Video Age International April 2016

10 Book Review April 2016 V I D E O A G E W hen you hear the name David Lynch — director of such decidedly freaky feature films as Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway — you think odd, you think strange, you think bizarre, you think weird. You think of a tie-less man with his shirt buttoned to the neck at all times and gray hair that sits like a cresting wave atop his perpetually furrowed brow. You think of films that, while being cult favorites, are often so critically reviled that one Variety reviewer called 1977’s Eraserhead , “a sickening bad-taste exercise.” You think of a man so peculiar in taste and bearing that someone even thought to coin the term, “Lynchian”— which is essentially a synonym for “weird” — and which UrbanDictionary.com defines as: “You have no f-----g clue what’s going on, but you know it’s genius.” In David Lynch: The Man From Another Place (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 184 pgs., $15.43), U.S. film critic Dennis Lim seeks to pull back the curtain to reveal more about the oddball director, from his early influences and humble beginnings as a painter to his current role as the showrunner behind Showtime’s forthcoming Twin Peaks revival. He explores each of Lynch’s projects, including his surprising critical success The Elephant Man in 1980, undisputable flops like 1984’s sci-fi adventure Dune , shameless money grabs like 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , and headscratchers like 2006’s Inland Empire , which employed a dizzying shift in perspective — one of Lynch’s preferred directorial tricks — that befuddled both fans and critics alike. Lim (who’s also director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center) digs deep into each of Lynch’s projects — delving easily into the gross, the grotesque and the surreal with ease — although not so deeply into Lynch’s actual life. Sure, we learn about the Missoula, Montana-born auteur’s many significant romantic relationships (four marriages thus far and a lengthy love affair with leading lady Isabella Rossellini), but not very much about how each woman might have influenced the avant-garde filmmaker. The marriages and the four children that resulted from them are barely mentioned. Some might say that’s because The Man From Another Place is a book about just that, the man. But others might argue that we are the way we are in part due to the peoplewho populate our worlds. Would 1986’s Blue Velvet — possibly Lynch’s most autobiographical film; he even dressed Kyle MacLachlan, the film’s star, as he himself usually dresses — have become the critical and cult favorite that it was without Rossellini’s influence (and performance)? Who knows? Lim certainly doesn’t explore the question. Butwhatthebooklacksinpersonalexploration, it somewhat makes up for with telling personal anecdotes. In this slim biography (it’s under 200 pages) Lim manages to paint a vivid portrait of Lynch. Fascinating tidbits about the director include the fact that he keeps a preserved uterus in his home — a rather Lynchian gift from onetime collaborator Raffaella De Laurentiis (daughter of late Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis); that he “tended to eat the exact same thing every day (at the time, a tuna sandwich) until he got sick of it and switched to something else”; and that cooking is forbidden in his home due to his fear that the cooking smells will get all over the artwork he keeps in his house, such as his drawings and writings. As a result, he only eats things “that you don’t have to light a fire for.” Lim tells of an interview with U.S. talk show host Jay Leno in which the director mentioned that “for seven straight years he drank a chocolate milkshake in a silver goblet every day at 2:30 p.m. at [burger joint] Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles.” He also describes Lynch’s Hollywood Hills, California home as being “spartan, almost bare… Since he rarely came across furniture that he liked, he left the house unfurnished.” Limdepicts Lynch as a harmless odd duck who’s a big believer in the power of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a type of mantra meditation — and even founded an organization, the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness- Based Education and World Peace, to fund the teaching of the practice in schools. According to Lim, Lynch credits TM with keeping him from committing suicide at a really low point in his life, when his first feature-length film, the black- and-white surrealist horror movie “ Eraserhead had stalled and his first marriage to his first wife, Peggy [Lentz], was unraveling.” But despite his somewhat offbeat daily practices, Lynch still thinks of himself as a small town boy and often describes himself using the simple four-word bio, “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.” He speaks in a somewhat halting, gee whiz, Middle America sort of cadence that seems to surprise folks who picture the man behind such mind-bending projects as the ABC network’s early ’90s Twin Peaks , well, differently. After all, that series actually included, among its regular cast of characters, a woman known as the Log Lady, who receives messages from a wooden stump she holds in her arms, as well as a dancing, backward-speaking dwarf called, yes, The Man From Another Place. Is the excessive weirdness artificial, wonders Lim, or is the shy-seeming humility the sham? “There is… something a bit peculiar about Lynch’s niceness — a heightened golly-gee, stuck- in-the-1950s folksiness that some people think must be a put-on,” writes Lim. “Whether innate or cultivated or both, the picture of David Lynch the straight-arrow square is striking for the obvious contrast with the darkness and extremity of the work, its obsession with grotesquerie and depravity. In view of the work, in fact, Lynch’s mild-mannered calm can seem somewhat creepy.” Who knows what’s real and what isn’t? Lim doesn’t. And Lynch isn’t telling. Like the movies he makes, Lynch’s working life has been fairly unusual. Writes Lim: “Lynch’s career is a series of ups and downs, filed with meteoric rises, spectacular collapses, unexpected detours, and long bouts of inactivity. Looked at another way, it is also a model of constancy, a testament to a single-mindedness that verges on the autistic.” In a word, it’s been Lynchian. And whether you’re a fan or a foe of the films crafted by this man who seems at times to be from another planet altogether, you’ll be fascinated by The Man From Another Place . ( By Leah Hochbaum Rosner ) A Lynchian Director From Another Place. Could It Be Twin Peaks?