Much has been written about Lynch. A long line of people have queued up to have a go at explaining his mad, elliptical movies - like people lining up to try and open a particularly tight jam jar, all convinced that they would be the one with the strength in their wrists to manage it, despite the clear failure of everyone who went before them. His work resists interpretation, and so of course the attempts will continue forever. The jam's going to stay in the jar, and we just get to peer in and wonder.
I can't open the jar either, and I'm not going to try. I have no clever insight. What I do have is my own relationship with his work, snaking through the years as I come across each new film. I think, really, that's all any of us have.
Here, for your reading pleasure, is my particular journey beyond the red curtain.
Eraserhead
One Thursday in the 1980s I called round at my friend Paul's house to see if he was coming out. We were not-quite teenagers, and so were in that phase where plans extended no further than "I knock on your door and, if you are free, we wander round the streets giggling and climbing walls." Imagine that now. If someone knocked on my door, out of the blue, and said, "Let's just hang out with no particular agenda," I would chase them away with a stick.
On this particular Thursday, I went into the living room of Paul's parents' house to wait while he got ready. His parents were watching a film, and that film was bonkers. There was a woman, singing, on a stage. Except there was something wrong with her face. She had huge, hamster like cheeks and strange, rough skin. She was smiling, but her eyes were desperate and sad. The whole thing was in black and white, and felt vaguely nightmarish. Paul's dad looked up at me, and by way of explanation said, "She lives behind his radiator." Right. Thanks Paul's dad. Paul and I left the house and probably went to sit on a shed roof or something and talk about Blake's 7. But that weird, mysterious image of the woman stayed with me.
Years later I saw all of Eraserhead, and it was as delightfully uncanny as that first impression suggested. I've seen it maybe a dozen times since, and every time it is equally unsettling. The non-sequitur imagery pulses with the logic and tone of a nightmare: the moon faced guy, the radiator lady, the baby... oh God, the baby. A couple of times I've made a new friend and, excited to share my world with them, stuck the film on, with the caveat that it is 'probably the weirdest thing I've seen.' The way they looked at me afterwards suggested that this was not adequate preparation.
Wild at Heart
I went to university in the early 90s, just as Twin Peaks was unfurling its tendrils across the television landscape. I didn't watch it at the time. I'd missed the first season, I think, and wasn't in a position to catch up. Plus, and this is probably the real reason, everyone else was watching it. And by everyone, I meant all the cool people on my course at college. They were really into it, and went on about it, and had cool in-the-know conversations about the Log Lady and Bob and The Owls and all that.
I was already pretty much an outsider on my course. I hadn't read enough books, I wasn't as smart as everyone else and I was much less sure of myself. Or rather, I wasn't as good at covering up my not-sure-of-myself-ness. This was just one more reason to feel left out, and so I rejected Twin Peaks, taking control of my outsider feelings by acting like it was a choice.
However. The people who were into Peaks were also into David Lynch in a big way, and they started a film society called - brilliantly - Lynch Pin. And they showed Eraserhead, which I knew I loved. And they showed Wild At Heart. Well. It's hard to express the impact this had on me. In the first sequence, Nicolas Cage smashes a guys head open, in a shocking moment of visceral violence that made me uncomfortable, horrified and thrilled in equal measure. The film then careened off on a crazy path that was like a banquet of new, exotic flavours and textures. Did I like it? Maybe? I wasn't sure. I just knew there was something mesmerising about the too-dark night through which our heroes drove, the seductive music that accompanied their bewildering adventures, and the out-there characters they met - people who seemed both cartoonish and yet frighteningly real. None more so than Willem Dafoe's appalling Bobby Peru, who leered horribly into my soul from that day on.
I loved it. And something shifted inside; I couldn't go back to enjoying film in the same way, now I'd tasted this. The next week they showed Heathers (they weren't exclusively a Lynch film club - they allowed other weird, nightmare-adjacent stuff too). Heathers is a very good film with loads of cool ideas. But it felt tame and conventional after the astonishing heroin hit of Wild at Heart. I never properly fell in with the cool guys - and deservedly so, I was a right mess - but I have always silently thanked them for that exposure to the beauty and brilliance of David Lynch.
Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and all that
I completed my degree in literature, having learned many things, chief among them being that I wasn't actually very interested in literature. I preferred film, thanks. Why did books still exist when we had films? (This may, also, be part of the reason I didn't fit in at college - they all loved books and thought they were great). I spent the rest of the 1990s exploring the world of cinema, trying to get a sense of what were the films you 'should' have seen. What were the ones that got talked about, and referenced by magazines - the ones that influenced the work that came afterwards?
Previously, my guide-ropes through the world of film had been fairly basic. Did I like the actors? Would there be explosions and/or murders? Was it Star Wars? If the answer to any of these questions was yes, I would pursue the film. Now I had something new: the concept that the director was the author of the movie, and that if I liked one of their films, I'd probably like the others.
So off I went, chasing down the other movies of directors I liked. I would later learn that the concept of 'the director as author' is not so simple. However, in the case of David Lynch, it appeared to be a pretty compelling argument. As I devoured Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and - later - Mulholland Drive, I recognised that weird, otherworldly flavour that I'd first tasted in Paul's living room, and again in the darkened room of the college film club. David Lynch had a set of very clear preoccupations and they appeared to be, in no particular order:
dark, twisted sexuality
cool jazz
no, you may not understand the story
nudity
dreams
violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere
film noir
fluctuating worlds and/or realities
elemental evil
you will laugh, but you will not be sure why
these three or four actors are my friends and get to be in everything
I've lumped these films together because, to me, they are part of the same experience: an awakening into the idea of cinema as one person's vision. As if we're looking not at a person making art, but rather into a world that you can only see when that person briefly pulls at the edge of the world and draws it back, like a curtain you never knew was there.
David Lynch started to become a touchstone for me, like David Bowie: someone I didn't really understand, but who exemplified the things I wanted to understand. A creator who made things that seemed genuine and personal, and unique. I was struggling a lot with that, in the 90s, I was trying to make things - songs, poems, stories - but I couldn't hear my own voice in anything I did. It seemed lost in imitation, in fear of how it might be received, in the foolish belief that it needed to say something. Have a purpose.
For now, I would watch this guy, and others like him, and try to work him out. Not what his work meant - that jam jar wasn't going to open any time soon. I wanted to know what it was he was doing. How he found a way to get that elemental, beautiful stuff inside him out into the world, in a way which made people... feel something.
How was he doing that?
That will do, for now. We're about to get onto my first viewing of Twin Peaks, and that needs a little time to breathe. See you next time, for warm synths, swinging traffic lights and a decade where I outsourced my emotional life to the inhabitants of a small, beautiful town on the edge of the world.
