Review: 'David Lynch' Revised & Updated Edition

Break the code, solve the crime. One thing that draws a lot of viewers to the films of David Lynch is Lynch's refusal to express his intentions on the surface. In an age when every film's message must be explicitly stated for an audience with the attention span of a puppy, David Lynch's dogged refusal to ever play that dull game is especially thrilling. 

It also means that theories about what, say, that blue box in Mulholland Dr. means are more plentiful than donuts in Agent Cooper's mouth. Whether they be glib brain farts or endless exegeses, explanations of what Lynch really meant are everywhere. To the late filmmaker's credit, he rarely validated any, but also rarely outright said any were wrong either.

Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'Blue Velvet' Blu-ray

Having begun his career as a pure avant gardist with challenging yet emotionally rich films such as The Grandmother and Eraserhead, David Lynch took an unexpected turn into the mainstream when he made the historical melodrama The Elephant Man and the space opera Dune. With his next feature, Lynch found the perfect balance between his most outré ideas and the more traditional storytelling that would make him America’s most popular surrealist. Nevertheless, Blue Velvet still split audiences, with some finding his S&M noir deeply compelling while others finding its extreme scenes of sexual sadism repelling.

As is usually the case with Lynch’s films, plot is secondary to style, world-building, and unfiltered emotion, but Blue Velvet is one of his more traditionally sensible stories despite odd elements such as the severed ear that draws clean cut college boy Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the seedy underworld in which repulsive thug Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) kidnaps the husband and child of nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) as leverage for forcing her into humiliating and violent sex acts.

Review: 'The Women of David Lynch: A Collection of Essays'

Like almost all artists worth discussing, David Lynch is highly controversial. Some viewers praise his ability to place you in an unsettling, beautiful, transcendent, and completely realized world. Others dismiss him as a purveyor of weird for the sake of weird. He has also split viewers in terms of his treatment of women. Some feel that the way he portrays women is complex and ultimately empathetic. Many others have dismissed him as a misogynist who gets off on forcing his female characters to suffer.

This particular issue has continually resurfaced since the release of Blue Velvet 33 years ago and on through the debut of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks just a couple of years ago. The argument regarding Lynch’s treatment of women is so pervasive that Scott Ryan decided to devote an entire issue of his Twin Peaks ’zine The Blue Rose to the women of David Lynch. Ultimately, he has devoted an entire book to that subject. Since Ryan is a man, he is not the most qualified writer to dive into this sensitive topic, and he very wisely keeps a low profile in The Women of David Lynch. Instead he cedes control to thirteen women to explore such topics as Dorothy Valens’s role in Blue Velvet, the roles of non-white women in Twin Peaks, and the roles of all of the female characters in The Elephant Man. There are also interviews with Mädchen Amick of Twin Peaks and Charlotte Stewart of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, which provide firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a woman in Lynch’s world.

Most of the authors who contribute to The Women of David Lynch lean toward a more positive assessment of his treatment of women. They believe that he is generally intent on presenting a realistic idea of what it is like to be a women struggling through a patriarchal society. Understandably, the writers who tackle his treatment of non-white female characters are less forgiving, particularly Melanie McFarland, who is the only writer who is very emphatically not a fan of Lynch’s work. However, even she admits that it’s all a matter of interpretation as she cites other women writers who continue to admire Lynch’s work. Lynch is certainly an artist who demands active interpretation from those who take in his often confounding and troubling work.

As much as I love that work, I am one of those fans who is often troubled by the ideas behind his dreamy/disturbing imagery, and I found it very enlightening that many of the women of The Women of David Lynch found some of Lynch’s more controversial characters, such as Dorothy Valens and Mary X of Eraserhead, worthy of empathy and praise. I guess it does come down to interpretation, though just as a guy like Scott Ryan is not the ideal assessor of Lynch’s treatment of women, a guy like me is not the best assessor of the conclusions of the women who contribute to The Women of David Lynch. I can say that several of these writers confirmed some of my negative assessments, but some challenged them for the better, helping me to gain a more thorough appreciation for work I already loved with definite political reservations. While a couple of the more experimental essays didn’t work for me at all (one is written in the parlance of a Facebook post complete with excessive all caps and “LOLs”; another briefly reviews each of Lynch’s features from the pov of a misogynistic murderer on acid), most of these essays are accessible and enlightening, though I’m sure this particular issue will continue to be debated as long as people continue to study the work and women of David Lynch.

"You're Like Me": The Strange Links Between 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and 'Blue Velvet'

David Lynch has created some of the scariest moments on film. The infamous scene behind Winkie’s Diner has been rated cinema’s scariest scene more than once. Twin Peaks has been named television’s scariest show. Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, INLAND EMPIRE, and, of all things, The Elephant Man have been categorized as horror movies through the years. However, Lynch has never really been a horror film director. Rather he works horror into his work in the same way that he works in comedy and melodrama, and because he does not really make films we expect to hit the beats of specific genres, those moments of humor, naked emotion, and terror always hit harder than they would in genre pictures because they are so unexpected.

Review: 'David Lynch: The Art Life' Blu-ray Review

David Lynch the filmmaker has been the subject of such documentaries as Toby Keeler’s Pretty As a Picture and Jason S.’s Lynch 1 and Lynch 2. These films were fascinating opportunities to watch Lynch work despite his notorious reluctance to explain the meanings behind his cryptic works. Lynch has also shied away from talking about his personal life aside from a few stock stories, such as his disturbing sighting of a naked, battered woman when he was a child and the violent nightmarishness of his time in Philadelphia. These tales primarily serve as all the explanation he’ll give about the inspirations behind Blue Velvet and Eraserhead respectively.

Director Jon Nguyen and cinematographer Jason S.’s recent documentary David Lynch: The Art Life manages to finally dig deeper into the artist’s origins. Jason S. had apparently been living with Lynch since making Lynch 1 in 2007, allowing him greater access to Lynch’s work, thoughts, and trust. The fruit of this is a revealing story that goes well beyond the stock ones. We learn that Lynch was not just an “Eagle Scout,” as his Twin Peaks-era bio read in full. He also went through a phase as a Bobby Briggs-style J.D., drinking and causing trouble with a bad crowd. He has discussed his parents in stock stories about Donald Lynch’s habit of walking to work in his “ten gallon hat” every day and Edwina Lynch’s refusal to allow her son to use coloring books since she thought it stifled true creativity. In The Art Life he goes beyond those stories to discuss a dad who was deeply disturbed to witness his son’s approach to art that sometimes involves rotting plants and dead animals and a mom who encouraged her son’s creativity but withheld more physical affections. Some stories, such as one involving a neighbor named “Mr. Smith,” are too painful to tell, and he leaves them hanging and elliptical like so much of his film work.

Those films do not get much attention. Lynch’s “pre-professional” movies The Alphabet, The Grandmother, and Eraserhead are discussed briefly, leaving the focus more on his work as a painter and sculptor. His artworks can be very revealing regarding his film work, though. Those who were captivated by Twin Peaks: The Return will be thrilled to see how much of his non-filmic artwork reflects imagery from his recent 18-hour film.

The opportunity to watch Lynch create such works is invigorating too. They are three-dimensional pieces very much in the physical realm, and he creates them using thick, almost alive materials, grabbing and pulling them and spreading them on boards with his hands. I personally found Twin Peaks: The Return to be the most stimulating piece of art I’ve encountered since Lynch’s previous film, Inland Empire, in 2006. Watching him create is equally stimulating. So is hearing him speak. Lynch’s awkwardness and reluctance as a speaker is well known, but that somehow also makes him a mesmerizing communicator, and his is the only voice we hear in the film.

David Lynch: The Art Life comes to blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The film looks great, making the deliberately Lynchian booth from which he speaks (Ribbon mic. Green trees. Red light) pop off the screen. Of course, it is the less pristine footage of him as a child and teenager, his parents, and behind the scenes footage of his early films that is most electrifying. This disc is oddly short on supplements for an installment in the Criterion Collection, especially considering how much outtake footage Jason S. must have accumulated over ten years, but an interview with director Jon Nguyen makes the main feature even richer and more revealing.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 112

The Date: January 20

The Movie: Blue Velvet (1986)

What Is It?: After his purely experimental and purely commercial early work, David Lynch welds the two poles into the pop-avant garde style that would make him a household-name surrealist. Nancy Drew mysteries with an unhealthy dose of S&M lunacy and Dennis Hopper menace makes for one potent brew.

Why Today?: On this day in 1946, David Lynch is born.

Review: 'David Lynch: The Factory Photographs'

It seems as though David Lynch has only recently made clear his adoration of abandoned factories, but those who’ve been watching his work from the very start will recognize this has been a long simmering fascination for the artist. Both Henry Spencer in Eraserhead and John Merrick in The Elephant Man live in factory wastelands of black and white. In Dune, the vile Baron Harkonnen resides in a factory world of pipes, ducts, and gangrenous walls. Shortly after making The Elephant Man, Lynch began taking still photos of his favorite environment and continued to through the decades, snapping their looming smoke-stacked exteriors and rusting, shadowed interiors in Poland, Germany, England, and the U.S. Many of the most evocative are collected in Prestel Publishing’s new book David Lynch: The Factory Photographs. This may sound like a willfully nichey novelty, but Lynch has a way of taking the most mundane concept and working his dark alchemy on it, chilling you deeply with ordinary objects like windows, pipes, fans, ducts, bricks, and lighting fixtures. The Factory Photographs is as purely a Lynchian work as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, or his photos of ants crawling on clay heads. And it is not just an assortment of pictures on a single subject; it is a total exploration of that subject’s place in Lynchland. There’s an extensive essay on Lynch’s use of factories across the multitudinous media he has explored, a compendium of Lynch quotes on factories, and reproductions of his factory-inspired paintings and a short interview with the artist himself about this pet topic. Like all of Lynch’s work, The Factory Photographs is something to get lost in, a place to dream.

Ten Outstanding Performances in David Lynch Works

David Lynch a master of conjuring uncanny, dreamy atmosphere, of terrifying viewers with films that aren’t quite horror movies, of blending genres into swirling nightmares that defy pat analysis. This is the stuff of which the term “Lynchian” is made. But let’s not forget that he is also an expert conductor of actresses and actors, and he has superb taste in them despite his cheeky use of specimens like Billy Ray Cyrus every now and then. The emotional and logical demands of a David Lynch script require remarkably talented interpreters and very often result in thoroughly unique, flat-out stunning performances. Here are ten of the greatest.

1. Jack Nance as Henry Spencer in Eraserhead

Jack Nance would deserve a place on this list if for nothing but his commitment. Eraserhead famously took five years to make as Lynch kept running out of money. That meant Nance had to both remain in character for five years and wear Henry Spencer’s—ummm—distinctive hair style for five years. Nance’s work in the film is far more than that though. With a bare minimum of dialogue, he relies on his subtly expressive face and masterfully controlled body language to convey the real emotion roiling away beneath Henry’s placid surface as he contends with his monstrous, mocking baby. The slightest smile conveys a flash of fatherly pride, the upturn of eyebrows conveys his despondency with his lot in life, his restful expression at the end of the film let’s us know that he finally feels loved, and it is a most moving climax. And when Nance does speak, his choked delivery draws out the film’s humor and sadness with expert balance. Lynch regards Nance as one of the most expert actors with whom he’s ever worked and handed roles in almost all of his films to Nance until the actor’s death in 1996.

2. Freddie Jones as Bytes in The Elephant Man

10 Non-Horror Movies That Think They're Horror Movies

We expect monsters and suspense and shocks and disturbing images when we watch horror movies. They’re all part of the gravestone-littered territory. But what happens when such elements creep into dramas and crime pictures and kiddie-flicks and musicals and sci-fi spectaculars and pseudo documentaries? They may get under our skin even more assuredly because they don’t belong; they’re wrong, and horror has always drawn much of its power from showing us very wrong things. Thus some of the scariest movies are not horror movies at all, but movies that apparently think they’re horror movies. Here are ten of the most horrifying.

1. The Curse of the Cat People (1944 – dir. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch)

We begin with an exception to the rules delineated above. Val Lewton may be horror’s most renowned producer, yet most of his films could just as easily have found a place on this list because he so emphatically avoided commitment to the supernatural. RKO pictures handed Lewton goofy titles like I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Cat People, expecting him to make cheapo monster flicks to turn a quick profit. He in turn paid as little lip service to standard horror as possible, mining these pictures for unsettling psychological insight and allowing his stock company of directors— Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise— to realize them with artful light and shadow. RKO wasn’t getting exactly what it asked for, but it was getting hit films. Cat People was one of the biggest, so a sequel was a natural demand. Not only did Lewton barely bother to tie The Curse of the Cat People to its predecessor, but he made almost no effort to imbue it with anything recognizably horrifying. There is a ghost—former cat person Irena (Simone Simon)—but she is probably just a figment of little Amy’s (Ann Carter) imagination, and she is hardly an entity of horror. Rather, the once murderous monster has been totally rewritten as a benevolent presence, a beautiful and gentle playmate for a lonely girl whose parents (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph from the previous picture) don’t like her wasting her young years daydreaming. The Curse of the Cat People is a truly lovely piece of work—beautifully filmed and bittersweet—that was Lewton’s first to really give horror the heave ho. However, RKO was still able to market it as such because of its lurid title, its ghost, and a single scary sequence in which a local Miss Havisham (Julia Dean) tells Amy a story about the headless horseman that pitches the girl’s overactive imagination into hyperactive mode. There’s also a slight danger that the old lady’s daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is going to wring the kid’s neck in a fit of daughterly jealousy, but come on, that obviously isn’t going to happen in such a sweet film that really only thinks it’s horror.

2. Sunset Boulevard (1950 – dir. Billy Wilder)

When horror fell out of favor in the ‘50s, it immediately began assimilating into other genres. This is clearest in the decade’s sci-fi pictures that exuded fear more readily than the celestial and technological wonder at the heart of the genre. Horror also worked its way into noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly, with its apocalyptic finale, and The Night of the Hunter, a true genre straddler with a villain who is equal parts swindler archetype and boogeyman. In his 1950 noir Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder absorbed horror in subtler ways. Dimming star Norma Desmond (silent film legend Gloria Swanson) skulks through a Gothic old dark house replete with rat-infested swimming pool, Chas Addams-style dead chimp, and wheezy pipe organ on which the grim butler (one-time silent filmmaker and later-day horror character actor Erich von Stroheim) plays the classic horror signifier “Toccata and Fugue”. Norma, herself, is both beautiful and eerily possessed; a dead ringer for Gloria Holden’s Dracula’s Daughter. In his book American Gothic, Jonathan Rigby draws numerous fascinating parallels between Norma and Dracula senior, and her thrall over Joe Gillis (William Holden) is easily comparable to that of the Count over Mina or Renfield, even if the reason is more economic than supernatural. Though Rigby’s treatment of Sunset Boulevard as true horror is a stretch, there is no question that its final image of Norma— now completely insane, floating toward the camera, her eyes ablaze with madness, her predatory, claw-like fingers reaching for the audience—is among cinema’s most terrifying.

3. Vertigo (1958 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock)