in another, irregular video series he does called “What Is David Working On?” The only people he currently interacts with in person are his wife, Emily Stofle, their eight-year-old daughter, his personal assistant, and his three adult children. Though rumors persist of there being a Lynch television project in the works, he told me that—for now—production work of any kind for him is on indefinite hold. He’s open to the idea of getting back into directing when it makes sense: “I would never say no to anything if I fell in love with the material.”
Lynch feels lucky that his career played out the way it has. “I did my work, but so many people do their work,” he said. “Fate plays such a huge role in our lives. Look at all the great artists out there, whose work is so good, and they never make it. I just happened to get blessed with green lights.” As he recounts in “Room to Dream,” his 2018 memoir, Lynch was able to break through when Mel Brooks gambled on him to direct “The Elephant Man,” the 1980 big-budget feature that Brooks co-produced, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and John Hurt. (The film garnered eight Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director.) Lynch was an unknown with exactly one feature credit to his name: the self-financed, avant-garde freak-out “Eraserhead,” an art film that had taken him seven years to make and that few had seen.
Brooks had some chutzpah. Released in 1977, Lynch’s “Eraserhead” is a steampunk cinematic chamber play, a hallucinatory tour through a private, interior world. The story, such as it is, centers on a put-upon man (Jack Nance) caught in a web of claustrophobic domesticity with a miserable wife and their sick baby. Yet, like most of Lynch’s films, the plot is the movie’s least important element. Oh, yes, I thought, upon revisiting it: the absurdly awkward family dinner of fraught silences; the roasted chickens twitching on their plates; the mincing night-club singer who lives inside a radiator and whose cheeks seem to have sprouted spongy tumors; the tortured cries of a newborn who might be part baby goat, part diseased seal. It all retains its revelatory aliveness today. But, rather than making me squirm, “Eraserhead” now offers a kind of welcome, gallows-style comfort, and I found myself having a response new to my experience, something I might call laughing in horror.
The phenomenon repeated itself as I made my way backward and forward through Lynch’s catalogue. His early success did not smooth his edges—not even close. Lynch emerged out of the world of experimental visual art (his earliest shorts, “Six Men Getting Sick” and “The Alphabet,” were attempts to create paintings that move), and he’s remained true to his punk-like, outsider instincts. Though he managed to find a side door into the mainstream with “The Elephant Man,” he’s continued to be a deviant, standing among us but not of us, his output as challenging and unique as when he began. Sometimes that output has intersected with current tastes (“Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet”), sometimes not (“Lost Highway,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” chicken kits). But it’s been consistently free and unpredictable—including his quiet, G-rated “The Straight Story,” a paean to aging and forgiveness, and also the savage, expressionistic collage that is “Inland Empire,” a film that Lynch shot without a finished script, and his last feature to date.
There were some bumps along the way. “Dune,” from 1984, is pretty unwatchable. (To be fair, it’s the only one of Lynch’s films for which he surrendered the final cut, an experience he’s described as “a nightmare.”) Lynch’s lone foray into live theatre, “Industrial Symphony No. 1” was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989, as a part of its Next Wave Festival. The festival director, Joseph Melillo, recalls that the one-night-only performance was primarily staged for the camera, to produce a feature-length music video; it seems neither fish nor fowl. (Lynch told me that he’s considered making a sequel but finds the unpredictability of live performance to be off-putting.) And, though the first iteration of “Twin Peaks” was considered groundbreaking for its time, its convoluted story line and increasingly silly campiness helped to fuel a swifter-than-expected demise, prompting William Grimes to write in the Times that the show made “a persuasive case that there should have been less of it.”
