David Lynch

The Times Magazine, February 2007

A winter's afternoon in Los Angeles. The sun shouldn't be so strong this early in the year and its heat is intensified by the large glass windows of the workshop in which we stand. David Lynch has dressed for the weather that should have been in a buttoned-up white shirt and black sweater, moleskin trousers, thick socks and brogues yet shows no sign of being too warm

"Just trying to dig some screws out of this hunk of wood, buddy," he says in explanation of the claw hammer he is weighing in his hand at the moment I am introduced into his presence. "Always working on something, that's me. Gotta keep just working away." This folksy charm, almost parodying the benign and bumbling 'dad' characters of '50s American TV and film, is a personal trademark and makes him seem older than his 61 years. And in it is summed up the essential Lynthean paradox.

So representative in person of a vanished generation of affluent but kindly small town or suburban males, Lynch has in fact (and consistently) been one of the darkest and most maverick directors in modern cinema history. Though his personal dialogue and delivery recalls to mind the on-screen James Stewart or Ronald Reagan, his own films burrow obsessively beneath the apparently untroubled surface of life in the quiet streets of those same towns or suburbs, determinedly exposing the bleakness and horror that lies buried there. With him as with the world depicted in such defining works as Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) or the cult TV series Twin Peaks (1990), nothing is quite what it seems. Back in high school, he and a then girlfriend were voted Cutest Couple by peers. But as a new exhibition will show, the thoughts inside his young head could be troublingly bleak.

Lynch was an artist before ever he became a film maker and The Air Is On Fire, curated by the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain and opening next month in Paris, will show for the first time drawings, paintings and other works dating back as far as his adolescence. Some of the archival boxes and files to which the Fondation's director Herve Chandes was given free and independent access have remained unopened by their owner in 20 years or more. For Lynch completists and obsessives (and they are legion), their public debut within a complex multi-media display that includes photography, installations, film and video work and a programme of concerts and live performances will make Paris a Mecca this spring. "Herve's pulled out work I haven't looked at not just in years but in decades," its author observes, "and he's treated it kindly and with great respect."

Now settled back into a beaten-up armchair, Lynch sips from a frothed-up coffee (he drinks mug after mug of it each day and even markets his own organic line of beans, the David Lynch Signature Cup) and reflects on his relationship with Hollywood, in the Hills of which his three-house property (one functions as his office, another as his studio, then there is his home itself, in the garden of which is sited this rather grand, expansive equivalent of a shed) is located. "There's no community of film-makers here," he says, his right hand fluttering butterfly-like through the air as he talks. "You might go to a party here or there but that's about the extent of it. I don't visit other directors' sets or they mine. We live in the same place and we must like it here - I love it! There are some shared experiences but for the most part we're all just on our own, getting on with our own work."

Lynch arrived here in 1971, fresh from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and, newly enthused by the medium of film, with a $5,000 grant that allowed him to make a 30-minute short, The Grandmother, about a neglected boy who grows the titular character from seed. It was then that he would begin work on Eraserhead, a project that took six years to complete due to both personal and budget constraints. "I come from a very responsible family," he notes of this time. "My brother is now in charge of all the electrical wiring for the State of Washington's penitentiaries. My sister is a financial planner who is doing really well. They are serious people. And here am I, older than them, three years into this film and with no money left. I'm divorced (from the first of his three wives) and have a child (Jennifer, who would go on to direct the critically reviled Boxing Helena). Naturally, there's some concern.

"So one night my father and my brother sit me down in the living room of my parents' house and give me The Talk. I mean, it's not looking good, is it? I'm not moving forward but in my mind there's nothing to do but to finish this film. I have to do it. But they're telling me (a) to get a job, and (b) to forget about Eraserhead. And they mean it."

Lynch smiles when he says that he couldn't oblige them on (b), but he did see the sense of (a), and this despite having a chequered history of employment. "I'd had jobs throughout high school because my dad had said that if I wanted an artist's studio - and boy, I did - then he would pay half the rent if I raised the other half. That was a big incentive. And all of my jobs were delivering prescriptions for drug stores and always I'd get fired. I wasn't such a bad employee. I'd always make sure people got the correct medication. But I was bad enough. I had real issues with authority and was cavalier in my dealings with it. I feel bad now about the way I behaved. If you're gonna have a job you should try and do it well. That's the thing I learned from that time."

But now, compelled by circumstance, Lynch knuckled down to the overnight delivery by car of 200-plus copies of the Wall Street Journal to private houses and business addresses. By reconfiguring the route he had been given ("and by driving flat out in my Volkswagen throwing out of both windows, left and right") he was able to cut his working time to just one hour. "And I ended up loving that route. It made me enough money to move into a place of my own, and with it and the help of some new investors, I was able finally to finish the film." Disturbing and enigmatic, Eraserhead instantly established his name. Still though, there was what he refers to as his "art life."

It was his mother Sunny who'd best encouraged Lynch's nascent talent in that area. "My brother and sister were allowed colouring books but not me. We were all given plenty of materials but I was encouraged to do my own drawings, not just stay within the lines of someone else's. I don't how or why she intuited there was something there worth nurturing but it was a beautiful thing for me, that belief and support. She made it seem a natural thing for a boy to express himself in that way, which probably isn't what everybody felt at the time in the kind of places we were living."

That an adult male might make a living from art was a whole other thing however. There were no role models whatsoever. "Until I was 15, that is. We've just moved to Virginia and I'm standing outside my new girlfriend's house when she introduces me to a friend, Toby Keeler. And Toby tells me his stepfather is a painter. I feel I'm about to pass out. It is possible! In that moment my whole life changes."

The next weekend and at Lynch's request, he was taken to Georgetown to meet Bushnell Keeler. "And I almost passed out again because he worked in this classic, archetypal studio, just exactly the kind of place a kid would imagine. There and then I determined I'd be a painter too. I was getting nothing from school. Zip! The classroom was unbearably boring and devoid of inspiration. I didn't want to follow any route that it might prescribe for me. And though it may have been my parents' private hope that I would be drawn to something more conventional, they were surprisingly encouraging and supportive. But that couldn't stop there being a lot of fear and anxiety in me. I don't know what it was based on. It was just there. Anger too, though mainly that came later and through finding myself in situations that were not what I had envisaged for myself."

In describing his domestic world up until then, Lynch talks of broad and quiet streets, tree-lined and elegant; of comfortable homes with sun-dappled lawns and safe back yards in which to play; of cherry blossom; of whistling milkmen; of shiny aircraft passing slowly overhead across an azure sky. Where of all the places he and his family lived during that time (his father's work as a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture caused them to move repeatedly) best represents this idealised, almost mythic vision of late '50s and early '60s suburbia?

"Our home in Boise, Idaho," he says firmly. "It's where we lived longest. Six years, taking me from third to eighth grade so from aged eight to 14. Everything seemed to come together for me there. I had great friends. There was an optimism in the air that you could almost reach out and touch. It was an utterly magical time. Phenomenal. The best."

When I remark that, from a European perspective, the songs and the cars of that era are especially potent signifiers of a vanished America, Lynch draws that fluttering right hand to a space above his heart. "Exactly," he says. "The two major things. You had the birth of rock'n'roll and a music that, to my mind and in terms of excitement, has never been topped. Then yes, the cars, so staggeringly beautiful and a focus for every boy I knew." And the Donald Lynch of that time drove ...? "This ancient Potiac, gutless and slow. Oh, it was beautiful enough in its own way, two-tone yellow and green and with a hood (bonnet) emblem of orange plastic. But to be without a new car in that Golden Age! My God, the social embarrassment it represented. I was so covetous. When we moved on to Virginia and got a Chevrolet Impala with vast chrome fins, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

Whether through nostalgia or as a self-protective mechanism, Lynch continues to define himself in terms of this seductively-painted past: "Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana," he has been quoted as having said in self-definition to interviewer after interviewer, an unhelpful response to all manner of lines of personal enquiry. It is a recurring theme or milieu in much of his work too, both as an artist and a director. But as we well know, that white picket-fenced world is not quite what it seems. Pitch is oozing from the cherry tree bark and ants infest the blossom. As in the film Blue Velvet, a severed ear may lie hidden within the grass. When and how did he become aware that adults had secrets, that what may seem to be perfection can go to seed and rot? Not, he says, through observing his own parents, who remained happily married until his mother's death three years ago.

"A sad story," he says of this latter fact, digressing. "She was killed in an automobile accident and it was my father who was driving. Thank goodness he's slipped a little and doesn't really remember the episode. That's a blessing for him, I think. He's doing real good though, even at 91."

Then, returning to the question, he continues, "But you asked about secrets ...There wasn't any one single event. It was just an awareness growing throughout that time that all might not be as was first thought. You'd go back to a friend's house, for instance, and you'd notice something about him change the moment he stepped inside. Or something about the way his parents were sitting as you passed the open door of their living room would cause you to wonder, though you didn't know quite know about what. Stuff like that happened all the time to me. It made me very curious.

"Still today I'll pass a house and maybe there's a light on in one of the windows but that light isn't warm. It has a coolness to it which will make me think, 'Who lives there? What goes on inside?' And there are millions upon millions of homes like that. The doors are closed. The curtains are drawn. Nothing that you can call an obvious clue. But still I'll think, 'All isn't quite as great as it would otherwise seem in there.' It's just a sense I have about the world and they way in which people live."

Appropriately then, included within The Air Is On Fire is a life-sized recreation of a Lynch drawing of just such a suburban room, domestic setting for who knows what acts of familial theatre. Indeed, in the paintings and drawings too, a recurring theme is the home ("complete," says the introduction to a companion book published by the Fondation, "with its potentially sinister underbelly.")

But America indoors and out has changed beyond all recognition since the would-be halcyon days of the Lynchean fantasy. By his own measure, the process began around 1960. That's when a cloud formed and it all began to change. And when I went back to Boise from Virginia that summer to visit I saw exactly to what extent. It wasn't as I had remembered it. And by the time we got to '63 and Kennedy was shot (in his capacity as an Eagle Scout and on his 15th birthday, Lynch had served as an usher at the President's inauguration), well that whole chapter of history was closed tight. Gone forever."

And of course actual world events were running in parallel with his own maturation and increasing insight, his loss of innocence. "Which is inevitable for all of us. That very real optimism I'd felt only had a certain depth. Beneath it were plenty of things to be afraid of. Plenty."

Today though, the sores are on the surface. Comparatively, we live in a shameless and confessional age. Sins that once were kept hidden are now paraded in public, picked over and discussed. Does Lynch believe that makes for a better world? "Oh yes, undoubtedly," he says, leaning back in his chair, his fingertips forming a steeple. "One by one, the sicknesses are being revealed. It's ever harder for bad things to be concealed. It's all put out there and we are forced to deal with it and move forward. That kind of house-cleaning has got to be healthy and help is now getting to people who previously weren't receiving it. OK, so there are still a lot of bad things going on in the world but I'm real hopeful that the world is going through a big and beautiful transition and that things for all of us are going to get good. Real real good." Because? Lynch leans back some more and beams.

"Because of the unifying field," he says. "Because of the enlightenment of the field of unity. I know it sounds strange but that's what's going to make the future a great place. I've been doing transcendental meditation for 33 years now and I've seen how transformational it can be. Again and again I've seen people who're in pretty bad trouble learn the technique for diving within to experience bliss consciousness at the deepest level, and little by little their consciousness and inner happiness expands. Intelligence, creativity, love and understanding all grow. Negativity recedes. And for the individual as a result, life just gets better and better." Then, correctly reading the neutral expression newly fixed to my face, he adds, "But this isn't some hippy thing. It's not goofball. In terms of personal growth, it's money in the bank. If there's something you want to accomplish, this is the way."

Lynch is a follower of the now elderly Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in the late 1960s the guru of choice of The Beatles and their celebrity acolytes. Last July, an official community of some 1800 fellow believers was established in Idaho and over Christmas Lynch spent time there, participating in group events. "By day they do regular jobs but in the morning and evening they go into these two domes that have been built, one for the men and one for the women, and do the programme together. And I'm in there with the lights low as this stream of guys come in and sit together and it was the most beautiful cosmic feeling. They're the real heroes, like yogis from the Himalayas lined up, except that they're regular Americans who happen to be deep, deep souls.It's so beautiful what they're doing, day in, day out. The feeling in that room was beyond the beyond. Intense bliss."

It's Lynch's (and all other followers') belief that such organised activity "enlivens the unified field", so helping good to triumph over bad. Tracking studies claim to have proved it really works. "Since that group I visited started, the overall arc of the news is up significantly. Hurricanes were supposed to hit bad this year but so far not one has reached us. The stock market has broken about 18 records. Unemployment is down. Consumer confidence is up. Even Bush is being influenced, 'cos more and more he's saying, 'Let's talk. Let's negotiate, rather than kill.'"

And is his family as committed as he (Lynch has a grown-up son, Austin, from a second, 10-year marriage and is now with his third wife Mary and their young boy Riley)? His ever-moving right hand pauses momentarily and he smiles. "You know, I'm more gung-ho than a lot of people but to one degree or other, yes they are."

Last summer he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education, its aim to fund any child who wants to learn how to practice transcendental mediation. An estimated 1.5 million Americans now do so and experts in the field credit the artist/ director with raising awareness and creating a growing interest in TM. Newly published in the US (Tarcher/ Penguin) is the Lynthean equivalent of a self-help book, Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativty, a series of musings (some droll, some homespun, some plain out there) on his beliefs and their impact on his life and work. As an example, take 'Therapy': "I went to a psychiatrist once ... On entering the room I asked him, 'Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity?' And he said, 'Well, David, I have to be honest. It could.' And I shook his hand and left."

Reaction to that creativity has been less kind in recent times. The crossover success of Twin Peaks 15 years ago made Lynch a topic of watercooler conversation everywhere, but subsequent films Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) tested critical and audience patience and the commercial expectations for a new release, the three-hour-long Inland Empire (it stars his frequent muse Laura Dern alongside Jeremy Irons and Harry Dean Stanton) have been muted by the bemused reaction of some arthouse audiences on its first US run. Three-times Oscar nominated and winner of a host of European awards, the director is undeterred. Shooting films digitally and distributing them independently is the way forward, he says. "That way no-one dicks around with your work. And I'll never do TV again. Why would I want to? The internet is the new television, without all of the ad breaks."

Time for us to part. Lynch is off this evening on a promotional push for his book and bids an assistant to bring a fresh copy, so that he may sign it for me ("All the best mate,' he will write, and "because I know how you Englishmen speak."). "But first I must urinate," he announces, rising from his chair and moving towards me. I smile and look behind me expecting to see a bathroom door, but there is none. Lynch's hand is on his zipper now and he is looking at the small stainless steel sink I have been sitting beside throughout out conversation. "Ah!" I say, suddenly understanding. "Let me give you some privacy."

Which is how I come to be outside in his garden looking down over Los Angeles as he, behind glass, pees into a drain. Midway through he puts his head round the door jamb and calls to me. "You know, you've got a great smile, buddy," he says, waving slowly at me with his free left hand.

Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson

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