Culture | The painting and the moth

David Lynch’s memoir illuminates the origins of his art

“Room to Dream” suggests the director’s themes and visions derive from his childhood

Damn good coffee in “Twin Peaks”
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Room to Dream. By David Lynch and Kristine McKenna.Random House; 592 pages; $32. Canongate Books; £25.

ONE evening in the 1950s David Lynch and his brother were wandering along the quiet, dimly lit streets of Boise, Idaho, when they encountered a stumbling, naked woman. “Maybe it was something about the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the colour of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth,” Mr Lynch remembers. He wanted to help her, but did not know what to do or say. “She was scared and beat up, but even though she was traumatised, she was beautiful.”

Fans of Mr Lynch will recall a disturbing scene like this one from “Blue Velvet”, a film released in 1986 that starred Isabella Rossellini. That movie, the director’s fourth, established him as an auteur of woman-in-trouble surrealism. Critics have strived to interpret his idiosyncratic oeuvre, but “Room to Dream”, a story of his life, shows that many of his themes derive from childhood—ideas and images lurking in shadows that Mr Lynch has filled with imagination and dread.

“Room to Dream” is itself an unusual artefact. Its chapters alternate between a biography by Kristine McKenna and a memoir by Mr Lynch. Ms McKenna narrates the major turning points in her subject’s life: his move to Virginia for high school, where he became a painter; the early experimental films he made in Philadelphia, including a creepy short called “The Grandmother”; his acceptance at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he studied alongside Terrence Malick and Paul Schrader and embarked on his first feature film, “Eraserhead” (1977).

Several of his friends tell Ms McKenna that Mr Lynch combines a sweet nature with dark, twisted fascinations. Jack Fisk, who would become a production designer on his films, recalls a moth landing in the thick paint of one of his pictures and struggling to death: “I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.” Mr Lynch asked Raffaella de Laurentiis, a film producer, for her uterus when she had a hysterectomy (she gave him a pig’s instead).

Still, the humour and eccentricity of Mr Lynch’s own reminiscences and observations are the book’s main pleasure. He is reticent, in an old-fashioned way, about his love affairs (he has been married four times). But he says he likes “librarian types…their outer appearance hiding smouldering heat inside”. He didn’t “get there” until he was 18. Of one Catholic girl in high school, he reports: “We probably did more on the early dates than later, because she kept going to catechism and finding out more things she wasn’t allowed to do.” Characters in his life might as well be characters in his films. “His head was as big as a five-gallon can,” he writes of an acquaintance, “and he had a huge beard and giant torso and the legs of a three-year-old.”

Mr Lynch betrays an affinity for spirituality, numerology, conspiracy theories and fate. He thinks Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination, since he was just “one twenty-five cent bullet” away from the presidency. He believes people “can go into the future”, though he allows that this is “not easy”. Scenes in his films come to him in dreams, “the logic” of which appeals to him. He is a devotee of transcendental meditation, and he believes in karma: “There’s a law of nature that says what you sow is what you reap and you come into life with the certainty that some of your past is going to visit you in this life.”

With each quirk Mr Lynch gives fans further clues to understanding his art. Laura Palmer of “Twin Peaks”, his television masterwork, seems to be his favourite woman in trouble, aside perhaps from Marilyn Monroe, whose story he says he wanted to tell on screen. He implies that Monroe may have been murdered by the Kennedy family (the book is full of suspicious deaths, both famous and obscure).

When he cast Ms Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”, it was not just her beauty but the look in her eyes, “a fear in there”, that made her right for the part. Mr Lynch has been seeing the same dark visions since he was a boy, translating them to a spectacular canvas. As he writes in this book, “you’re basically who you are from the start.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The painting and the moth"

Kim Jong Won

From the June 16th 2018 edition

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