TT 481: Lynch Memories (by Glenn Kenny)

guest post about the late director by a noted critic

(A basic understanding of David Lynch is a binding ingredient within my social circle and peer group.

Glenn Kenny is a fabulous movie critic for the New York Times and other places; he has also written valuable books: I reviewed Glenn’s The World is Yours: The Story of Scarface, here.

The most famous article about David Lynch is by David Foster Wallace, who spent time on set watching the filming of Lost Highway. “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” (1996) was originally published in Premiere before being reprinted in the Wallace anthology A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. (That whole anthology is genius and currently $3 on Kindle.)

Since Glenn’s essay is partly personal — “my memories of being affected by David Lynch” — I’ll also tell an anecdote. I learned about Lynch during the early years of The Bad Plus, when I was encouraged to watch Twin Peaks (the DVD box had just finally come out, a major cultural event); the band also went to Mulholland Dr. in the theatre. Drummer Dave King frequently raved about the movie Lost Highway as one of his favorite films, and while I had seen the movie in my twenties, I just didn’t know what I thought about it. Luckily, I happened upon Wallace’s deep dive in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and reading Wallace enabled me to go back and re-watch Lost Highway with much more understanding.

This is all relevant because Glenn Kenny edited the Wallace article for Premiere.

— e.i.)

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1. Apologia

I’m obliged to make something clear from right off the bat: I was not friends with David Lynch. I interviewed him, once, in 1989, in tandem with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singer Julie Cruise. More on that in a bit. When I was at Premiere magazine, he was aware of my existence; in September of 2001 he attended the magazine’s Toronto International Film Festival party. He was there with Mulholland Dr., and he had star Naomi Watts on one arm and star Laura Elena Herring on the other, and when he saw me he gave me a big happy wave and said, “Thanks for the four-star review, Glenn,” for I had indeed given the picture a four-star review. And a little later, after sampling the food on hand, he enthused to me, “Great pizza, Glenn!”

Of course I knew that Lynch was aware of the mammoth piece on him by David Foster Wallace that my magazine had published several years prior, and probably that I was the editor of that piece. I don’t think he’d ever read it; Lynch was wary of critical exegeses of any and all stripes. But given the high profile of its author — who based some of his observations on two days spent on the set of Lost Highway, frankly closer to craft services than the camera — there was a time when Lynch got asked about the piece a great deal, and he developed a stock answer for queries about it. Which was “That guy’s weirder than ME.” As it happened, they had never been introduced. (A side note: Don DeLillo, in his remarks at a memorial for Wallace held at NYU in October of 2008, closed with these words: “Youth and loss. This is Dave’s voice. American.” I think that can be said of Lynch as well.)

The last time I saw Lynch was in Cannes, at the breakfast buffet at the Hotel Martinez, in 2007; the Palme D’Or winner was there with a boatload of other Palme D’Or winners to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the festival. We exchanged short greetings; it was seven in the morning and neither of us were our customary ebullient selves.

And that’s it. Nevertheless, when I heard of Lynch’s death last Thursday, it hit me very hard and very personally. So much so that when two outlets for which I do freelance work asked me to write something about Lynch, I said I couldn’t really turn anything around in the time frame they required. Which I admit is kind of a dereliction of duty since doing such things is my job. What can I tell you.

But a little after that, the proprietor of this Substack, a friend who’s also an artist I admire, asked if I’d contribute some thoughts. It felt right, because the idea was more along the lines of talking to a friend.

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2. In the personal canon, in the critical canon

I’ve written books about films by Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, two filmmakers I’ve loved all my adult life (and portions of my adolescence, yes, I am a senior citizen); there’s a host of other filmmakers living and dead I admire and revere, Anderson, Bava, Bresson, Cronenberg, Denis, Ford, Godard, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lang, Lester, Ozu, Mizoguchi, PIalat, Polanski, Ray, Ray, Tarkovsky, Zeman, you get the general idea.

But I’ve got a special attachment to Lynch, whose movies came along at a special juncture in the development of my taste. I was a precocious kid, a horror buff who also had a jones for French pictures; the first two books I bought with my early-70s allowance money were Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film and P.E. Salles Gomes’ biography of Jean Vigo. In my teens I was a faithful Village Voice reader, and I first heard of Eraserhead through a short but emphatic review of it in that paper by J. Hoberman, a critic whose admiration of Lynch was always tinged by a certain skepticism (Lynch’s arguable reactionary streak never sat well with this stalwartly progressive assessor). And shortly after that, the picture came to New Jersey, courtesy of a friend of mine, as it happened. Nelson Page, who ran the A/V department at my high school, was running a small theater on Rt. 4 in Paramus where he booked Lynch’s movie; in emulation of the way it was screening in NY at the time, it was a midnight show. (Which concept had been introduced to Jersey with The Rocky Horror Picture show, at the Oritani Theater in Hackensack, where my then-girlfriend worked the concession stand; these hours put something of a crimp in our dating activities.)

Wallace, in that aforementioned essay, does a wonderful job of describing the particular scenes of Eraserhead that are not just Lynchian but universal. Going to the house of one’s boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents and being served an unappetizing meal is not, I reckon, an uncommon experience. (cf. “Rappers Delight.”) But the Lynchian nightmare of those chickens in Eraserhead is the most perfect artistic account of how such an experience can actually feel. This is why I never thought of Lynch or his work as being particularly “weird.” I remember after the screening at Nelson’s theater, my oldest friend Joseph coming out of the theater and nodding at each other, still stunned. “This guy gets it,” was our shared thought.

Eraserhead was released 48 years ago, and would be the first of only 10 completed Lynch feature films — which is not many, especially when compared with directors who release new movies every other year. (Of course, if you count the television series Twin Peaks, its follow-up Twin Peaks: The Return, and the dozens of shorts he made, you’ve got a much bigger body of work.) But certain titans of filmmaking — Bresson, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Welles — have fairly short feature rosters. Their work nevertheless remains monumental, immediately recognizable. So it is, and ever will be, with Lynch.

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3. Ears

Lynch’s audio world is just as startling as his imagery. In early interviews he was just as dismissive of “What does it all mean” queries as he’d always be; but he spoke with enthusiasm of certain parts of his process, particularly the work he did with his sound designer Alan Splet. Recounting activities like putting a feeding a garden hose into a bathtub of using an air conditioning duct as a reverb unit. Lynch co-composed the creepy “In Heaven” with L.A. eccentric Peter Ivers and curated some particularly galumphing Fats Waller organ numbers for his first feature. For his second feature, The Elephant Man, Lynch used a conventional (and moving) score by John Morris, who was a longtime collaborator of Mel Brooks, that picture’s producer. (We won’t speak of Dune here; the film got out of his control in a painful way, and he avoided speaking of it for the rest of his life; nevertheless, we Lynch heads still hold it in higher esteem than the admittedly estimable Villeneuve adaptations.)

When he discovered Angelo Badalamenti, who initially came on Blue Velvet as a vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini, he recognized at least a potential kindred spirit, and his hunch was correct. I mentioned above that I only formally interviewed Lynch on one occasion. And that was on a conference call with him, Badalamenti, and Julie Cruise, the singer of “Mysteries of Love” in Blue Velvet. They were preparing Lynch’s “Industrial Symphony” for a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the fall of 1989.

Both Angelo and Julie spoke of working with Lynch as a kind of gradual initiation into a secret society. They didn’t quite know why they were being invited into his world, and they didn’t quite know that they were right for that world. Cruise told me that before being tapped to sing for Blue Velvet, “I was a belter,” in the Broadway tradition. Nothing she ever sang for Lynch was belted; rather, it was almost whispered, projected with an angelic innocence.

Badalamenti’s Blue Velvet score is exemplary. His opening theme with its high strings sounds like it could usher in an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and it’s also got a high Camp theatricality to it. The overall mood practically defines neo-noir, but some of his motifs — say the three-chord “dunt-dunt-DAH” motif that punctuates several transitions — sound like ad jingles gone awry. Lynch’s selection of songs in the picture is spot on. The title tune by Bobby Vinton, of course, but most crucially, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” the only song that can make Frank Booth cry. The scene in which Dean Stockwell’s ghastly, luded-out drug dealer Ben lip-synchs the song to Frank can be very funny if you just describe it; on film, it’s stomach-churningly moving. When Blue Velvet came out on home video, I did a phone interview with Orbison and he spoke of how moved he was to be remembered by Lynch — the use of the song actually restarted his career to a large extent — and he recognized the song’s aptness. Roy Orbison, too, “got it.”

What else? Well, there’s so much. One of Lynch’s unrealized projects was Ronnie Rocket, often described by him as being about “a little guy and electricity. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” Dylan sang; all of Lynch’s films have the ghost of electricity lurking in their bottom. In The Straight Story the movie’s hero often sleeps outdoors, under high-tension wires, and their hum is powerful. It reminds me of LaMonte Young, whose drones are just as inspired by the electrical audio of his Midwest boyhood as they are by Indian ragas.

And then there’s his use of “Honky Tonk, Part One,” Bill Doggett’s rock and roll classic, a greasy groove that, as a Blue Velvet feature of Ben’s sound system and then Frank Booth’s car stereo, becomes the soundtrack for horrific, humiliating violence.

And while I’ve never had any use for Marilyn Manson, their emo-goth stylings meshed reasonably well with the L.A. menagerie of Lost Highway. Lynch’s engagement with music never stopped; see the array of singers and bands, all of them in some way or another Lynch’s children, that ended most of the Twin Peaks: The Return episodes with Roadhouse performances.

— Glenn Kenny

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(The unexpected popular success of Twin Peaks was surely partly thanks to the luminous contribution of Angelo Badalamenti. As a coda to Glenn’s discussion of audio, let’s recall Badalamenti’s work as an actor in Mulholland Dr., where Badalamenti plays a disgruntled heavy who mostly says “This is the girl,” before spitting out an espresso. In terms of a director paying tribute to a beloved composer, this phenomenal set piece is in a class of one. — e.i.)