David Lynch passed away last week. Many of us here at Reactor took this one like a blow to the solar plexus.
I am not by any means an expert on Lynch’s work; there are gaps in my knowledge, and films I saw once years ago that I probably won’t watch again. I’m not here to talk about his specific works, I’m here to talk about his WORK.
The day I learned the news I rewatched two films about him: Lynch/Oz and David Lynch: The Art Life. Both of them are available on The Criterion Channel—The Art Life is available to stream for free until January 31st, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Lynch/Oz is a documentary-cum-film-essay by Alexandre O. Philippe—the same man who made Doc of the Dead, 78/52, and The People Vs. George Lucas—and as the title suggests, it’s about the relationship between David Lynch and The Wizard of Oz. Early on in the doc, filmmaker Karyn Kusama relates that when asked about The Wizard of Oz at a screening, Lynch replied, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz”, and the further Lynch/Oz digs into the conversation between Lynch and the film, the more that becomes apparent.
It’s not just about that, by a long shot, but over the course of six chapters its seven contributors make a strong case for the idea that The Wizard of Oz is a central touchstone for a lot of Lynch’s film and television projects. And not just in a “lots of people wear red shoes” way, but on a deeper level that explores The Wizard of Oz‘s ideas: people wear many masks, and people who look alike can play different roles; the journey of life is inexplicable, and full of both wonder and terror; and no matter how lovely a society seems on its surface, there are often dark things going on behind the curtain.
Rather than parking any of his interviewees in front of a camera, Philippe lets them talk over juxtaposed imagery from The Wizard of Oz, scenes from Lynch’s work, and their own work, so you can see the connections for yourself, and either nod along in recognition or maybe push back on some of the bigger reaches. But even the biggest reach is fun, because all of the possible connections are interesting.
The film is broken into titled chapters that dig into a theme that runs through Lynch’s work. “Wind” is narrated by film critic Amy Nicholson, “Membranes” by director Rodney Ascher (Room 237), “Kindred” by John fucking Waters, “Multitudes” by director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, Yellowjackets), “Judy” by directors Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson (Moon Knight, Archive 81, the upcoming Daredevil: Born Again), and “Dig” by David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight).
I enjoyed all of them, but unsurprisingly John Waters’ is the best, because (a) He’s John fucking Waters, (b) he knows Lynch and is able to talk about their own relationship, and most important, (c) The Wizard of Oz is also a foundational text in his life, so his segment ends up being as much about him as about Lynch, which in turn means it’s about both of them as Mid-20th-Century artists who pushed back against America’s tendency toward straitlaced conformity, and who gathered like-minded artists and freaks to help realize their visions.
Here we have eight artists giving serious attention to the work of a ninth artist, talking about how deeply he considered the work of a different group of artists. The documentary charts how the studio-produced, popular children’s entertainment of 1939 first gained cult and then mass appeal over television airings, and how it worked its way into the mind of this never-to-be-replicated genius, David Lynch, and then how Lynch’s imagery and ideas worked their way into the work and lives of all the interviewees and the people who made Lynch/Oz. While I can see people dinging it for being a little bit surface at times, it is also a neat little nesting doll of artistic conversations.
Which brings me to the other documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life—made by Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Rick Barnes, and Jon Nguyen, filmed over four years, and released in 2016. The narration is from Lynch himself, created from 20 interviews, sometimes musing on moments from his childhood, sometimes free-associating about the process of making art.
Rather than focusing on Lynch’s films, or his relationship with Hollywood, with popular success or its lack, the rollercoaster of his Cannes appearances—the documentary digs into the first thirty years of his life, and stops just as Eraserhead is finished. Not when it’s released, not when it becomes an underground hit midnight movie, not when it leads to Mel Brooks hiring him to direct The Elephant Man—when he’s finally, after four years of work, finished a complete cut of the film.
This is so important. Or, to use Lynch’s oft-repeated phrase “so beautiful”.
The Art Life isn’t about Lynch’s career, it’s about how he built a life around work.
It starts with his childhood, which was peripatetic, but, at least as he describes it, extremely happy. It wasn’t until starting high school that he ran into a wall that I think will be familiar to plenty of people reading this. Lynch was obviously smart, and driven to the point of obsession if he was interested in a topic, but going to school and studying what he was told to study felt like torture for him. A turning point came for him at about the age of 14, when he began to rebel—in predictable ways, but ways that he seemed to see in retrospect as deeply negative. Fortunately, at some point in this rebellious phase he met a boy named Toby Keeler, whose father, Bushnell, was a painter. As in, he created paintings, and sold them, not as hobby but as a job.
Faced with the idea that such a career was possible, Lynch made painting the center of his life: “The art spirit sort of became the art life, and I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it. Maybe, maybe, girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.”
The film does a great job teasing out how his family, while generally extremely supportive, wasn’t always entirely okay with being on the backburner. But even then, it’s not like he walked confidently into a career as a painter. There were still false starts, attempts at school that didn’t take, and bills to pay. It’s just that, as the film makes clear, all of that could be managed as long as the life was being lived in service to the art.
His narration of his early days unspools over images of Lynch as an older man in Los Angeles, painting and making small sculptures. As he talks about playing in a mud puddle as a toddler, we see him smudging charcoal over a canvas. As he talks about his early days, we see him slapping giant globs of paint onto canvases, delicately painting details, carefully working wire into cursive words and then fixing those words to the top of a painting. We see him painting with his small daughter, and making her tiny clay pieces of food to feed other toys.
When he gets a life-changing grant from the AFI, and is then invited out to Hollywood to work on a film, there are no stories of him schmoozing with the other young men who were out there in the 1970s, or meeting with studio execs to try to get more funding. He sets up his production in the stables of the the Doheny Mansion (a little bit away from where the AFI classes are held) and he spends the next four years creating Henry Spencer’s world until it’s far more real than the extremely swanky Beverly Hills neighborhood outside.
What’s real is the work. What matters is the work.
Work isn’t an obstacle to get around. It’s not a thing you punt off to underlings, or a thing you lifehack away with AI. The work is the fucking point.
Obviously we’re in a weird moment culturally. (I don’t even just mean what’s going on in the US, which is just one symptom among many.) Spending time and effort on making things has been devalued, but I think the idea of work itself has been devalued. What’s driving people’s desire to build passive income, to become influencers, or trad wives, to turn their own autonomy over people who they see as strong and authoritative—I think it’s all the same drive of wanting, I don’t know, an eternal vacation? Some sort of release from every day stress that’s only become worse over the last decades, only become more frantic with the constant chime of social media and breaking news, only become more stark as social structures collapse and the idea of building a career or a purposeful life has become a fantasy for, I think, most people.
Lynch mentions that a lot, a few times in The Art Life, and much more often in his Master Class—the idea that daily life has become so hectic it’s almost impossible to set aside time for serious work, or, maybe more important, the daydreaming that leads to work. If your time is colonized with work you have to do to pay for groceries, or constant blaring panic notices, obviously, you’re not going to be able to think deeply about… anything. You’ll be alienated from yourself and your innate creativity.
And while I think there’s a long road ahead to fixing the problems fueling all of that, spending time with David Lynch’s mind, and his work, are a simple step in the right direction. Remind yourself that you have the right to time, and, creativity, and art. I find it heartening that of all the David Lynch stuff on Criterion Channel, it was The Art Life that they chose to make available to everyone. And whether you love his work, you hate his work, or you’ve never really thought about him before, you’ll find something here.
Things are dark, yes? (But, bad dark, not cool Lynchian dark.) A lot of powerful forces on this earth are insisting that art and intelligence and empathy are a waste of time. What better way to fight back than to follow Lynch’s example and make weird shit? What better way to create light in the darkness than with weird, singular, unique, empathetic, fucked up art?
