cut to Lynch?
he luxuriant. unruly steely-grey hair of the
filmmaker memorath descrihed hy Mel
Brooks as ‘.limmy Stewart from Mars‘
appears to have a life of its own. It gives
David Lynch the appearance of a man in a
permanent state of shock. llis furrowed hrows and lined
forehead suggest a constantly questing mind adept at seeking elusive solutions for elahorate puzzles.
Now 55. Lynch has grown to look like his movies:
quirky. enigmatic. distinctive and sometimes
infuriatineg ohscure. Leaving the secluded surrounds of
his house high in the Hollywood Hills. he often slinks into coffee bars in downtown Los Angeles (Lynch lore has it that he ate lunch at Boh‘s Big Boy nearly every day for eight years). where he anonymously watches the passing crowd.
'lt’s good to he surrounded by people.’ he says (and he does sound like James Stewart). ‘You can lose yourself. and allow your imagination to take flight into strange and distttrhing psychological areas. I use that time to think and to dream.'
Those periods of reflection have given American cinema one of its most surreal and eccentric talents: from the nightmarish 1976 feature dehut liras-er/ieat/ to his stunning post-modern thriller Blue l'elvet. the freewheeling ll'i/tL-lt Heart and the cult television series Twin Peaks. But being an idiosyncratic talent. Lynch has suffered his highs and lows. llis nadir was l‘it‘e ll'alk lli’t/i .lle. his Twin Peaks prequel movie which suffered a critical druhhing you can't help hut think was the revenge of those who found his films unfathomable.
During these times of crisis. Lynch withdraws from the world for a period and concentrates on his painting and music. His non—film work includes Industrial .S'_\‘nip/I(nrv No l: The Dream ()f The Broken Hearted which he composed. directed and produced for television in 1990. He has had a weekly cartoon. The :lngriest Dog In The ll'ur/(l. which is printed in small local papers. and more of his doodlings can he found in Dumb/and his new weh animation. to he found at atomfilms.shockwave.com
After a five-year hreak from filmmaking. Lynch ventured forth again with his I997 thriller Lost Highway. The plot threw logic out of the window (though Lynch argues that point). hut critics and audiences loved it. Lynch then turned expectations on their head directing a conventional narrative not of his own writing. The Straight Story. He explains his excursion into ‘normalcy’ (another point Lynch argues) simply: ‘I had fallen in love with the script and ideas. and
10 THE LIST -'-
His talent was strange enough to make Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and now Mulholland Drive, but is DAVID LYNCH as bizarre ashis films?
Blchard Mowe