Research into Experimental Filmmakers - David Lynch

David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. Indeed, the surreal and in many cases violent elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.

Moving around various parts of the United States as a child within his middle class family, Lynch went on to study painting in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films. First, the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was instead highly critically acclaimed.

Proceeding to create his own television series with Mark Frost, the highly popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1992), he also created a cinematic prequel, Fire Walk With Me (1992), a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990), and a family film, The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his following films worked on "dream logic" non-linear narrative structures, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for his films The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and also received a screenplay Academy Award nomination for The Elephant Man. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era". Allmovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking", whilst the success of his films have led to him being labelled "the first popular Surrealist."

Early life: 1946–1965

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm), was an English language tutor whose grandfather's parents had immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century. Lynch was raised a Presbyterian. Due to Donald's job, the Lynch family often moved around according to where the Department of Agriculture assigned him. It was because of this that when he was two months old, David Lynch moved with his parents to Sandpoint, Idaho, and only two years after that, following the birth of his brother John, the family again moved, this time to Spokane, Washington. It was here that his sister Martha was born, before they once more moved, this time to Durham, North Carolina, then to Boise, Idaho and then to Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch found this transitory early life relatively easy to adjust to, noting that he found it fairly easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school. Commenting on much of his early life, Lynch has remarked that "I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school… For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude." Alongside this schooling, his father made him join the Boy Scouts, although he would later note that he only "became one so I could quit, and put it behind me." He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. It was through being an Eagle Scout that he was present with other Boy Scouts outside of the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's birthday in 1961.

Lynch had become interested in painting and drawing from an early age, becoming intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend's father was a professional painter. At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia, he did poorly academically, having little interest in school work, but was popular with other students, and after leaving decided that he wanted to study painting at college, thereby beginning his studies at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964, where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf. Nonetheless, he left after only a year, stating that "I was not inspired AT ALL in that place", and instead deciding that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union. They had some hopes that in Europe they could train with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at his school, however upon reaching Salzburg they found that he was not available, and disillusioned, they returned to the United States after spending only 15 days of their planned three years in Europe.

"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast." - David Lynch

Philadelphia and short films: 1966–1970

Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia, but since his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he was forced to stay with his friend Tony Keeler for a while, before he decided to move to the city of Philadelphia, where, at the advice of Jack Fisk, who was already attending it, he decided to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, something he preferred far more than his previous art college in Boston, claiming that "In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." It was here that he began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, and they were married in 1967. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their child, a girl whom they named Jennifer. Later describing this situation, Peggy stated that "[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant." As a family, they moved to the Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where they were able to purchase a large 12-room house for a relatively low $3,500 due to the high crime and poverty rates in the area. Later describing living there, Lynch stated that "We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street… We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in… The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city." Meanwhile, in order to help financially support his family alongside his art studies, he took up a job printing engravings.

It was at the Philadelphia Academy that Lynch made his very first short film, which was entitled Six Men Getting Sick (1966). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and so purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find in order to do so. Taking one of the abandoned upper rooms of the Academy as a working space, he spent $200 – which at the time he felt to be a lot of money – to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Describing the work as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played the film on a loop at the Academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $450 of that on purchasing a second-hand Bolex camera, Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was simply a blurred, frameless print. As he would later relate, "So I called up Bart [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."

Using this leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment on making a work that was a mix of animation with live action, producing a four minute short entitled The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images before dying at the end by haemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorded to record the sound of his baby daughter Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch felt to be particularly effective. Later describing where he had got inspiration for this work from, Lynch stated that "Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started The Alphabet going. The rest of it was just subconscious."

Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to film makers who could produce for them both a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script that he had written for a new short film, one that would be almost entirely live action, and which would be entitled The Grandmother. The Institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5000, out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the further $2,200 which he needed. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother revolved around the story of a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell later remarked that "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".

Los Angeles and Eraserhead: 1971–1979

In 1971, Lynch moved with his wife and daughter to the city of Los Angeles in California, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place that he would later describe as being "completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great… you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing." He began writing a script for a proposed work entitled Gardenback, which had "unfolded from this painting I'd done." In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add in more dialogue, something that he reluctantly agreed to do. Nonetheless, with all the interference on his Gardenback project, he became fed up with the Conservatory, and announced that he was quitting. Attempting to prevent this, many of the teachers at the centre asked him to reconsider, believing that he was one of their best students, and he finally agreed, albeit on the condition that he could create his own project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was "wrecked", he instead set about on a new film, which he called Eraserhead.

Despite the fact that the film was planned to be about forty-two minutes long (it would end up being eighty-nine minutes long), the script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long, and some of the teachers at the Conservatory were concerned that the film would not be a success with such little dialogue and action. Nonetheless, they agreed not to interfere as they had done with Gardenback, and as such Lynch was able to create the film free from interference. Filming, which began in 1972, took place at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team, which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound designer Alan Splet to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets as well as a food room and a bathroom. Initially, funding for the project came from the AFI, who gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the work, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, they were unable to provide him with any more. Following this, Lynch was also supported by a loan given to him by his father, and by money that he was able to bring in from a paper round that he took up delivering the Wall Street Journal. Not long into the production of Eraserhead, Lynch and his wife Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and so he began living full-time on set. In 1977, Lynch would remarry, this time to a woman named Mary Fisk.

Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man named Henry (Jack Nance) living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. The baby constantly cries, eventually leading to its accidental death, at which the world itself begins to fall apart. Lynch has consistently refused to either confirm or deny any interpretation of Eraserhead, or to "confess his own thinking behind the many abstractions in the film." Nonetheless, he admits that it was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, and referred to the film as "my Philadelphia Story".

It was due to the financial problems with the production of Eraserhead that filming was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again. It was in one such break in 1974 that Lynch created a short film entitled The Amputee, which revolved around a woman with two amputated legs (played by Jack Nance's wife, Catherine Coulson) reading aloud a letter and having her stumps washed by a doctor (played by Lynch himself).

Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976, after five years of production. Lynch subsequently tried to get the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but whilst some reviewers liked it, others felt that it was awful, and so it was not selected for screening. Similarly, reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it was indeed screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, from where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. He was very supportive of the movie, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977, and Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, and was later described as one of the most important midnight movies of the seventies along with El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead. The acclaimed film maker Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films.

The Elephant Man and mainstream success: 1980–1982

The cult success of Eraserhead on the underground circuit led to it being seen by Stuart Cornfeld, an executive producer to the producer Mel Brooks, who later remarked that "I was just 100 per cent blown away… I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. It was such a cleansing experience." Contacting Lynch, he agreed to help him with his next planned project, a film entitled Ronnie Rocket for which Lynch had already written a script. Nonetheless, Lynch soon realized that Ronnie Rocket, a film that he described as being about "electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair", was not going to be picked up by any financiers, and so he asked Cornfeld to find him a script written by someone else which he could direct. Cornfeld went away and found him four possible scripts, but upon hearing the title of the first, The Elephant Man, Lynch was already sure that that was the script for him, going on nothing but the title.

The Elephant Man script – written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren – was based upon a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a heavily deformed man living in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but was later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves. Lynch wanted to film it, but at the same time also had to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events, but in his view make a better plot. However, in order to do so he would have to get the permission of Mel Brooks, whose company, BrookFilms, would be responsible for production; subsequently Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring that "You're a madman, I love you! You're in."

The resulting film, The Elephant Man, starred John Hurt as John Merrick (his name was changed from Joseph), as well as Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves. Filming took place in London, and Lynch brought his own distinctively surrealist approach to the film, filming it in color stock black and white, but nonetheless it has been described as "one of the most conventional" of his films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch.

The De Laurentiis films, Dune and Blue Velvet: 1983–1986

Following on from the success of The Elephant Man, the film maker George Lucas, himself a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Lynch however refused, arguing that Lucas should direct the film himself as the movie should reflect his own vision, not Lynch's take on it. Soon after however, the opportunity to direct another big-budget science fiction epic arose when Dino de Laurentiis of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group asked him to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune (1965). Lynch agreed, and in doing so was also contractually obliged to produce two other works for the company. He then set about writing a script based upon the original novel, initially with both Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, and then just by himself when De Laurentiis wasn't happy with their ideas. Lynch also helped build some of the sets, attempting to create "a certain look" for the film, and he particularly enjoyed building the set for the oil planet of Giedi Prime, for which he "used steel, bolts, and porcelain to construct" it.

Dune is set in the far future, when humans live in an interstellar empire run along a feudal system. The main character, Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a noble who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis which grows the rare spice melange, the most highly prized commodity in the empire. Lynch however was unhappy with the work, later remarking that "Dune was a kind of studio film. I didn’t have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises" to his own vision. He produced much footage for the film that was eventually removed out from the final theatrical cut, dramatically condensing the plot. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be as successful as Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it had cost $45 million to make, and grossed a mere $27.4 million domestically. Later on, Universal Studios released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television, containing almost an hour of cutting-room-floor footage and new narration. Such was not representative of Lynch's intentions, but the studio considered it more comprehensible than the original two-hour version. Lynch objected to these changes and had his name struck from the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director and "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym which Lynch himself invented, inspired by his own feelings of betrayal) as the screenwriter.

Meanwhile in 1983 he had begun the writing and drawing of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which featured unchanging graphics of a tethered dog that was so angry that it could not move, alongside cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications. It was around this period that Lynch also got increasingly interested in photography as an art form, and travelled to northern England to take photos of the degrading industrial landscape, something that he was particularly interested in.

Following on from Dune, Lynch was contractually still obliged to produce two other projects for De Laurentiis: the first of these was a planned sequel, which due to the film's lack of success never went beyond the script stage. The other was a more personal work, based upon a script that Lynch had been working on for some time. Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, the resulting film, Blue Velvet, was set in the fictional town of Lumberton, USA, and revolves around a college student named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequently investigating further with the help of friend Sandy (Laura Dern), he uncovers that it is related to a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly subjects her to rape. Lynch himself characterizes the story as "a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story."

For the film, Lynch decided to include pop songs from the 1950s, including "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton, the latter of which was largely inspirational for the film, with Lynch stating that "It was the song that sparked the movie… There was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns – lawns and the neighbourhood." Other music for the film was also produced, this time composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who would go on to produce the music for most of Lynch’s subsequent cinematic works. Dino de Laurentiis loved the film, and it achieved support from some of the early specialist screenings, but the preview screenings to a mainstream audience were instead highly negative, with most of the audience hating the film. Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.


"I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they're all out there." -
David Lynch

Influences

Lynch admits that his work is more similar in many respects to those of European film makers than American ones, believing that most films that "get down and thrill your soul" were by European directors. Lynch has commented on his admiration for such film makers as Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog and Jacques Tati. He has also stated that Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) is one of his favourite films, as is Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

Recurring motifs

There are several recurring themes within Lynch's work, leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas". One of the key themes that they noted was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery within his works, something they related to the "surrealist ethos" of relying "on the subconscious to provide visual drive". This can be seen in John Merrick's dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Agent Cooper's dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the "dreamlike logic" of the narrative found in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Discussing his attitude to dreams, Lynch has stated that "Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I'm quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made or discovered; a world I choose… [You can't really get others to experience it, but] right there is the power of cinema."

Another of Lynch's prominent themes include industry, with repeated imagery of "the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories", as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story. Describing his interest in such things, Lynch stated that "It makes me feel good to see giant machinery, you know, working: dealing with molten metal. And I like fire and smoke. And the sounds are so powerful. It's just big stuff. It means that things are being made, and I really like that."

Another theme is the idea of a "dark underbelly" of violent criminal activity within a society, such as with Frank's gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch's films, from the protagonist in The Elephant Man, to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as is the idea of death from a head wound, found in most of Lynch's films. Other imagery commonly used within Lynch's works are flickering electrictity or lights, as well as fire and the idea of a stage upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.

With the exception of The Elephant Man and Dune, which are set in Victorian London and a fictitious galaxy respectively, all of Lynch's films have been set in the United States, and he has stated that "I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films." A number of his works, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway are intentionally reminiscent of the 1950s American culture even though they were set in the later decades of the 20th century. Lynch later commented on his feelings for this decade, which was that in which he grew up as a child, by stating that "It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways… there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."

Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his choice to cast Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield, while in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita and in Inland Empire, Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. By contrast, Lynch rarely creates multi-character roles for his male actors.

Reflections:
I find David Lynch's films very inspirational as the images in the film are powerful, hypnotic and unique.