Unlocking David Lynch

The enigmatic director offers keys to his body of work in a new documentary

Promotional material for ‘David Lynch: The Art Life’ Image courtesy of Cinetic Media.

David Lynch is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to divulging the inspiration and meaning behind his enigmatic films. So it makes sense that the audience at the North American premiere of David Lynch: The Art Life audibly gasped when the director relayed an anecdote that spoke directly to one of his most iconic visual moments in film.

After driving into the city and getting stoned for the first time as a teenager, Lynch and co. were headed back home when he realized he’d completely stopped his truck in the freeway. Traffic must have been peeling around him, but he was transfixed. Why did he stop? Because, in his altered state, he was obsessed with the traffic lines on the road, and watched as they moved slower, and slower, until they stopped. Sound familiar?

David Lynch: The Art Life, which just premiered at the documentary film festival DOC NYC, follows Lynch around his artist studio as he works on paintings and sculptures and recounts his early days. Instead of sitting down with the enigmatic director of Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Eraserhead and getting him to divulge all his secrets, the directors let him narrate the first twenty-odd years of his life, and overlaid that with scenes of Lynch stretching putty, working black chalk onto wax paper, and generally getting his hands dirty.

As he paints in his studio, cigarette smoke swirling around a coif of white hair, Lynch delves into his childhood, adolescence, and college years leading up to the creation and release of Eraserhead in 1977. Though he’d never go the De Palma route, painstakingly explaining film by film his thoughts and process, Lynch describes a young life full of keys critical to unlocking and better understanding his films.

The Geographical Key: The Duality of Suburbia

Blue Velvet. Image courtesy MGM.

Lynch was born in Montana, and moved around quite a bit as a child. He had a particular fondness for Boise, Idaho, where he described his life as very insular and safe. “My whole world,” Lynch explains in the film, “was two, three blocks.” But just as suburban life could be peaceful, it could also be terrifying, as Lynch recounts an encounter with a dazed and confused naked woman wandering toward he and his brother late one night. And he described his subsequent move from Boise to Virginia as a dark and broiling time, saying “Virginia seemed like… always night.” While some of his work, like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, takes place in and deals with Hollywood, a large body of Lynch’s filmography concerns itself with suburban life. And key to that exploration is this duality of suburbia, which was at once safe and dangerous, and it reverberates into his works like Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

The Inspiration Key: Creating ‘The Art Life’

Young David Lynch. Image courtesy of Cinetic Media.

The title of the documentary, The Art Life, comes from a phrase that Lynch concocted to help explain a certain ethos of creativity. Though not as direct a link to his films as some of the other inspirations on this list, the founding of The Art Life spoke to a tireless devotion to creative practice that Lynch would carry through his paintings, his films, and beyond. And all of this was born from early interactions with the artist Bushnell Keeler.

The painter’s work couldn’t be further from Lynch’s (much of his art features sailboats listing at sea), but as the father of one of Lynch’s childhood friends, Keeler was the first working artist the director ever met. Sharing studio space, mentoring, and pushing from Bushnell helped Lynch develop The Art Spirit, or Art Life, which he described as “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it.”

The Death Key: Morgue Visits

From ‘Twin Peaks.’ Image courtesy of ABC/Spelling Ent./CBS Paramount Domestic Television

While living in Philadelphia (more on that in a moment) Lynch lived near a local morgue. After befriending a night guard at Pop’s Diner, Lynch was allowed in to see the bodies. “It just makes you think how they got there,” Lynch reminisces in the documentary. “It makes you think of stories.” The morgue, and more generally the mystery of a dead body, holds a special place in Lynch’s work, especially in Twin Peaks. And the idea that a place most would find repulsive could be a wellspring of creativity feels very in-line with our perception of the director, doesn’t it?

The Industrial Key: Philadelphia Rot

Eraserhead. Image courtesy The Criterion Collection.

Lynch describes Philadelphia as “the last place in the world I ever wanted to go.” But in the late 1960s Lynch moved there to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and found that Philly “was kind of a poor-man’s New York City. So it was a weird town… a mean town.” Lynch has often equated the squalor and industrial menace of Eraserhead with his time spent in the city of brotherly love, and in The Art Life, he paints the town as a sort of smoke-stack madhouse.