In his Introduction to David Lynch: His Work, His World, author Tom Huddleston acknowledges that “our world will be a much more ordinary place” after Lynch’s passing. The filmmaker died January of this year due to emphysema, which he developed from smoking since the age of eight. Although “multidisciplinary artist” is a more accurate description for Lynch as he has also created works in various mediums, including as a musician and as a visual artist. Huddleston rightly notes that “for more than five decades [Lynch’s] influence pervaded every corner of our culture,” which helps explain how “Lynchian” became a “dictionary-approved adjective.”
Buy David Lynch: His Work, His WorldThe book, which is housed within a slipcase, opens with Lynch’s birth in Missoula, Montana and traces his family’s path as they moved around the country. As a young man, Lynch settled in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where his best friend and future collaborator Jack Fisk attended. Lynch studied painting before transitioning into film. Examining the content and context of his early shorts, Huddleston states “right out of the gate, is so much of what we have come to understand as ‘Lynchian’” in his first film, Sick Men Getting Sick (1967).
Each chapter then focuses on a specific film and on Lynch’s life during that time, starting in the ’70s with Eraserhead. It started as a short film for the American Film Institute but took five years to complete photography. During its creation, he met people he would work with throughout his career, such as lead actor Jack Nance, who appeared in many Lynch films, and Nance’s wife, Catherine Couslon. Credited as director’s assistant, she did make-up, camera work, and notably created the iconic look of Nance’s hair. She later played the Log Lady in Twin Peaks.
The life of an independent filmmaker was not an easy one. His father and brother tried to talk him into giving up on the unfinished film. He divorced his wife Peggy Reavey, with whom he had a daughter, Jennifer, whose birth and his response to it inspired Eraserhead. He took odd jobs to put as much of the money as he could into completing it.
The book moves through Lynch’s career, revealing the origins for films, giving a fair accounting of the public’s reaction to them, and covering unrealized projects, from the many attempts to greenlight his screenplay for Ronnie Rocket to a video game called Woodcutter from Fiery Ships. It concludes with Twin Peaks: The Return, which Lynch apparently viewed as an 18-film rather than a TV series. Regardless of where one lands (I vote the latter), Huddleston connects The Return to Lynch’s past works, showing how an artist continues to deal with the same ideas throughout his life.
Huddleston explained “the purpose of this book is to…explore not just Lynch’s output but also his personal history, and how the two informed one another.” He succeeds with this fascinating biography that should please longtime Lynch fans and those new to his work and his world.
