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The Films of David Lynch
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The Films of
David Lynch
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by
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John Alexander
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The Films of David Lynch
Contents
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Introduction 1
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The Films
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The Alphabet 29
The Grandmother 31
Eraserhead 35
The Elephant Man 48
Dune 62
Blue Velvet 76
Wild at Heart 92
Fire Walk With Me 106
Twin Peaks 122
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Conclusion 140
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Chronology 146
Filmography 147
References 153
Index 155
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The Films of David Lynch
Note
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With the exception of Eraserhead, David Lynch's feature films have been shot in
Panavision (2.35:1 ratio). Television and video screenings have been reduced to the
1.33:1 ratio which means the viewer sees just over half of the intended film. A
special wide-screen VHS-video edition of Wild at Heart has been released in the
UK, supplementary to the standard 1.33:1 issue. Wild at Heart is a case in point as
the wide-screen format is composed to the advantage of the convertible front seat
shots, the motel bedroom shots and the open highway shots. The 1.33:1 issue
'scans' which makes redundant these carefully considered compositions. Similarly,
Blue Velvet, Dune and The Elephant Man contain much side-line detail which
disappears in the VHS-video releases or television screenings.
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© 1992
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The Films of David Lynch
FOREWORD
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To date books on Lynch include Anne Jerslev's David Lynch i vore ojne (1991)
(David Lynch in our eye), and Robert Fischer's David Lynch: Die dunkle Seite der
Seele (1992) (The dark side of the soul) from Denmark and Germany respectively.
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Anne Jerslev's book applies the writings of the feminist theorist, Julia Kristeva, and
her concept of 'abjection' to Lynch's films. Wild at Heart she describes as a post
modern melodrama. Robert Fischer's book is more encyclopaedic in scope, rather
than critical, with detailed production information and a comprehensive lexicon
section which evaluates Lynch's films, videos and record productions, under entries
from the 'Abstrakt' to 'Zucker'.
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My approach has been to examine the contrast between Lynch as 'story-teller' and
Lynch as 'painter'. The Hollywood film's preoccupation with narrative should
contradict Lynch's preoccupation with the image, yet, the commercial failure of
Dune notwithstanding, Lynch has so successfully integrated his personal vision into
the commercial mainstream, that he has entered the most 'mainstream' of visual
media, the television drama.
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The Films of David Lynch
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The Films of David Lynch
INTRODUCTION
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1 Secrets, Desire and Retribution
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The film credits of Eraserhead describe her as 'the beautiful girl across the hall.' In
the middle of the night she knocks on the door of Henry Spencer. She has come
to seduce him. She and Henry embrace on top of the bed which dominates
Henry's dark, claustrophobic room. Together they sink slowly into a pool of liquid
in the middle of the mattress, and disappear. All that remains is her black hair
which floats on the surface of the white pool.
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In Blue Velvet a young man watches a woman disrobe from behind the jalousie of
a wardrobe door. She discovers him and seduces him at knife point, cutting his
cheek open with the point of the blade.
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In the Lynch world desire induces suffering; pleasure releases demons of the spirit
from which there is no respite. Lula in Wild at Heart, Laura in Twin Peaks,
Dorothy in Blue Velvet, fall victim to sexual psychopaths and must pay a fearful
price. John Merrick, the deformed 'elephant man', having found a moment of
tenderness with a kindly actress, is humiliated by a twisted soul who initiates him
into the shadow side of perverse desire. For Lynch desire is a key to unlocking a
door into the darker regions of the human spirit.
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Fear has many guises in the Lynch film - the psychopath, sexuality, chaos, disorder,
even the body itself, instill fear, contrasted against an idyll of the contented family
and the harmony of a small town.
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'In a large city I realised there was a large amount of fear. Coming from the
Northwest, it kind of hits you like a train,' says Lynch.
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Otherwise, he claims, his childhood was like a 1950's magazine advertisement
where a 'well-dressed woman bringing a pie out of the oven... a couple smiling,
walking together up to their house with a picket fence.'
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'We are children of the city', said French director Jean-Jacques Beneix describing
the new wave of filmmakers of the 1980's. Lynch 'is a small-town American boy.'
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Lynch says his films both reveal and hide his fears, but he avoids self-analysis and
intellectualising. 'It's better not to know so much, in a way, about what things mean
or how they might be interpreted, or you'll be too afraid to let it keep happening.'
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The Films of David Lynch
Psychology, says Lynch, 'destroys the mystery, this kind of magical quality. It can be
reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and
defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience.'
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The overhanging threat in the Lynch world is loss of control, upheaval, chaos. The
'worst possible' scenarios of David Lynch describe the hapless protagonist at the
mercy of forces he is powerless to contain. Henry Spencer in Eraserhead is left
with a deformed monstrosity that holds him captive in his own room. John Merrick
(The Elephant Man) swoons away at Victoria station. Having endured a lifetime of
brutal subjugation, he is suddenly without Master. Fate abondons him, then
delivers him into the benign hands of Dr Treves.
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In Dune, the seemingly all powerful House of Atreides, collapses overnight as a
result of a single act of betrayal. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey shrewdly manipulates his
investigations into a secret and hidden world, finally to stand facing a man without
conscience, and is powerless. Lula (Wild at Heart) careers down a make believe
yellow brick road, but Sailor Ripley is steered from one predicament to another
with the hapless disarray of H C Andersen's Little Tin Soldier.
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The 'Wounded Hero' of Lynch's world is victim to events determined by a
perversely macabre fate. Lynch's stories are tales of initiation, where 'innocents'
traverse darkness to emerge on the other side, traumatised, purged, and finally,
absolved.
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For the viewer, the Lynch film is similarly an initiatory experience, exposed to his
taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery 'on a level not counterfeit and
illusory, but interior.'
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2 Influences
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David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, where his father worked as a
research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. He grew up in Idaho,
Washington State and Virginia. He shared a studio with Jack Fisk (who would
become a cinema art director) in his high school days, and studied painting at the
Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC.
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After a year at the Boston Museum School he left for a three year trip to Europe,
but returned after 15 days. 'I didn't take to Europe. I was all the time thinking, this
is where I'm going to be painting. And there was no inspiration there at all for the
kind of work I wanted to do.' He returned to the US and took up jobs at an art
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The Films of David Lynch
store and frame shop before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in
Philadelphia in 1965.
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Inspired by such painters as Francis Bacon and Edward Hopper, Lynch graduated
two years later with a collection of large dark paintings, which 'needed just to move
a little bit'. He completed his first film, a one minute long animated tape loop
which was entered in a contest for experimental painting and sculpture at the
Academy. 'Not so much a film as a moving painting, a loop which could repeat
itself endlessly... the figures caught fire, got headaches, their bodies and stomachs
grew, and they all got sick.' The six figures of the film consisted of three
sculptured surfaces based on plaster-casts of Lynch's head (executed by art college
colleague Jack Fisk) and three animated film figures. Their movements were
accompanied by the sound of a wailing siren.
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A wealthy patron, H Barton Wasserman, financed Lynch's next project which
would be a similar combination of animation on a repeating loop with a sculptured
screen. The film was ruined but Lynch had sufficient funds to finance The
Alphabet, completed in 1968, a four minute long film combining animation and
live action. He used a similar combination of techniques to make The
Grandmother (1970) which was financed by the American Film Institute.
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Lynch worked at a variety of jobs while filming his first feature film, Eraserhead,
which was completed in 1976. Its foreboding and surrealistic quality attracted
discriminating audiences of the art house circuit, and finally the attention of
commercial cinema. With the support of Mel Brooks he made The Elephant Man
(1980) based on accounts recording the life of the deformed Joseph Merrick in
London in the late 1800's. Dune, one of the largest science fiction film projects
undertaken, with a budget of $45 million, was completed by Lynch in 1984 - a
critical and commercial fiasco. He made Blue Velvet in 1986 and Wild at Heart,
which won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or, in 1990.
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David Lynch became a household name when the television series Twin Peaks was
screened throughout the world in the late 1980's. His most recent film projects
include two feature films based on the series, the first of which, Twin Peaks: Fire
Walk With Me, was released in 1992.
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He photographs, paints, makes commercials and videos, produces records,
composes song lyrics, writes The Angriest Dog in the World comic strip for The
LA Reader, and produces television programmes together with Mark Frost, the
most recent of which is the TV situation comedy, On The Air, a parody based on
the ficticious 'Lester Guy Show', set in the USA, 1957.
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The Films of David Lynch
Unlike many of his contemporaries amongst the American new wave of
filmmakers, David Lynch is not a director who has climbed up through the ranks
of the commercial film industry, nor is he the film school graduate who perceives
life in terms of what he's seen on a cinema screen - David Lynch is the art school
student who made his paintings move.
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Lynch's quirky visual style and apparent disregard for narrative makes him
something of an anachronism in the mainstream of the commercial cinema. The
preoccupation of the Hollywood cinema is story-telling, and since the silent films
of D W Griffith and Cecil B de Mille, the efficiently told narrative has been
paramount in American film production. This has not been the case in Europe
where the avant-garde, expressionism and surrealism, have, in the wake of other art
movements, rejected the 'iron script' and filmed pictures first and stories second.
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David Lynch - art student and animator - does not share the same pre-occupation
with stories as such, with the conventions of a dilemma, an intrigue and its
resolution. For Lynch narrative conventions are simply a means to an end, and the
end is creating an atmosphere, a resonance, of 'making the phenomena strange',
whether that phenomena is ordering coffee and pie in a small town diner,
cockroaches in underwear, or watching a strangely dressed man mime a Roy
Orbison song, while executing acts of incongruous violence.
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Scorsese, Coppola, even Woody Allen, make essentially American films, even
outside the restrictive grip of the studio system, but often from the perspective of
ethnic groups, and how they adapt to America.
Lynch, a self-confessed 'all-American boy', uses quintessentially American settings
and characters (there are no socially integrated foreigners in a Lynch film - not even
on the Planet Arrakis), yet seen through a lens distorted by an outsider's
perspectives - the eye of the estranged artist.
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Lynch's portrayals of America have more in common with the America filmed by
Europeans; Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, John Schlesinger and Nicolas Roeg,
than the America we see in the films of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Steven
Spielberg, Oliver Stone et al. The Elephant Man, filmed in Great Britain, is a
triumph of authenticity - Lynch has succeeded in creating a world, not only
credible, but it seems, a world in which he is 'at home.' Alternatively, never has
America looked so foreign, so strange, sinister and exotic, as in his first feature film,
Eraserhead.
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Aside from Lynch's personal influences - a childhood in the Northwest, life in
Philadelphia, and the entanglements of his personal relations; his films reveal
influences ranging from the surrealists to the American Romantic movement and
the film noir of the 1940's and 1950’s.
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Description:With the exception of Eraserhead, David Lynch's feature films have been shot in
Dune notwithstanding, Lynch has so successfully integrated his personal
