The new documentary David Lynch The Art Life is essentially 90 minutes of Lynch telling stories about his formative years — like the time he smoked weed and stopped his pickup truck in the middle of a freeway, or the time he showed his dad a bunch of dead birds in his basement. And, of course, because this is David Lynch, he also enthuses about the texture of dead insects and their innards (“it’s unbelievable!”). As he splats and hammers his paintings in his studio, smoking cigarette after cigarette, a sharper picture of Lynch the man comes into focus. The film is dedicated to Lynch’s youngest daughter, serving as a private memoir from father to daughter, and it’s surely the most intimate doc yet about Lynch. Needless to say there’s a lot about the man you probably didn’t know.
He once got so stoned that he stopped his car in the middle of a freeway: The first time Lynch smoked weed he ill-advisedly climbed behind the wheel of a pickup truck. Probably not the best idea. “Three of us got into this pickup truck and drove down to New York City, in Brooklyn,” he says. “It was on that trip that I smoked marijuana for the first time. And then it was my turn to drive. So I was driving on the freeway and pretty soon I hear, “David.” And I said, “What?” And they said, “David!” and I said “What?!” and I then I hear, “DAVID!”… “WHAT?!”… “You stopped on the freeway, man.” Turns out Lynch had been so tripped out by the lines going by on the freeway that he brought the car to a halt in the middle lane. “It was such a dream,” he says. I guess that explains all the shots of road lines in Lost Highway.
He walked out of a Bob Dylan gig and didn’t give a fuck: “The next time I smoked dope,” he explains, “Bob Dylan was playing at this big place right down the street. And lo and behold, out of thousands of people in this auditorium kind of thing — where I was way in the back — out of all those seats, there was this girl sitting next to me that I had just broken up with.” But instead of asking the girl how she was, how strange it was to find her there, Lynch measured Dylan with his fingers: “I said to her, ‘His jeans are only this big!’ Then I measured his guitar and said, ‘His guitar is only this big!'” Naturally by this point Lynch had no interest in hearing Dylan and wasn’t afraid to show it. “I wasn’t digging the music, he was so far away. So I wanted to get out of there really bad. Then when the concert was over, Peter [Lynch’s roommate] came over with a bunch of his friends and says, ‘Nobody walks out on Dylan’. And I say, ‘I walk out on Dylan. Get the fuck out of here.’ So that was the end of Peter as my roommate.”
He once saw a mysterious naked woman sitting on a curb — which kind of explains that scene in Blue Velvet: One of Lynch’s most unshakable memories is from his childhood home in the sleepy suburb Sandpoint, Idaho. He was out late one night with his brother. “Out of the darkness comes this, kind of like the strangest dream, because I had never seen an adult woman naked, and she had beautiful pale white skin. And she was completely naked.” In what sounds like a scene from Blue Velvet — Dorothy Vallens emerging from the darkness completely nude on Jeffery’s front lawn — Lynch goes on: “I think her mouth was bloodied, and she kind of came walking strangely across Shoshoni Avenue…it seemed like she was like a giant. And she came closer and closer, and my brother started to cry. Something was bad wrong with her. And I don’t know what happened but I think she sat down on a curb, crying.” Like the perfect review of Lynch’s movie career, he neatly ties up the anecdote: “It was very mysterious, like we were seeing something otherworldly.”
His dad freaked out when he saw his collection of dead things and told him he shouldn’t have kids: When Lynch lived in Philadelphia, his dad came to visit. Everything was going fine until Lynch suggested, with childlike eagerness, his father see what he’d been working on in his basement. “I had all these experiments going: I wanted to see what fruit would do after a long period of time, through different stages of decay; I had some dead birds… so I wanted to share this with my father, so I took him down to the basement,” Lynch explains. As they walked back up the stairs, Lynch smiled to himself, thinking how great it was that his dad got to see this. Then he turned around and saw the pained expression on his father’s face. “It was in the truck driving back that he said to me, ‘Dave?’ And I said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I don’t think you should ever have children.'” His dad was deeply worried about him, as most dads would be if their son showed them a bunch of dead things. Soon after, Lynch found out his girlfriend was pregnant.
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His definition of ‘the art life’ makes you want to live it: A couple of times in the film, Lynch brings up what he calls ‘the art life’. Partly inspired by Robert Henri’s book The Art Spirit, he developed his own simple philosophy. “I had this idea,” he explains, “that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it. Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” Perhaps that explains why Lynch is so prolific. Because who wouldn’t want to work 24/7 if the work sounded as romantic as the equation: coffee + cigarettes + paint + girls = happiness.
He fell in with the wrong crowd at school and his life spun out of control: When his family moved to Virginia, Lynch fell in with the wrong crowd. He felt a dark vibe both literally (“it seemed like it was always night”) and emotionally (“it was total turmoil”). He explains that he made friends with two guys but that “they were not the friends I should have had…I was smoking cigarettes, going into DC and drinking and sneaking out of the house at night. It was almost like I couldn’t control it, you know. It just was what was happening.”
His mom always told him that she felt let down by him: Like most arty kids, Lynch hated studying. “I never studied. I never did anything. I hated it so much.” For that reason, and because he fell in with a ‘bad bunch’, Lynch’s mom would say that he disappointed her. “I was really living in hell. I had to live two different lives and I always felt that she thought I had something really good in me, like a high potential. So the reason she would say she was disappointed in me is because she didn’t see that thing, not as an artist but just some kind of thing, I don’t know where she latched onto that, but I kept letting her down.” On a brighter note, his life outside of school was thrilling to him. “The only thing that was important is what happened outside of school and that had a huge impact on me. People and relationships, slow dancing parties, big, big love and dreams — dark, fantastic dreams…”
His father once told him that he was no longer a member of the family: Lynch also talks about falling out with his dad. “My father wanted me home at 11 on school nights,” he explains, “I didn’t want to come home at 11. All I wanted to do was paint. So we had a big fight — and we never had fights — but this particular time it was really bad … I might have said something like, ‘Well I’m going to stay out later than 11’. And my father said, ‘Fine, you are no longer a member of this family’. And he left the room.” Lynch says that this hit him like a sucker punch: “I was devastated.” Thankfully this was not the end of their relationship. Lynch’s friend’s dad had seen how hard he was working on his art during those late nights. It wasn’t like he was goofing around. He was passionate about his work. Once this was explained over the phone to Lynch’s dad, everything was cool. However, the dead birds in the basement incident was still to come.
Credits
Text Oliver Lunn
Photography David Lynch