Lynch looks back on early years as artist
David Lynch hasn’t released a new non documentary feature since “Inland Empire” in 2006. But he’s back in the news as he revives his groundbreaking TV series “Twin Peaks” to fulfill the promise made by the Laura Palmer lookalike at the end of the show’s second season: “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”
(OK, she said it in 1991, so technically it will be 26 years, but let’s not be petty.)
So the timing is right for the 2016 documentary, “David Lynch: The Art Life,” focusing not on the features like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” that made him famous but on his early years and training as an artist, up to his first experimental movies. For some viewers, it will be more than they want to know, but for Lynch’s many partisans, it’s required watching.
The film opens with archival photos and footage depicting the filmmaker’s childhood and teen years in Idaho, Montana and Washington state, with emphasis on his closeness to his mother. He had a knack for drawing at an early age, and praises her for refusing to buy him coloring books, so as not to inhibit his artistic freedom. (Most of the movie is narrated by Lynch.)
He never cared much for school, including his eventual stint at a museum school in Boston. Later he moved to Philadelphia, a town that he immediately hated and says was infested with fear. But his time there paid off, inspiring the enigmatic “Eraserhead,” the first movie to bring him wide attention.
He hit his stride in 1971 when, already married and with a young daughter, he got a chance to study at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles. After a bumpy start, he settled in at the former stables of the institute (it was housed in a rambling onetime mansion). A $10,000 grant enabled him to work, on and off, on “Eraserhead.”
Lynch was totally into “the art life,” to an extent that unnerved his parents and cost him his marriage. He recalls moments of great joy, and times when he was frightened and disappointed. It’s amusing, however, to see him as a young buck, full of himself.
Interspersed with his recollections are scenes of Lynch today, that astonishing hairdo now gray, smoking cigarettes (a favorite occupation) and creating paintings, sculptures and objects, often with menacing overtones, at his current Los Angeles home. He remarried several times, and at age 71 has another young daughter.
The movie, credited to three directors (Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and Olivia Neergaard-Holm), perhaps dwells a bit too much on images of Lynch puffing on a smoke and staring into the distance in artistic contemplation. This might try the patience of even die-hard Lynchians. Also, there might have been a bit more attention paid to Lynch’s deep and abiding interest in making music, one of the chief ways he’s occupied himself since “Inland Empire.”
Mel Brooks once likened Lynch to “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” and Lynch sometimes has seemed to play up the persona of the aw-shucks weirdo. But there are also a few times when this movie seems to pierce behind Lynch’s eccentricity and suggest intense emotions of a more troubling kind. These brief moments hint at the sources of the darkness that haunts so much of his work.
Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@ sfchronicle.com