David Lynch’s ​‘Room to Dream’ is an inti­mate, human­is­ing self-portrait

Giv­en his noto­ri­ous­ly cryp­tic way with those inter­view­ers seek­ing answers to what are invari­ably the wrong ques­tions when it comes to his work, it would be a fool’s errand to expect David Lynch to sud­den­ly spell things out in his won­der­ful new book, ​‘Room to Dream’. That said, per­haps one seem­ing­ly inde­struc­tible debate can final­ly be laid to rest, at least as far as its mak­er is con­cerned. ​“It was nev­er tele­vi­sion for David,” notes pro­duc­tion coor­di­na­tor Sab­ri­na Suther­land of his long-await­ed return to the world of Twin Peaks last sum­mer, ​“It was always a fea­ture film.”

If it seemed like a tire­some­ly banal ques­tion to ask of a film­mak­er whose work has always proved resis­tant to the bina­ries of def­i­n­i­tion, it’s one on which the very exis­tence of Twin Peaks: The Return hinged. ​“Show­time had it in their heads that this was episod­ic tele­vi­sion and didn’t under­stand David’s vision,” con­tin­ues Suther­land. “[He] want­ed a com­plete fea­ture-film crew there every day, includ­ing light­ning machines, stand­by painters, and spe­cial-effects tech­ni­cians, and that isn’t how tele­vi­sion works.” Lynch walked away from the mea­gre deal, cit­ing cre­ative dif­fer­ences, only return­ing when a viral cam­paign from his cast mem­bers brought the net­work to their sens­es. Lynch him­self puts his response to the con­trac­tu­al deba­cle more suc­cinct­ly: ​“Fuck this! I’m fuck­ing out!”

The film­mak­er who The Ele­phant Man pro­duc­er Mel Brooks once described as dress­ing ​“like Jim­my Stew­art about to star in a film about Charles Lind­bergh” has an easy way with an F‑bomb; his fucks jostling for space with archaical­ly whole­some slang. For an artist whose career was built on dev­illing the opti­mistic sur­faces of Amer­i­cana, such lin­guis­tic ten­sion feels appro­pri­ate­ly and sin­gu­lar­ly, well, Lynchian.

At once biog­ra­phy and auto­bi­og­ra­phy, ​‘Room to Dream’ sees each of its chap­ters divid­ed into two parts. The first is tra­di­tion­al­ly researched by Los Ange­les Times crit­ic Kris­tine McKen­na, who con­duct­ed over a hun­dred inter­views with per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al col­lab­o­ra­tors, while the sec­ond offers Lynch’s own take on the peri­od cov­ered. ​“What you’re read­ing here is basi­cal­ly a per­son hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with his own biog­ra­phy,” the intro­duc­tion has it, ​“A chron­i­cle of things that hap­pened, not an expla­na­tion of what those things mean.” As such, it’s the most com­pre­hen­sive overview of the filmmaker’s life and career to date.

What final­ly emerges across some 500-odd pages is a human­is­ing por­trait of an intu­itive work­ing method, a process of approach­ing the cre­ation of a work of art that in turn pro­vides the key to the audience’s under­stand­ing of it. ​“We read his images at some not ful­ly con­scious lev­el,” wrote Pauline Kael of Blue Vel­vet, and to read Lynch describe the evo­lu­tion of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve is to sense a sub­con­scious over an intel­lec­tu­al instinct at play: ​“There’s a unique blue key to some­thing unknown. There had to be some­thing it was to, and I don’t know why it end­ed up being to a blue box instead of a door or a car.”

Cast and crew would be none the wis­er to Lynch’s var­i­ous endgames, while ever will­ing to trust and facil­i­tate a path through his imag­i­na­tion. ​“Wear a bun­ny suit you can’t breathe in that’s sev­en thou­sand degrees inside? I don’t care; I’ll do it for David,” says Nao­mi Watts, “[He] nev­er explained to us what we were doing. We just fol­lowed his instruc­tions.” Script super­vi­sor Cori Glaz­er describes being roped in at the last minute to play Mul­hol­land Drive’s Blue Lady, with no idea of how the char­ac­ter would fit into the sto­ry, ​“David’s favourite thing to say is, ​‘I don’t care – it’s modular!’”

While McKenna’s bio­graph­i­cal jour­ney through Lynch’s life eschews any­thing approach­ing tex­tu­al analy­sis, it’s not with­out keen insights to approach­ing the work itself. ​“Lynch prefers to oper­ate in the mys­te­ri­ous breach that sep­a­rates dai­ly real­i­ty from the fan­tas­tic realm of human imag­i­na­tion and long­ing, and is in the pur­suit of things that defy expla­na­tion or under­stand­ing,” she writes, ​“He wants his films to be felt and expe­ri­enced rather than understood.”

This ongo­ing pur­suit of the intu­itive has alter­nate­ly earned him legions of fans and alien­at­ed them, as evi­denced by the rap­tur­ous recep­tion to the first series of Twin Peaks and its sub­se­quent 1992 spin-off fea­ture, Fire Walk with Me. “[He’s] dis­ap­peared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see anoth­er David Lynch movie,” said Quentin Taran­ti­no of the lat­ter. Not that Lynch appears to give a shit about his work’s crit­i­cal recep­tion. As McKen­na writes of Lost High­way​’s 1997 open­ing, ​“Lynch remind­ed the film com­mu­ni­ty that he wasn’t mak­ing movies for them and was answer­ing to the high­er author­i­ty of his own imagination.”

Lynch sug­gests this refusal to com­pro­mise on his artis­tic vision harks back to the ter­ri­ble expe­ri­ence mak­ing Dune for Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is, a for-hire gig that saw him with­out final cut for the only time in his career. He’d learned his les­son by the time it came to Twin Peaks, as co-writer Mark Frost recounts, ​“I remem­ber an exec­u­tive tak­ing a list of notes out of his pock­et and say­ing, ​‘I’ve got some notes if you’re inter­est­ed,’ and David said, ​‘No, not real­ly,’ and the guy qui­et­ly put the list back in his pock­et with a sheep­ish look on his face.”

The inim­itabil­i­ty of Lynch’s work is best borne out in the lack­lus­tre sec­ond sea­son of Twin Peaks, in which he’d large­ly divest­ed his involve­ment. ​“Peo­ple would come in and put a kalei­do­scope on the cam­era and say, ​‘Oh look, how Lynchi­an,’” notes actress Kim­my Robert­son. His work is explic­it­ly per­son­al, and Lynch’s own telling of a youth spent in the idyll of Boise, Ida­ho and a young adult­hood on the dan­ger­ous streets of Philadel­phia a decade lat­er por­trays oppos­ing visions of an Amer­i­ca he’d look to rec­on­cile. Not that said ten­sion wasn’t per­cep­ti­ble from the start, as rec­ol­lect­ed in a child­hood encounter that would give birth to Blue Velvet’s Dorothy Val­lens many years later:

“We were down at the end of this street at night, and out of the dark­ness – it was so incred­i­ble – came this nude woman with white skin. Maybe it was some­thing about the light and the way she came out of the dark­ness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the colour of milk, and she had a blood­ied mouth. She couldn’t walk very well and she was in bad shape, and she was com­plete­ly naked… I might’ve asked, Are you okay? What’s wrong? But she didn’t say any­thing. She was scared and beat up, but even though she was trau­ma­tised, she was beautiful.”

If there’s a con­stant to Lynch and McKenna’s account, it lies in an insa­tiable work eth­ic present from the very start. For those only famil­iar with Lynch’s cin­e­mat­ic out­put, ​‘Room to Dream’ serves to con­tex­tu­alise the films with­in his broad­er work as a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary artist. One gets the sense that the great­est per­son­al prof­it of an entire work­ing life, has been the space to fol­low his muse. Per­son­al rela­tion­ships have clear­ly suf­fered along the way, and while the book’s intro­duc­tion states that ​“noth­ing was declared off-lim­its,” there’s lit­tle by way of self-crit­i­cism on Lynch’s part.

“David is like cat­nip to women,” notes McKen­na, and it’s hard to keep up with his myr­i­ad roman­tic entan­gle­ments. ​“There’s no mal­ice in Dad and he doesn’t do these things out of self­ish­ness,” says daugh­ter Jen­nifer Lynch, ​“It’s just that he’s always been in love with secrets and mis­chief and sex­u­al­i­ty, and he’s naughty and he gen­uine­ly loves love. And when he loves you, you are the most loved, and he’s hap­py and gid­dy and he has ideas and gets cre­ative and the whole thing is insane­ly romantic.”

Yet it’s hard not to think there’s a flip side to that coin. All the women in Lynch’s life speak high­ly of him – all of his col­lab­o­ra­tors do – but not with­out a note of fond res­ig­na­tion lurk­ing between the lines; an aware­ness that they’ll always come sec­ond to his own pri­vate muse. There’s gen­uine sad­ness to be found in his fourth wife Emi­ly Stofle’s account of his mov­ing out of the mar­i­tal bed­room dur­ing the mak­ing of Twin Peaks: The Return to a space that would allow him time to smoke and think.

Maybe it’s the cost of the artis­tic life, or sim­ply the nature of an autho­rised account of it. It would be remiss to put any­thing past such an uncom­pro­mis­ing artist as Lynch. As Twin Peaks’ Michael Ontkean says, ​“You don’t see the strings or the wires or the rab­bit unless David wants you to.”