Lynch on Lynch

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When he was 14, his family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. Though Lynch flourished as a high school student in Alexandria...leaving Boise is when the music stopped... Lynch works from a studio on a slope above one of three adjacent homes he owns in the Hollywood Hills, just a stone’s throw from Mulholland Drive. He is reclusive and seldom leaves this little realm, let alone grants audiences to journalists – but he is prepared to now, on the eve of publishing an unconventional memoir-cum-biography, Room To Dream. An assistant escorts me through the house (sleek concrete walls and surfaces, floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS cassettes and CDs) and up through the garden to the studio. A snake slithered across the path earlier this morning, the assistant says. Do you ever watch INLAND EMPIRE two or three times in a row and feel like you don’t understand the world anymore? Yeah, me neither… Then, reading this book, you’ll come across Noriko Miyakawa’s words - “The parts of the film you don’t understand point to places in yourself that need examining” - and feel you need to do some more soul searching, because nowhere in here is this bad boy explained. Simply that “it’s deep in interesting ways, and it goes into different places and has different textures that hook together. You enter the film in one place and you come out in another,” which is what I always loved about David Lynch when asked to talk about his films: abstract AF… NOTE: if you google David Lynch ‘paintings’... you’ll be amazed of how much he has done - subconscious surreal bizarre paintings!!!! I also find his initial justification for transcendental meditation completely bizarre. As a teen, Lynch left his Christian church upbringing because he was frustrated with the hypocrisy he saw in the church. Later on, he discovers meditation, and with boyish glee proclaims that transcendental meditation is the real deal, because “get this, what it teaches us it that we should treat other people the way we’d like to be treated ourselves!” ?? He seems entirely unaware that what he’s just said is the words of Jesus (from Matthew 7:12), which Christians regard as “the golden rule.” I find Lynch to be a really odd spokesperson for meditation.

David Lynch, Paley Library Gallery, Temple University, Philadelphia, December 14, 1969–January 17, 1969. The cynic might think that this book and its recording is an 108-minute infomercial for Transcendental Meditation and its founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I don't believe it is. Lynch approaches the mindful practice with his same Jimmy Stewart "gee whiz" enthusiasm as with everything else he does.Gosling, Emily. “David Lynch’s damn good new MIMA show explores his use of naming.” It’s Nice That, 14 November 2014. Web. This withholding of pleasure is Twin Peaks’ new secret weapon, and it works,” wrote the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage. Others disagreed, the Hollywood Reporter branding the reboot a “self-indulgent, pointless, meaningless… exercise in misplaced nostalgia and auteur idol-worship”. He is not about to make a big-screen film any time soon: while he loves the superior sound and picture quality of cinema, Lynch thinks theatrical releases have become too short. “I would not make a feature film in today’s world because the kind of films I make couldn’t be on the big screen for very long.” Better, then, to make shows for television, a medium that is more comfortable with loose ends and narrative culs-de-sac, where he can tell a “continuing story”.

David Lynch: Paintings and Drawings, Touko Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, January 12–27, 1991. (Catalogue) Eraserhead landed Lynch a job directing The Elephant Man. His attempt to personally mould and apply John Hurt’s makeup failed, forcing him to hire a specialist and triggering an extraordinary bout of self-reproach. “I thought it would be better to kill myself because I could hardly stand to be in my body,” he writes. He recovered only to clash with Hurt’s co-star, Anthony Hopkins, who deemed the young American out of his depth and tried to get him fired. Mel Brooks, who produced the film, recalls an angry phone call from Hopkins but not an explicit demand to fire Lynch. In any case, he defended his director and shepherded The Elephant Man to eight Oscar nominations in 1980. Brooks remains a fan, telling Lynch’s co-author: “He’s all screwed up, too, of course, and he projects his own emotional and sexual turmoil into his work and assaults us with the feelings he’s being assaulted by.” It hit me that the trip we're on as human beings is so beautiful and it has the happiest of happy endings. Everything is okay. There's nothing to worry about. Everything is just beautiful." There is a theory that Lynch himself doesn’t always know what is going on in his stories. He shoots this down. “I need to know for myself what things mean and what’s going on. Sometimes I get ideas, and I don’t know exactly what they mean. So I think about it, and try to figure it out, so I have an answer for myself.”

Offers countless new stories, even for Lynch fanatics…All is told with Lynch’s considerable charm.’

David Lynch: Lithos, 2007-2009 (exhibition catalogue). Edited by Patrice Forest; with an essay by Chihiro Minato and an interview with the artist by Dominique Païni. Gravelines, France: Musée du dessin et de l’estampe originale, 2010. Smith, PD. “Room to Dream review—a remarkable insight into David Lynch.” The Guardian, 21 July 2018. Web. He does, however, squash the theory, much loved by some Peakers, that the last two parts of the 18-hour series should be watched simultaneously on two screens, with dialogue overlapping. “Yeah, I heard that. It’s bullshit. See, it’s beautiful that someone came up with this. You could double-expose scenes in lots of films and it could conjure some fantastic thing.”What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm...anti-Hollywood attitude…and matter-of-fact defiance of reality.’