David Lynch shares the odd details
Filmmaker David Lynch is a cheerful, charismatic man with a “sunny disposition” and a “capacity for joy.”
It says so right in the index of his bizarro new autobiography Room to Dream, listing several instances of each jolly behaviour.
Wait a minute. Lynch is also an angry, shy and agoraphobic person, whose many dislikes include graffiti, the desert and going out in public. These are also in the index and book.
Seems the snowy-haired Midwesterner, now 72, is more of a complicated and contradictory fellow than his beatific smile and mild manners would let on. This would not necessarily be news to faithful followers of his convention-flouting movies, which include Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, or his groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks. Lynch fans have learned to expect not just the unexpected from their hero, but also the downright weird and disturbing (Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, amirite?). U.S. President Donald Trump is obviously not hip to Lynch’s trip. Trump misinterpreted a comment Lynch made about him to The Guardian newspaper, in which the filmmaker observed that the carrot-topped dictator “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.”
This was not meant as an endorsement, although Trump took it as such, boastfully tweeting about it. This prompted Lynch to issue a statement this week saying he was taken out of context and that Trump really needs to mend his ways: “Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president … You are causing suffering and division.”
Trump forced Lynch to do something he rarely does: explain himself. But Lynch was already in a talkative and revelatory mood, because Room to Dream is chockablock full of insights into the man and his methods — although we still don’t how he created the nightmare-inducing baby from Eraserhead, and likely never will. The book, which Lynch co-wrote with journalist and art curator Kristine McKenna, is anything but a standard memoir. Roughly half of it is written as a regular autobiography, with McKenna interviewing family, friends and associates to paint a portrait of the man. The other half is Lynch’s elucidations and/or contradictions of McKenna’s prose, often both at once. “What you’re reading here is basically a person having a conversation with his own biography,” the introduction helpfully notes.You wouldn’t expect it to be normal, right? But we do learn many cool things about David Lynch. Here are five of the best: He and his pals once tried to blow up a cow: As a teen in Boise, Idaho, Lynch’s summer job was clearing brush in a ski resort called Bogus Basin. He and his brush buddies found a “dead, bloated cow” by a mountain stream and tried to “pop” it with their steel pickaxes.“You’d bang the pickax into this cow and it would fly off this thing — it could’ve killed somebody,” Lynch writes. The cow would fart when you hit it really hard, and it was a poisonous odor because it was decaying, but we could not pop this cow. I think we gave up.” He’s a Beatles fanatic: Lynch attended the Fab Four’s firstever U.S. concert in Washington, D.C. in 1964, having scammed the ticket from his brother, and he became an instant devotee. He has since befriended Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and every year attends Ringo’s birthday party at the Capitol Records building in L.A. Says Lynch: “I got to tell Ringo and Paul that I was at their first American concert, and of course it didn’t mean anything to them but for me it’s incredible.” Married four times, thrice divorced, split No. 4 looms: Lynch’s current wife Emily Stofle says Lynch got so rattled while making Twin Peaks: The Return, she rented a nearby house for him to live in alone, keeping out the light with blackout curtains. He still lives there, Stofle ruefully notes: “He says he needs uninterrupted time for thinking and complains that he’s never alone, but he’s in charge of the world he’s created for himself.” He’s a man of many and lengthy habits: During the 1980s, after Eraserhead estab- lished him as an out-there auteur of note, Lynch sought solace in the habit of going to Bob’s Big Boy eatery in L.A. every day at 2:30 p.m. to consume several cups of coffee and a chocolate milkshake. Meetings and interviews were also conducted there. Lynch kept this routine up for eight years, until somebody warned him he might miss a Cannes film submission unless he kicked his Bob’s habit and got serious about his editing. “It almost killed me,” Lynch says. “I had to give up milkshakes.” At TIFF in Toronto during 9/11, he got deeper into TM: Lynch was attending the Toronto International Film Festival with Mulholland Drive in 2001 when the 9/11 terror attacks occurred. The tragedy convinced him to get even deeper into the transcendental meditation (TM) he’d been exploring, now a major part of his life and art. Says onetime assistant Jay Aaseng: “That event made him feel like it was important for him to share TM with the world. I think he thought that if everyone was meditating, things like that wouldn’t happen, and at that point he offered to pay for everyone in the office to have TM training.”