THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DAVID
Lynch writes a memoir — but reveals only more mysteries
Room to Dream David Lynch and Kristine McKenna Random House
Mystery is important to David Lynch, explanation anathema. Fans who share Lynch’s pleasure in mystery will approach this book anxiously, hoping that his secrets may somehow be both revealed and sustained. Luckily for them, he seems constitutionally incapable of self-revelation. In telling his life story, Lynch demonstrates the same disregard for causality and tonal consistency that marks his films. Room to Dream is very much the gospel according to David.
How has such an idiosyncratic, uncommercial director achieved such success? Room to Dream provides only partial answers. Luck certainly played a part. A chance meeting with Mel Brooks led to The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch’s first mainstream success. A contractual provision allowed Blue Velvet to proceed despite the failure of sci-fi epic Dune (1984). Twin Peaks arrived in 1990, just when TV audiences were ready for something wild.
But all these works required specific conditions to produce them, too, and Lynch and coauthor Kristine McKenna use their book to make a case for artists being given the freedom — imaginative and economic — to do that dream-work unrestricted.
Money was always an insoluble factor. Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead (1977), took five years to make, during which he supported family and movie alike in part by delivering newspapers. But, ironically, the $40 million or so granted to him later to make Dune felt like a prison. A big budget mandated an audiencefriendly script and a running time suited to theatrical schedules. “I started selling out before we even started shooting,” he writes. “It was the only way I could survive.” The film flopped, and Lynch would never again relinquish control of the final cut. Instead, he found happiness and acclaim working with small budgets, doing things his way.
Lynch’s vision appears to reflect his real-life world view and experience. Indeed, Room to Dream sometimes feels like a tour of primal scenes, with several iconic theatrical episodes transplanted directly from Lynch’s life. For instance, as a child, biking around picket fenced neighbourhoods, he was fascinated by homes where “the lights were dim ... I’d get a feeling from these houses of stuff going on that wasn’t happy.”
Once, a bloodied, naked woman staggered “out of the darkness” toward him. “She was scared and beat up,” he says, “but even though she was traumatized, she was beautiful.” We’re not told what happened to her — Lynch probably doesn’t know and doesn’t seem interested. Things go unexplained in life; why not in the movies? The woman reappears, of course, in the guise of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet.
Memory behaves similarly in Lynch’s art and life. When he doesn’t remember something, he digresses on subjects that matter to him: trees, L.A. light, transcendental meditation.
“I love the Red Room,” Lynch remarks of his most famous creations in Twin Peaks. “First of all, it has curtains, and I love curtains. Are you kidding me? I love them because they’re beautiful in and of themselves, but also because they hide something.”
Room to Dream pulls off a neat trick, drawing back a curtain and revealing little. Despite the book’s heft, there’s not much to explicate the mysteries of Lynch’s work. But for him, the mystery’s the thing. To explain is to destroy.