DAVID LYNCH AND I ARE SITTING HIGH UP in his
aerielike studio talking about one of his favorite topics.
"I love concrete," he says. "Concrete is very
strong. It can be very smooth and make beautiful, minimal shapes."
He's just launching into a story about the
genius of his concrete trowler, Renaldo, who can give a wall a burnished
surface full of marvelous shapes and shades, when the phone rings. It's
his 9-year-old son, Riley.
"You want to do what?" Lynch
barks. "Ride your skateboard into the swimming pool? Of course you can't."
He shakes his head. "What did you think I'd say?"
As they talk, I think about how weird it would
be to have David Lynch as your dad.
TO TALK SERIOUSLY ABOUT LYNCH IS TO BEGIN with
his enthusiasms.
"Look at this," he says one hot August morning.
He shows me a photograph of a dilapidated industrial building. "I took it
last December in Lodz, Poland. I was at this film festival, Camerimage,
and it was so much fun. In the daytime we'd shoot factories, and at night
we'd shoot nudes."
Factories and nudes, nudes and factories -- of
such strange oppositions is Lynch's imagination made. His movies are torn
between light and dark, blonde and brunette, goofy and primal, avant-garde
and retro, the radiantly transcendent and the downright icky. And this
sense of duality carries into his daily existence. Lynch jealously guards
his privacy but parades his innermost kinks onscreen for the whole world
to see. He invariably talks poor -- "David's so goddamned cheap,"
his late friend Jack Nance once laughingly told me -- but has a
three-house compound in the Hollywood Hills. Although his twisted style
subverts traditional American values, his political attitudes are
profoundly conservative: "She's a wonderful woman," he once snapped when I
made fun of Nancy Reagan. Where many are swallowed by their
contradictions, Lynch gobbles them down like amphetamines. They're his
goad, his fuel, his shivering thrill.
When we first met in the mid-1980s, his big,
soft face was immaculately shaven, his hair neatly combed, his crisp white
shirt carefully buttoned all the way to the top. He exuded a corn-fed
adolescent enthusiasm -- did anyone else, even then, still say "Jeepers"?
-- and I understood why he was often compared to Jimmy Stewart. Now, at
55, he still uses the same cracker-barrel lingo, but time has left its
handwriting upon him. His eyes are bloodshot, the white shirt looks a tad
worn, and bits of gray stubble elude his razor. He still reminds me of
Jimmy Stewart, not the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington but the grizzled
obsessive from Vertigo. His beaming smile has lost its
innocence.
Yet sitting in his studio high above the family
bunker (all three houses are made of concrete), he's in fine spirits.
After years in the artistic wilderness, David Lynch is back with a
vengeance. He's about to launch a pay Web site, DavidLynch.com, and his new
movie, Mulholland Drive, has proven an unexpected triumph. A
rejected TV pilot that Lynch re-shot, re-cut and re-conceived,
Mulholland Drive isn't merely his best work in a decade, it may be
the best movie set in Hollywood since Sunset Boulevard.
In an essay written around the time of Lost
Highway, David Foster Wallace neatly explained why Lynch's work is so
unsettling: Unlike a normal film, a Lynch film gets under your skin
because you don't know what it wants from you. It enters you like a
dream.
This is certainly true of Mulholland
Drive, a corrosively beautiful fairy tale that's as mysterious as the
inky shadows that lie just beyond the throw of our headlights. It centers
on the apache dance of two wildly different women, one dark and one fair.
There's the hard-faced brunette sexpot known as Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who is suffering from amnesia, and there's innocent, blond Betty
Elms, played by Naomi Watts, whose breathtaking performance takes her from
wide-eyed wonder to a lacerating awareness of human emptiness. Wildly
ambitious and wantonly intuitive, the movie is at once a touching love
story, a portrait of L.A. illusions, a pomo slice of film noir, a
clubfooted satire of the movie business and a radical vision of the human
psyche -- not to mention another Lynchian riff on The Wizard of Oz,
complete with tiny people. Call it a tale about nudes caught in the Dream
Factory.
Like nearly all of Lynch's work, the movie
began not with a plot line but with a mood, an image, a title, a place --
in this case, Mulholland Drive.
"I picture Mulholland Drive at night," Lynch
says, lighting up an American Spirit cigarette. "Anybody who's driven on
that road knows that there's not a lot of traffic, and it's filled with
coyotes and owls and who knows what. You hear stories about things
that happen on Mulholland Drive. It's a road of mystery and danger. And
it's riding on top of the world, looking down on the Valley and Los
Angeles. You get these incredible vistas, so it's pretty dreamy as well as
mysterious."
THE MOST INSTINCTIVE OF ARTISTS, LYNCH HAS
never liked discussing his work and grows instantly leery when you bring
up questions of meaning. When I ask how he sees the difference between
blondes and brunettes, a classic dichotomy that he returns to
fetishistically, his answer's so deliberately vague that both of us smile
-- we know I'll never be able to use it. Like a good Middle American (he
was born in Montana), he views all manner of analysis with mortal
suspicion. He once went to a psychiatrist, and after the first session
asked if therapy might damage his creativity. The shrink said yes, and
Lynch never went back.
The first time I interviewed him, in 1986, I
spent hours peppering him with questions, all of which he deflected with
cheery aplomb. I felt like a high school kid parked with a perky virgin
who politely removed my hand each time I put it on her thigh. Today, we're
both too old for that song and dance, and we race through our paces like
blas¨¦ divorcees.
"You feel warier than you used to be?"
"Uh-huh."
"Less good-humored?"
"Uh-huh."
He leans back in his Aeron chair. I look around
his atelier, which is studded with Lynchiana. A coffee cup, a big kit of
Brookestone tools, a gorgeous, unfinished painting that contains the words
Bob's Anti-Gravity Factory. In a touch so talismanic that it feels
art-directed, his small portable stereo is adorned with the husk of a dead
fly.
He lights up another cigarette, and I ask about
his smoking. He says that 22 years after quitting cold turkey, he started
up again in 1992.
"What happened in 1992?"
He laughs mirthlessly. "Don't get funny with
me, Powers."
I originally wondered if his fabled
obsessiveness was a sly shtick, a way of giving reporters something droll
to write about while throwing them off the scent. No doubt this is partly
true. But in 1989, I spent a week interviewing Lynch for a French
documentary and saw firsthand how thoroughly his obsessions shaped his
life. Back then he wouldn't allow any food in the house (he hated the
smell) and ate exactly the same thing every day (as I recall, a tuna
sandwich for lunch). Since then, the menu has changed but not the
obsession:
"I'll have the same thing every day for six
months maybe, or even longer," he says. "And then one day I just can't
face it anymore.
"Now, I have cappuccino in the morning, many
coffees during the day, and salad that's put in a Cuisinart so each bite
tastes the same. No meat. This has got nuts and eggs and some lettuce and
different kinds of greens. So it's a little bowl of Cuisinart salad with
Parmesan cheese on top. And then at night I have a block of Parmesan
cheese, maybe a 2-inch cube, and red wine. Mary [Sweeney, with whom he
lives] cuts it up for me into little chunks and gives it to me in a
napkin."
When I ask why he wants to stick to this
redundant diet, he tells me that it's "reassuring . . . there are no
surprises there." Lynch's inner life is obviously so fertile and turbulent
-- a steaming Amazon of run-amok impulses -- that his culinary routine
provides a kind of sanctuary. Like the concrete walls that house him, his
dietary rituals help him fend off the outer world so he can devote all his
time to work.
For Lynch loves working more than anything in
the world. Tireless as a silkworm, he just can't stop creating: He paints,
makes movies, produces TV shows, takes photographs and plays guitar for a
heavy-metal band called Blue Bob. Creativity is the one topic he never
tires of talking about. He'll tell you how some ideas come from deep
inside you, and how other ideas come from places so much deeper inside
that they seem to be coming from outside you. And he'll tell you
how still others trickle into your mind like water and pool there until
you finally notice them and fall in love with their possibilities. Just
don't ask him what they mean.
"Once you fall in love with the ideas," he
exults, "that is so thrilling. There's not much more to think about except
trying to go as deep into that world as you can and being true to those
ideas. You kind of get lost. And getting lost is beautiful."
OF COURSE, SOME WAYS OF GETTING LOST ARE not so
lovely, and for most of the last decade, Lynch seemed to have dropped off
the cultural map.
It hardly seemed possible. From the moment he
made the definitive midnight movie, Eraserhead, in 1976, he was a
guy on the rise. True, Dune was a megabudget flop, but Lynch had
already landed a Best Director Oscar nomination for The Elephant
Man, and his next picture, Blue Velvet, quickly became one of
the cinematic touchstones of the last quarter-century. By the summer of
1990, his trademark blend of irony, grotesquery and visceral emotionalism
had made him the heppest cat around. Wild at Heart had just won the
Palme d'Or at Cannes, Twin Peaks was an international craze, and
Lynch himself gazed out from the cover of Time, which dubbed him
the "Czar of Bizarre." He had turned a common Irish surname into a
resonant adjective -- the word Lynchian was every bit as evocative
as Kafkaesque -- and his eccentric sensibility seeded the clouds of
the '90s, influencing TV programs like Northern Exposure and
cartoonists like Daniel Clowes, and injecting his artistic DNA into the
work of Tarantino, Egoyan and the brothers Coen (what is Fargo if
not a more anodyne Twin Peaks?).
But just when Lynch seemed to have it made,
this oddball Icarus flew too close to mass culture's klieg lights. Despite
a shattering climax, Twin Peaks guttered and died, and the public
never warmed to Wild at Heart (which I still think is his worst
film). By the time Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was released in
1992 (and yes, that's the year he began smoking again), he had fallen
sadly out of favor. Although his account of Laura Palmer's last week is
one of that decade's bravest and most harrowing films, it died in a
blizzard of nasty, uncomprehending reviews (The Washington Post
termed it a "psychic autopsy, a weirdly fundamentalist cogitation on the
intersection of Heaven, Hell and Washington state").
When I ask about this fall from grace, he
shrugs and replies in the primitivist terms you might expect: "They warned
me if you're on the cover of Time, you've got two years' bad luck
coming. And a black cloud did come over me, and when the black cloud comes
over, there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing. And you look out and
you wonder, 'How come these things are happening and people are saying
these things?' It's just the way it is. It's just part of the deal. And
then you wonder, 'How long will the cloud be there?'"
Lynch didn't make another film for five years,
and you heard industry types muttering that he was "over." But his own
faith in himself was unshaken. "If you don't believe in the work and you
get bad reviews, then it's really devastating. But if you believe in it,
then the bad reviews, at most, are confusing -- you can still live. With
Dune it was the first example, and with Fire Walk With Me it
was the second."
Because his work never relies on formula, Lynch
has a narrower margin for error than most filmmakers: If a scene or two
goes kerflooey, he completely loses the audience. That's pretty much what
happened with the patchy Lost Highway (1997), whose Möbius-strip
structure was miles from Hollywood's three-act clich¨¦ -- Bill Pullman
transforms into Balthazar Getty with no explanation. People just
didn't get it. That may be one reason he played it so linear in The
Straight Story, a lawn-mower-powered 1999 road movie that was as
square as Grandma's favorite doily. Although the movie was guilty of
romanticizing small-town life (no Wal-Mart in Lynch's Iowa), it also
marked a heartfelt stab at a new emotional maturity. Lynch genuinely
believed what he was saying about family and reconciliation. The movie had
a tenderness largely missing since The Elephant Man.
That tenderness has carried over into
Mulholland Drive, which finds Lynch up to his customary trick of
dropping light and dark into the Cuisinart. Although this is the
crookedest story he's ever told, Lynch never loses sight of his heroines'
frailty amid all the hallucinations, mistaken identities, performances
within performances, dreams within dreams within dreams. The film's vision
is bleak, for Lynch no longer seems to believe in any kind of solid,
stable psyche. He portrays the self as a series of trap doors through
which we tumble, or perhaps as an onion -- peel off its layers and there's
nothing left but silence. In a pivotal scene, Rita and Betty go to a
downtown theater and watch a Latina singer belt out a song with wrenching
passion. It's a dazzling star turn -- until we discover that she's merely
lip-synching. Mulholland Drive suggests that each of our lives is a
performance in which we're never quite sure whose voice we're really
hearing, or who's writing the lines.
It's not that Lynch has no idea of how he'd
like the world to be. For all his dark, perverse imaginings, his social
values are rooted in the sunlit credo of the American West: Don't tread
on me. Nothing matters to him more than his freedom to do whatever he
thinks up. I first saw this side of him one afternoon in 1989 when he
began railing about the city government: It wouldn't let him put razor
wire around his property to keep itinerants from cutting across his
property. He shook his head:
"You know, John, this country's in pretty bad
shape when human scum can walk across your lawn, and they put you
in jail if you shoot 'em."
While Lynch doesn't seem like the sort of man
who's packing heat, he was drawn to Ronald Reagan because of his "cowboy
image" and laments that L.A.'s wonderland of individual freedom is being
hedged in by rules and regulations. He takes building-code restrictions
personally. "People," he says, "should be able to build what they
want to build, when they want to build it, how they want to
build it."
Although he claims to know nothing of politics,
in last year's election he backed the Natural Law Party, whose philosophy
is that an ideal government mirrors the natural order. While this may
sound slightly wacko, the party's platform is perfectly sensible --
libertarianism with a human face. As part of the campaign, Lynch produced
a campaign video for the party's presidential candidate, John Hagelin, an
acclaimed quantum physicist. This tape is an extremely strange document
(you can see it at http://archive.hagelin.org/soundbytes/davidlynch.htm),
for Lynch has no great knack for doing normal. He interviews the candidate
in front of creepy golden curtains and punctuates the questions with
ominous pulsing music. The superbrainy Hagelin winds up seeming like an
off-kilter, B-movie version of a real politician -- the presidential
hopeful from Twin Peaks.
Lynch's picture of the world was formed in the
1950s, and he clearly adores the mythologized version, that fabulous
decade of jukeboxes and sneaky-perverse movies like Rear
Window.
"It was a feeling in the air that anything was
possible. People were enthusiastically inventing things that thrilled
them. And there was a happiness in the air. There was plenty going on
beneath the surface, but it wasn't as dark a time because there was that
other thing going along with it. The '50s was a time when people seemed to
be going crazy with design. And the cars were just incredible. I mean, you
look at them, and it's like you start to fall in love. That changed, you
know, in the '60s and '70s. The cars were pitiful. I mean pitiful.
It made you ashamed. You'd wanna hang your head and go in a corner. It was
sickening."
We're talking a couple of days before September
11, but Lynch is already gloomy about the state of the world:
"You just get the feeling that you're sort of
powerless in the big picture. And it's not like 'I better get mine,' but
I'm gonna burrow in and concentrate and enjoy doing that. Not try to put
my head in the sand, but for my own protection let as little of that
outside negativity affect me."
He lights another American Spirit.
Far more than when we first met, Lynch appears
to be isolating himself from the outside world. And there's more to this
than just surrounding himself with concrete walls. Where he once waxed
lyrical about tooling around L.A., he now says he doesn't drive very much
anymore. People have gotten too crazy and the cars too hideous. "If the
cars were more beautiful," he says about driving, "somehow I think people
would take care and enjoy it more."
At the moment, he seems settled in a
domesticity I wouldn't have believed possible in the early '90s. Back then
he was known for squiring around actresses, from ex-flame Isabella
Rossellini to Twin Peaks hotty Sherilyn Fenn. (In life, anyway, he
prefers his women dark rather than fair.) He's currently into his 10th
year with companion Mary Sweeney, a multitalented brunette who produced
his last three films, edited all his work since Fire Walk With Me ä
and co-wrote The Straight Story. She's also the mother of
9-year-old Riley.
I ask Lynch: "Do you like being a
father?"
His smile falters slightly. "What does that
have to do with anything?"
WHEN THE AIRPLANES FLATTENED the World Trade
Center, the composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen caused a scandal by calling it
a great work of art. Lynch is not so cut off from humanity as to say
anything like that, but far more than anyone I've met, he does view life
through the prism of aesthetics. He's so preternaturally attuned to design
that it's sometimes hard to believe he's not kidding.
I've been told that Lynch likes to hang around
the vintage modern furniture shop Skank World, and one morning, I ask if
he cares about furniture. He instantly sits up.
"Caring," he says, giving it a little
spin. "Every word has, you know, its spread of power. You could care a
little bit or you could care a lot. But if you put this word caring
at the maximum-level intensity, it wouldn't begin to be enough to say how
much I love furniture.
"And I have been sick lately. I'm not
seeing any furniture that thrills my soul. I look around, I look at stuff,
and a lot of times it's close but no cigar. A piece of furniture can
completely destroy a whole room." He pauses to sip his coffee. "You know,
unless the environment is a certain way, you really do yourself a
disservice."
Lynch himself has designed furniture, and
though he finds none of it "thrilling" -- the highest term of praise in
his lexicon -- I ask if we can look at what he's come up with. We step
carefully down the narrow pathway and wind up in house number three, which
is less a home than a gigantic grown-up playhouse.
We pass through a room filled with gorgeous,
sinister paintings devoted to the further misadventures of Bob, then move
down a dark hallway to a door. It opens to reveal a full-fledged
motion-picture mixing studio, with a big silver screen, two 35mm
projectors, huge Marshall amps and technicians sipping coffee. They're
working on the sound for the forthcoming The Elephant Man DVD, and
Lynch promises me that the remix is going to be "pretty tasty." From
there, he leads me to a room filled with the equipment that runs the
studio, and an Epson 9500 photo printer that uses rolls of paper up to 44
inches wide. Lynch fondly calls it the "Bad Boy."
All this must have cost you a fortune, I say,
and he nods.
"It was not pretty."
Eventually we find our way to his office, where
I'm shown a group of tables that he designed -- an asymmetrical espresso
table, a club table with a special slot for cigarettes, and a "floating
beam" table, whose thick underlying beam appears to hang in the air. They
were built by a Swiss company called Casanostra, which subsequently went
out of business. Lynch insists that his tables weren't the reason why,
though it's hard to imagine anyone buying one with the intention of using
it -- they're fabulous Magritte-style curios rather than practical home
furnishings.
Even as he dutifully shows me a bed he designed
(the headboard was made, he says, by "Raoul, the upholsterer to the
stars"), he's eager to get me over to the computer, a relatively new
obsession. Lynch's tastes may run to retro in cars and lamps, but he's not
one of those Luddites who find Flash animation as incomprehensible as
Sanskrit or hate digital video (he's thought of making a silly DV comedy
titled The Dream of the Bovine). Lynch happily embraces what he
calls the "beautiful world" of the Internet, which he sees as a new
frontier of staggering freedom. "The whole world is made of little bits,"
he says, "and now we've been given little bits that we can manipulate. The
sky is the limit."
Predictably, Lynch has no discernible interest
in using computers the way most of us do. He rarely surfs the Net, doesn't
play video games. Instead, he has spent much of the last two years
designing DavidLynch.com, which was optimistically scheduled to
launch October 12 (it didn't make it) and should be open for business any
day now. The site will showcase all manner of new Lynchiana, from still
photographs and music to DV serials.
Once his computer's booted up, he clicks his
mouse. Up pops a set of surreal teeth that open and close. Very
spooky.
Click! We're looking at a seedy apartment
occupied by three characters, all of whom have human bodies topped with
big-eared bunny heads.
Click! An extraordinary close-up of
bees.
Click! A naked woman in a jar.
Click! A butcherd pig that's been reassembled
and now stands on its back legs ("I'm going to make the pig walk").
Click! To my shock, there's a picture of Lynch
bending over and pointing his finger at his backside (covered, thank
heavens), which is aimed straight at the camera.
Lynch laughs. "I did this one for a guy who
said I hadn't paid him some money."
We spend a long time perusing a still photo of
the elevator lobby from Eraserhead. Using PhotoShop, Lynch has been
able to make the elevator doors slide open to reveal what's inside --
light spills out onto the carpet in the foreground.
He stares at it intently. "There was a period
when I could get lost in this world for weeks at a time."
My allotted time has run out, and I keep
preparing to leave. But looking at all this material, Lynch is getting
excited. He keeps offering to show me one more thing. He shows me two
nudes. He shows me another Polish factory. He shows me the lovely
prototype image for his Web site's chat room, which looks like some unholy
hybrid of a steam engine and a film projector.
As the images keep coming (even more bees!), I
find myself getting caught up in his boyish enthusiasm. His stuff really
is cool! And I'm reminded why, though some folks think him dark or
nasty, I've always found Lynch inspiring. A true romantic, he believes in
the transcendent power of imagination, the possibility of creating
wondrous new worlds.
Computers, I say, must be a real boon to
obsessives like him.
He tells me that, for the upcoming DVD of
Eraserhead, a man named Arash has spent four months digitally
tweaking all the images.
"You know, like, when you're watching a film on
TV, you see little white specks? That's negative dirt. On
Eraserhead, the dirt was built in. There was no way to get rid of
it. Every print had the same dirt. And you know how when you're on your
computer and you've got your magnifying glass, you can go to the next
magnification and see large? And on the next magnification you'll see
billions of pieces of dirt and so on? Well, Arash has cleaned this
thing."
"Cleaned it?"
"Frame by frame." He beams triumphantly. "It
will be the cleanest film in cinema history."