Steven Spielberg knew what he was doing when he cast David Lynch as John Ford in The Fabelmans; already, in 2022, the director had become, like Ford, bigger than his movies, a living monument to cinema. Seeing Lynch in conversation back in 2007 at London’s BFI Southbank, before the release of Inland EmpireI was very mindful of that fact, writing that “seeing him speak to a packed house, with that silver pompadour, that black suit and buttoned-up, tie-less shirt, made me feel like a witness to history, like seeing Picasso, Churchill or Fred Astaire.”
The Elephant Man producer Mel Brooks later went one better when I spoke to him in 2008. Describing their first meeting at Bob’s Big Boy Diner in Burbank—because Lynch only ever ate there, usually for a late lunch at 2.30pm—Brooks said, “He looked just like Charles Lindbergh when he flew over the Atlantic. He had a white shirt, buttoned at the top, and a leather jacket, like the one Jimmy Stewart wore when he played Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis.”
When I met Lynch earlier on in the day, it did worry me then that he was one of the few remaining holdouts when it came to smoking, which, I’d heard, dictated his travel plans. Even John Waters—who claimed he’d smoked so much that he was a cigarette— had long given up by then. (“It’s the only thing the government ever told me that was true,” he later said. “It does kill you.”) But the smoking ban was still six months away, and Lynch had turned it into a mesmerizing artform; he could light a cigarette without you even noticing, pop it in his mouth and talk for five minutes straight without flicking it or sending a millimeter of ash flying.
Part of the reason for the distraction was the voice, the cheery, familiar drawl that could, by turns, tell you everything and nothing, his avuncular tone in contrast to the spectacular darkness that his films could so disturbingly, and effortlessly, achieve. The first time I met him, around the time of The Straight Story in 1999, I asked what kinds of messages he left on his answerphone. A good one, he said, was, “We’re at the gun store right now, we’ll get back to ya.”
Indeed, the reason the Lynch myth will endure is that he knew the value of mystery, and, in interviews, his reticence—or whatever the opposite of bloviating is—was a form of fan service. When I spoke to Lynch ahead of Twin Peaks: The Returnthe show’s publicist asked that there should be no questions about characters—or plot. Now, that is pretty funny for a piece that was supposed to be a curtain-raiser, and Lynch swatted away my attempts to find out, well, anything at all. “That’s totally under wraps, Damon, you know that,” he very much enjoyed saying. “You’ve got a good sense of humor about it though.”
The funny thing is, I was not an immediate fan. I loved Eraserhead when it first came to the UK in the early ’80s but mostly saw it as a bellwether of the post-punk spirit that would follow in the wake of The Sex Pistols. I didn’t even notice that Dunewhich I hated and was taken to by some friends who also somehow thought I might like Return of the Jediwas by the same director. But Blue Velvet was a life-changer; my first week in London I saw it in a West End cinema called the Lumiere (of course, it’s now a hotel). It arrived in the UK as a scandal successits box-office takings surprising even its producer—Dino De Laurentiis—who called Lynch after the first test screening to tell him, “David! Is disaster.”
A couple of years after, I interviewed the late Julee Cruise, who recorded Blue Velvet’s final song “Mysteries of Love” (which was originally going to be The Cocteau Twins’ version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”). Cruise gave me a rare portal into Lynch’s mind that I’ve never forgotten; I asked her about the song “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” and she said, in a profoundly Lynchian way, she thought it was “some kind of something for Isabella”, meaning his then-partner Isabella Rossellini. That “some kind of something” was so much in the spirit of their work together. A similar insight came from Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, who told me while promoting her film Surveillance that her usually laidback father was horrified when she had some random Chinese calligraphy tattooed on, I think, her forearm: “How do you know what it means?!” he said. (It translated as something about eggs and good luck, if I remember rightly.)
-I wasn’t big on Wild at Heart but loved the pilot for Twin Peaks and most of the first series. I admired but didn’t always fully love his work after that, even trying hard with the early ’90s TV show On the Airuntil I saw the astonishing Mulholland Drive in Cannes 2001, at a press screening that is etched in my memory because my friend Shari got into a fight over seats with a crazy journalist. The ushers took his pass and threw him out, but by that time the room was full, so they brought out a couple of deckchairs—something I’ve never seen since—and we sat at the back. Every time Naomi Watts and Laura Harring said “Mulholland Drive” in hushed tones, Shari nudged me and whispered, “It’s like they’re saying ‘Oxford Street’.” Nearly 25 years later, it hasn’t lost any of its power as a hallucinogenic Hollywood noir, a Sunset Boulevard for the 21st century.
The next film, the delirious Inland Empire—a “companion piece” to Mulholland Drivehe said, preferring that to my description of it as its “evil twin”—seemed to take ages, but, looking back, it was only five years. With Laura Dern as an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown, it came with a new kind of freedom and energy; Lynch was inspired by the digital revolution and not entirely opposed to home cinema, if it was good enough. “I think the ultimate is the shared experience in the big dark room,” he said. “Huge picture, huge sound. A cough at a right or wrong moment, a spilled bag of popcorn, someone walking in front of the screen, these things break it and it’s a nightmare, so that’s the ultimate: the big room. But now you can have at your home a big screen and great sound, and you can turn the lights off and you can prepare all your stuff and see it and go into that world.”
It might explain why Lynch put so much effort into the extraordinary Twin Peaks: The Returnan astonishing show that its cineaste admirers championed as an 18-hour movie. People often talk about Lynch’s work strictly in terms of its impact—the extremes he was willing to go to, and the confrontational strangeness of his imagery. This, however, was a showcase for his ability to create atmosphere: moods that no one, even now, has found the words to describe.
Indeed, for all his film’s eccentricities—Blue Velvet’s freaky Frank Booth huffing, well, whatever that stuff is, Lost Highway’s spine-chilling Mystery Man, or Wild at Heart’s Sailor kung fu-kicking in a snakeskin jacket—Lynch wasn’t trying to be controversial. In fact, quite the opposite; as he proved in 1999 with his family-friendly hit The Straight Storyin which an 80-year-old man makes a 240-mile journey to visit his brother on a 5mph John Deere tractor.
“The thing people say about my films is that they’re experimental,” he said. “I say The Straight Story was my most experimental. When I read the script—which I didn’t write—I read it and I felt these things, and I was thinking, ‘Whoa, this is a beautiful feeling. How do you get that feeling in cinemas?’ ’Cos a lot of time you see people crying on the screen but you don’t feel like crying yourself. When you have something that brings a real emotion in there, that’s the power of cinema.”
