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David Lynch looks so like actor James Stewart, as this lean-jawed, mop-headed directing veteran relates stories from his past in David Lynch: The Art Life, that we’re surprised by the clipped Texan twang. It’s a staccato murmur, somewhere between a buzz saw and a bee swarm. What we expected was the liquid, drawling, expansive Stewart burble.
The stories spellbind even so. They testify to Lynch’s genius for revealing the nightmarish behind the plainspun. (“Damn fine cup of coffee,” says, more than once, the investigator into damnation in Twin Peaks.) The memories range from his loved but martinet dad — “Give up this film career, you have a child” — to his scary story of “Mr Smith”, a neighbour, whom he sees for almost the first time one spooky day walking in his family’s Idaho frontyard and . . . “I can’t finish this story.” What? Truly? Honestly? We imagine the unimaginable. In David Lynch’s movies, we know, every “Mr Smith” is an envoy from Hell or something worse.
There’s nothing like Lynch lore. Though it doesn’t quite seem to empower his paintings — we see him work at them in his studio, the sub-Baconian scrawls in oil, the sub-Rauschenberg object-ware collages — it’s the glory of his cinema. We have grown up with these tearings-of-the-veil, these glimpses into the beyond, that take place in broad daylight in ordinary streets and houses. Now we know the mind they come from.
