San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The dreamer
This is the best book by and about a movie director since Elia Kazan’s “A Life” (1988) and Michael Powell’s “A Life in Movies” (1986). But “Room to Dream” is more enchanting or appealing than those classics. Kazan and Powell left no doubt about it — on Broadway, in Hollywood and in London, if you were determined to be a genius you needed so big an ego that only you were allowed to challenge it. What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm account of how genius in America can be a matter-of-fact defiance of reality that won’t alarm your dog or save mankind. It’s the only way to dream in so disturbed a country.
I say “by and about” because this is not a publishing scam, a cute ghosting operation, to bring a reluctant David Lynch to the page. This is a living book by two authors who de-
serve to be read as partners. The voices are different. I can believe that the casual and yarning text by Lynch himself was read into a tape recorder, but I don’t think his expansive eloquence would have existed without his faith in Kristine McKenna. For as the book unwinds his soliloquies that seem to combine Holden Caulfield, Will Rogers and Blossom Dearie, so it is backed up by expert, lucid very well-researched narrative passages from McKenna that tell the story of this wayward yet purposeful career. Lynch often has the affect of a wanderer in his own trance, but no one of his era (he is 72 now) has been so set on taking America by its nerve ends and insisting on our reliance on fantasy and the inner life. He’s a dreamer and a wizard, folksy but magisterial.
Part of the charm of “Room to Dream” is how the two parts of the book nod to one another, and not just in flattering agreement. Lynch has allowed space for dispute or second opinion. It’s in this layering of the narrative that one begins to appreciate just how single-minded the chaos of David Lynch has been, and to understand how resolutely he has ignored the glamorous project of Being a Movie Director because he had nothing else in mind but the uncompromising and sometimes absurd destiny of Being an Artist.
If you want a test of this marriage, go to the book’s account of “Eraserhead,” the film that introduced Lynch as a new kind of art school filmmaker who might be capable of threatening the mainstream. Lynch had been born in Montana in 1946. Though he had moved around with a father who was an agricultural scientist, the key years of growing up were in Boise, Idaho, and Lynch himself revels in a golden age where the real and fantasy joined hands at twilight:
“I was out one night with my brother and we were down at the end of the street. Everything is lit up at night now, but in the fifties in small towns like Boise, there were streetlights, but they were dimmer and it was much darker. It makes night kind of magical because things just go into black. So, we were down at the end of the street at night, and out of the darkness — it was so incredible — came this nude woman with white skin. Maybe it was something about the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the color of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth.”
Was this some real Idaho victim who had been beaten up and cast adrift, or was she a portent of that haunting moment in “Blue Velvet” when a naked Isabella Rossellini appears on the street of a town called Lumberton, an apparition and a dread sign of what growing up means for the Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) she has seduced and educated? As Lynch himself might say, “Who knows?”
Well, this dreaming kid, so inwardly focused and so piercing in his gaze that girls flocked to him, found himself at the American Film Institute in 1971 and rather than take classes in the regular way, he said he was going to make this film called “Eraserhead.” The staff of the school there were so in awe of him that they said, well, of course, David, that’s what you have to do.
McKenna tells the story of how for nearly four years Lynch took over the AFI basement at Greystone mansion in Beverly Hills, gathered a few associates (like art director Jack Fisk and sound designer Alan Splet), scrounged for money, made sets out of job lots of scrap, drifted from one wife to another girlfriend, dressed in two neckties, torn shirts and hats with holes in them, fed on grilled cheese or egg salad sandwiches, smoked up a storm, meditated or went angry, made a mud sculpture on the kitchen table for his wife’s birthday and just left it there for months. And all the while this man-child, so shy, so inexplicable and riveting, convinced people that he knew exactly what he was doing. So he cast the first person he met for every part of the film and just believed that that came from sublime luck — and then urged his players not to act, just be blank.
You could read these passages and decide that David was a pain in the neck, a weird mix of pretension, calculation and insufferable. But out of this absolutely anti-Hollywood attitude he won over a fully accredited commercial monster such as Dino de Laurentiis, who told him, sure David, you make “Blue Velvet” exactly how you see it. And he did, and it was an outrage and a hit, enough to establish a career, but it is a work of American art to be considered in a league with Charles Ives, Edward Hopper and Faulkner.
As the book advances, you start to feel the invisible wind in Lynch’s sails, the rather detached family man who never quite made a film about a child but only because all his characters are best seen and felt as children. I may put “Blue Velvet” above all others, but you are welcome to prefer “Mulholland Dr.,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway” or “Twin Peaks.” It doesn’t matter too much, but a free force dressed up and talking like Huck Finn has passed through our time, and if any of those films have ever stopped you in your tracks, you have to read this book.
Never mind that it’s a book about the life and work of an artist. It’s also a reverie on America, on traveling, the light and the dark. It’s a visionary’s book in which no highway is lost:
“My brother, John; Jack [Fisk] and Jack’s dog, Five, drove across country from Philly with me, and the drive west was beautiful. I remember one point where we were driving into this gigantic valley and the sky was so big that when you came up over the ridge you could see four different kinds of weather at the same time.”
Gee whiz, if that’s a diner up ahead, let’s stop for a slice of that awesome Dutch apple pie and a chocolate milk shake like they did at Bob’s Big Boy.
David Thomson’s books include “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies” and “Television: A Biography.” His new book, “Sleeping With Strangers,” will be published in February. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com