David Lynch

by Colin Odell, Michelle Le Blanc

Overview

Internationally renowned, David Lynch is America's premier purveyor of the surreal, an artist whose work in cinema and television has exposed the world to his highly personalised view of society. This book examines his entire work, from the cult surrealism of his debut feature Eraserhead to his latest mystery, Inland Empire, considering the themes, motifs and stories behind his incredible works.

In Lynch's world the mundane and the fantastical collide, often with terrifying consequences. It is a place where the abnormal is normal, where the respectable becomes sinister, where innocence is lost and redemption gained at a terrible price. And there's always music in the air. From the deserts of a distant world to an ordinary backyard, at the breakneck speed of Lost Highway or the sedate determination of The Straight Story, readers will experience amateur sleuths, messiahs, giants and dwarves, chanteuses, psychopaths, cherry pie and damn fine coffee. David Lynch is your guide to this other world... and this is your guide to David Lynch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781842433829
Publisher:	Oldcastle Books
Publication date:	10/28/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

By Colin Odell

Colin Odell is a freelance author and film critic. He has co-authored books with Michelle Le Blanc about John Carpenter, Tim Burton, Horror Films, Jackie Chan, Vampire Films, Anime and Studio Ghibli and contributed to Wallflower Press's Alter Image and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is an editor and contributor to the online film review salon Kamera.co.uk and Vector Magazine.

Michelle Le Blanc is a freelance author and film critic. She has co-authored books with Colin Odell about John Carpenter, Tim Burton, Horror Films, Jackie Chan, Vampire Films, Anime and Studio Ghibli and contributed to Wallflower Press's Alter Image and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is an editor and contributor to the online film review salon Kamera.co.uk and Vector Magazine.

Read an Excerpt

David Lynch

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By Colin Odell, Michelle Le Blanc

Oldcastle Books

Copyright © 2007 Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-382-9

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CHAPTER 1

NOW I'VE SAID MY A,B,C – THE EARLY FILMS

Whilst creating a work for the end of year experimental painting and sculpture contest at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a chance breeze gave the impression of movement on the apparently static canvas. Immediately Lynch knew what he wanted. 'I wanted to see a painting move and have sound to it.'

Six Figures Getting Sick (1966)

Directed, Produced and Animated by: David Lynch

Crew: Jack Fisk

Six despairing heads confront the viewer, their bodies viewed in negative. From the depths of their exposed innards wells a tide of vomit that bursts forth from their mouths in a torrent of animated colour, covering the lower two-thirds of the screen. The constant wailing of a siren heralds the endless nature of their plight as they try to cover their mouths in vain, only for the whole incident to repeat, announced by a countdown that seals their fate.

With long-time collaborator Jack Fisk, Lynch set about constructing a sculptured screen consisting of a mould of his head onto which a one-minute animated loop would endlessly play to the incessant sound of an air-raid siren. If the lights were sufficiently low the film could be seen distorted through the artist's own features – a hybrid blend of film, sculpture and installation. Elements of this short work would crop up in The Grandmother as well as in the staging of Industrial Symphony No1 with its air-raid dolls. The six heads here are disintegrating, decaying models, their hands cardboard cut-outs.

The mix of media is what makes the whole piece so compelling and disturbing – there is no release from the figures' anguish – and at one point the whole screen turns blood red as the word 'sick' flashes to indicate the next bout of vomited multicoloured paint amidst the monochrome canvas. Stylistically the work recalls the works of Surrealist animators Jan Svankmajer and Walerian Borowczyk in its use of mixed techniques and imperfect objects to create a sense of unease. Six Figures Getting Sick bagged Lynch the first prize for his efforts. However, the whole exercise had cost about $200 to make, a vast sum for an impoverished art student, effectively rendering future experimentation in this area impossible without significant outside funding. Fortunately for the young artist another student was interested in the work. H Barton Wasserman approached Lynch and asked him to make a similar film for him.

Armed with a budget of $1,000 and the promise of total directorial control, Lynch purchased a Bolex camera, committing himself to spending many hours figuring out the intricacies of cinematography. The Bolex is one of the mainstays of independent movie making, and animation in particular; its clockwork mechanism and high quality optics make it an ideal first choice for many aspiring cinematographers. Lynch animated the whole film over the next two months. It was an ambitious project involving live action in one-third of the screen and animated segments masked off in the remaining two-thirds. Sadly, though, the end result was not a success for when the film was developed there was nothing but indistinguishable blurs with no frame boundaries. H Barton Wasserman continued to be supportive and let Lynch keep the remaining money to continue with his experiments. Rather than reshoot the painstakingly animated piece, though, he embarked on a new project: The Alphabet, a short film comprising live action as well as animation.

The Alphabet (1968)

Directed by: David Lynch

Written by: David Lynch

Produced by: H Barton Wasserman

Edited by: David Lynch

Cinematography: David Lynch

Sound: Robert Cullum, David Lynch, Robert McDonald

Cast: Peggy Lynch (Girl)

'Based on Peggy's niece's nightmare – or rather my imagining of it.'

A young girl lies sleeping in bed, her dreams disturbed by increasingly desperate shouts of 'ABC' by the disembodied voices of children. The alphabet is drawn in front of her from A to Z as the sky extends in pastel shades. A disembodied mouth lulls. A rising seed makes a letter A and gives birth, bleeding, to lower case offspring that form the head of a man. As a sprouting heart from the ejaculation of the man fills its progenitor with letters, the girl awakes screaming as the head disintegrates in a deluge of blood. Covered in spots and pasted with white paint she remembers her alphabet, only to face a similarly bloody fate.

The girl is played by Lynch's wife, Peggy, and the inspiration came from a chance story she related to him. On a family visit Peggy observed her niece having a nightmare, throughout which the young girl was chanting the Alphabet Song. This provided the springboard for the film as Lynch tried to imagine what this nightmare must have been like. One can only hope it wasn't quite so deranged.

The Alphabet provides the visual foundations for much of Lynch's later work. One aspect lies in the use of non -contemporaneous make-up. The pasty white make-up associated with the demands of silent cinematography seems to hold a fascination for Lynch and it is a simple way of creating other-worldliness that is genuinely creepy in a modern context. Fears of siring a deformed child would see their apotheosis in Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Indeed the decapitation of Henry in Eraserhead is effectively rehearsed in animated form here, albeit with a cubist main figure. What is interesting is that Lynch's influences are quite clear at this stage and they are almost exclusively embedded in the world of traditional arts rather than the moving arts. He has taken the world of Surrealist, Cubist and Naïve painting and given them the extra dimension of time. Unlike many of the Surrealists' own films, Lynch is responding here to the painterly aspects that would be difficult to realise on a live action basis. There are clear nods to Miró, Picasso and Dali in both the composition and visual nature of this film. Even at this early stage the use of sound to create unease and disassociation with the picture shows an understanding of the way vision and sound can be deliberately dissonant or mood provoking. Rushes of air and bass rumbles alternate with disembodied voices to reproduce the girl's dream state.

This was Lynch's first attempt at using sound on film (as opposed to the siren on Six Figures Getting Sick which was part of the installation itself) and, despite being crudely recorded, is startling in its effect. Key to the strangeness that permeates the soundtrack was the use of a faulty tape recorder which he used to record the sounds of his baby daughter, Jennifer, crying. The net result of the fault was twofold: first, it produced a deeply disturbing and unsettling background that suitably complemented the on-screen events, but it also meant that Lynch could get back the money he spent hiring the equipment, returned because of the faults.

Despite his enthusiasm Lynch had realised that the whole process of making films was not a cheap one. He was working as a printer in Philadelphia (the same job as Henry in Eraserhead) when a recommendation from his friend Bushnell Keeler led him to seek a grant from the American Film Institute. The original script for The Grandmother ran to just eight unformed pages and simply described shots or scenes. In some senses a formal script would not be appropriate for such a distinctively unconventional piece. But this script, submitted along with a print of The Alphabet, resulted in Lynch being awarded one of the AFI's four annual grants and so The Grandmother was born.

The Grandmother (1970)

Directed by: David Lynch

Written by: David Lynch

Produced by: David Lynch

Cinematography: David Lynch

Cast: Richard White (Boy), Dorothy McGinnis (Grandmother), Virginia Maitland (Mother), Robert Chadwick (Father)

Mother and Father have grown from the soil. They crawl around on all fours and make animal noises. They are disturbed by the arrival of Boy and they taunt him aggressively. Boy wets his bed and is punished by Father. Boy has an idea to bring some stability into his life – he will get a Grandmother by planting a seed on a bed, making sure there is adequate soil for her to grow. He tends the plant lovingly as it becomes a fully-fledged pod. He helps his new relative out of her pod and sits her down. Boy and Grandmother have a wonderful time. His parents still treat him cruelly but that can be forgotten. However, all good things come to an end: Grandmother becomes ill and Boy is forced to go to his parents for help. They laugh at him, and his attempts to drag them upstairs are futile. Boy rushes up to see Grandmother, but she is dead.

The basic premise of The Grandmother, where a neglected, abused boy creates an imaginary friend, could easily be the basis of any number of TV weepies or moralistic tales of caution and retribution, but not in the hands of David Lynch. Instead the film is a nightmare journey into the psyche of a confused and frightened child, showing the world from the viewpoint of a damaged mind. With his parents reduced to animalistic behaviour, scuttling around, barking or clawing like savage birds it is no wonder that the boy seeks solace with a grandmother. His father is so pent up with anger his face is almost dissected in two; his cackling mother is ineffectual and mean. His parents can hardly mouth a word – instead they bark like dogs. They have become animal-like in their brutality towards the child, either castigating or ignoring him. They treat their own son as one would a dog – rubbing his face in his own waste to discourage him from repeatedly fouling his bed. The Grandmother gives us a further vision of a child's nightmare as first explored in The Alphabet but here the reason for the boy's nightmare is made apparent to the viewer – his whole waking life is a nightmare to the extent that the barriers between real and dream state on occasion break down completely.

Lynch also shows his love of the Surrealists' use of free-word association as a way of creating images that have a dreamlike reality but also relate to the mind's ability to interpret literally or emotionally rather than figuratively. In the Buñuel/Dali film Un Chien Andalou (1929) the main protagonist gets his hand caught in a shutting door. Ants start pouring from the hole that has appeared in his hand – a literal interpretation of 'fourmis dans la main', an expression meaning 'pins and needles' in English. In The Grandmother Lynch employs similar word associations. The young boy literally soils his sheets but associates this with actual soil in which he grows his grandmother. Lynch also uses visual and aural association to emphasise aspects of this bizarre world. The boy's urine-soaked sheets make a large orange circle that becomes associated with the sun, which is also necessary to grow the seed.

If the odd events were not enough to create a sense of unease, Lynch uses a formidable arsenal of cinematic techniques both to distance the viewer and disorientate them. First there are extended animated sequences depicting the growth of the family from the seed and their eventual execution in the mind of the boy. These are a combination of photo-montage, paints and mixed media of a similar style to that used in The Alphabet, but here they are more integrated in the film's disjointed but linear narrative. Both films use primitive drawings to reflect the child's view of the world and create a further sense of distancing from the adult (more conscious) mind. In contrast the use of animation in Eraserhead is fully realised and professional: Henry's mind has passed the boundaries of childish imagination and ascended into adulthood.

Then there's the use of altering set space: the boy's bedroom alters throughout the film to create different states of mind, sometimes just a bed and a chest of drawers against the stark black backdrop showing isolation in the void. More startling still is the use of pixillation for some, but not all, of the characters' movements (and not necessarily scenes that would traditionally require animating), which makes the actions appear stilted, jittery and unnatural. The effect of disassociation is enhanced by the contrast with conventional live-action shots. Sometimes the jump from real to pixillated image is used in a single perceived shot to startling effect. Then there is the make-up, which, like in The Alphabet, is deliberately pasty and reminiscent of silent film star make-up gone wrong, caked and improperly applied. This accentuates any colour in a frame, be it the red around the eyes or an open screaming mouth. Along with the use of monochromatic sets the film at times appears almost black and white, so these splashes of colour provide focal points in the otherwise bleached -out world.

The Grandmother continues the theme of decapitation or headshot death that runs through much of Lynch's work. Often this is used to indicate some castration complex, most notably in Eraserhead, but here it is purely wish fulfilment as the boy imagines his parents' death in a makeshift theatre, an animated Grand Guignol to placate the boy's frustration at his plight. These flights of fancy externalise in the figure of the grandmother herself. The boy's world is so polluted by his experiences that even she seems sinister, and her smile and plump demeanour do little to dispel the dead look in her eyes. He has grown his grandmother on a bed in a pile of soil from a bag of seeds, tended lovingly between beatings from his father. This, of course, runs counter to our commonly accepted notions of what a grandmother is: by definition a biological grandmother is born before her grandson. It could be interpreted that the grandmother is really there, that the boy has dug her from the cemetary beside their house, his interpretation of birth being analogous to that of plants emerging from soil.

The grandmother is also incapable of proper speech: no one in the film can do more than mouth words or bark out indecipherable sounds, and she whistles like a boiling kettle as the last vestiges of life exit her body, a human balloon deflating in front of the helpless lad. The last hope of any love in his life has faded away, and the grandmother who kissed him and was there to hold him has breathed her last. All attempts to rouse his parents to her aid are futile. They don't care or even believe in the grandmother.

This film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas of Lynch's later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium. At just over 30 minutes, The Grandmother falls into that twilight category of film that is too short to be a feature and too long to be a short film. It is a baptism of fire to those unfamiliar with Lynch's work.

CHAPTER 2

HI YA SONNY, WHAT'VE YOU GOT THERE?

By 1970 Lynch had decided that filmmaking was what he wanted to do. He had been offered a scholarship at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies but after a year the young student was becoming agitated with some aspects of the course and decided to quit. In order to keep him on board the AFI offered him a deal he couldn't refuse ... the chance to make Eraserhead. They had seen the script for the film and allowed the vast premises of the school to be used to mount the production – there are some exteriors but for the most part this is a distinctly studio-bound film – so Lynch managed to obtain the college's disused stables, even treating them as a home for much of the shoot. A budget was agreed.

Unfortunately the AFI didn't realise the scale and ambition of the venture. Lynch's screenplay was 21 pages. In normal film production there is a page to length ratio – one page equals roughly one minute of screen time. The AFI thought, despite Lynch's indications to the contrary, that the film would be 21 minutes long. Production was to start in 1971 following auditions for all the main roles but the film would not be completed for many years. Lynch's meticulous attention to detail and the set construction took up much of the time but the real enemy was money. When the initial funds dried up production was halted after a year. Every time another source of funding dripped in, production resumed. For example, in one scene Henry enters his room. An entire year passed between the shots of him opening the door and actually entering. For a large part of this time poor Jack Nance was stuck with a goofy hair-do. 'Jack was such a professional, I can tell you!' Lynch has commented. When eventually the film was completed, thanks in part to additional funding from Sissy Spacek and Jack Fisk, who had regularly handed Lynch paycheques, over half a decade had passed.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from David Lynch by Colin Odell, Michelle Le Blanc. Copyright © 2007 Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
1. Introduction: Through the Darkness of Futures Past,
2. Now I've Said My A,B,C – The Early Films,
3. Hi Ya Sonny, What've You Got There?,
4. Life is Full of Surprises,
5. The Weirding Way,
6. You Stay Alive, Baby. Do it for Van Gogh.,
7. The Way Your Head Works is God's Own Private Mystery,
8. This Must Be Where Pies Go When They Die,
9. So What Did The Fish Tell You?,
10. Funny How Time Slips Away,
11. I Want to Sit with Him, Look Up at the Stars,
12. It'll Be Just Like in the Movies. Pretending to Be Somebody Else.,
13. Where is it That You Think I Went?,
14. The Clouds Come and Go Yet Something is Different,
15. She'll Never Go to Hollywood – Projects That Were Never Realised,
16. Night Thoughts – An Interview with Barry Gifford,
17. There's Always Music in the Air – David Lynch and Sound in the Cinema,
18. Pretty as a Picture – David Lynch's Visual Style,
19. Unlock the Dream, Solve the Crime – Mysteries and Secrets,
20. Billy Was Halfway Between His House and the Sickening Garden of Letters – Lynch and Surrealism,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgement,
Copyright,
Advertisement,

Editorial Reviews

Recent titles from this new British imprint, intended to "cater to...fans, regular cinemagoers and DVD enthusiasts, plus film and media students," cover directors and genres like silent films and Asian cinema. Since his early cult film Eraserhead, David Lynch has pursued his original, offbeat vision in films like Blue Velvet, finding time for the hit TV series Twin Peaks, the big-budget sf flop Dune, and more mainstream-friendly films like The Elephant Man. He has inspired a number of books dating back almost to the beginning of his career, but the authors here manage to find new things to say about his symbols, techniques, and obsessions-notably, his favorite theme of the surreal existing just under the surface of everyday life. Perhaps not the ultimate book on this auteur, but recommended for large film collections.
—Stephen Rees

Library Journal