Hardly forthcoming
“It seems there is no stopping it,” John Updike once wrote of the vogue for publishing writers’ lifetime correspondence, “as our zeal for ‘people’ and our impatience with intellectual and artistic constructs conspire to unmask all who during their lifetimes presumed to the title of fabricator.”
Nor indeed does there seem to be any stopping the trend in documentaries: the filmed biography of the creative genius, especially of the “twilight retrospective” variety — the portrait of the artist as an old man.
A humble figure, a writer or director or musician, toiling for years toward the completion of an intimate body of work, finds himself unaccountably seized and scrutinized, studied to satisfy our imprudent curiosity. It’s amazing anyone stands for it.
So here we have David Lynch: The Art Life. And here we have, too, a wildly miscalculated attempt to get inside the head of an artist whose mind has tendered its contents to exhibition rather comprehensively already in paintings, music, books, installations, TV series, commercials, shorts and, of course, feature films.
Must we really demand more of a man so personally reticent but creatively forthcoming? Listening to Lynch recount sedately the details of his mundane suburban childhood reveals nothing of significance about the work that the work itself does not insinuate more rewardingly.
“Boise, Idaho, seemed like such a great place,” Lynch declares flatly, midway through the film. Why, I haven’t felt such a frisson of radical insight since I learned that Joyce was born in Dublin!
Lynch has never been the sort of artist to speak with candour about the meaning of his work. He doesn’t record feature-length commentary tracks for the home-video releases of his films; he doesn’t participate in audience Q&As after festival premières; he has long been pressshy, if not press-hostile.
Indeed, the most illuminating profile ever written on the man (David Foster Wallace’s big, sprawling behind-the-scenes document David Lynch Keeps His Head, commissioned by Premiere magazine before the release of Lost Highway in 1996) includes the confession in its third paragraph that the author “rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him.”
The director of The Art of Life, Jon Nguyen, was afforded more access to his subject. But proximity is not proof of tact, let alone need. And given the paucity of what Nguyen extracts from the subject under his microscope, we’d be better off if he’d simply let the subject be.