Chapter 1Missoula

Foreword

Consider the stable. Behind a Tudor-revival mansion in Beverly Hills, in the winter of 1971, a young man of twenty-five carried a cot and a hot plate and a small space heater into a disused horse stall with a concrete floor, and did not leave it for five years. He built the sets inside it with his own hands. He chose the wallpaper and aged it himself. He rode a bicycle down the dark hills at four in the morning, delivering the Wall Street Journal to driveways, to raise the thousand dollars a month that kept the film alive. And when the images were finally shot, he sat with a sound engineer and built, layer upon layer, out of industrial recordings and microphones lowered inside metal, a soundtrack of some four hundred simultaneous elements — because the hum he wanted did not exist yet, and so he made it. This is where I chose to begin. Not with the finished films. With the making.

I began there deliberately, because the people I have written about were, almost to a person, workers inside machines — the repertory companies, the studio floors, the broadcast houses of the British and American midcentury, systems that divided the labor of making a thing so finely that no single hand was ever responsible for the whole of it. Lynch was the refusal of that arrangement. He did the jobs himself. He built the baby himself, alone, behind a locked door, and kept for fifty years the secret of what it had been made from. A man who will not delegate and will not explain is, for a biographer, either the best of subjects or the worst. I did not know which he would turn out to be when I started.

What I had expected to write was a book about images — the ear lying in the grass, the red room, the blue evening light going down over a mown lawn. Those images are why the word Lynchian entered the language, and I could have listed them for you in my sleep. What I found, once I was inside the work, was that the images were never the medium. The medium was sound: the room tone, the low industrial pressure of a city leaning against a single window, the hum underneath the picture that he mixed himself and would let no one else touch. The pictures were what you noticed. The sound was what did the work.

I built the book, as one must with a man who guarded the line between his life and his art, from the public record: the long trail of interviews he gave across half a century, the memoir he assembled late with a co-author, the production histories, the press and museum and court archives that gather around any life lived that publicly for that long. He did not, in any of it, join the wounds to the work. He never told you what the films were about. The refusal was not evasion. It was, I came to think, the same instinct that had locked the stable door.

Because the thing worth a book, in the end, was not the strangeness. Strangeness is cheap, and Lynch was never selling it. The thing worth a book was the method: a boy raised on radiant mid-century American streets who understood, before he could name it, that the radiance was real and was also not all that was real, and who then spent fifty years building — by hand, in stables and sound rooms — the exact machine required to show you both at once. The surface, and the thing occurring beneath it, held in one frame at one time, without a word of instruction as to which you were meant to believe.

I came to him expecting to decode a body of famous pictures. I leave having watched a man make things, which is slower and harder and more moving than decoding, and which is finally the only subject I trust. This is the book that the watching produced.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · Missoula

The house in Missoula, Montana, was small and white, with a front porch that held a rocking chair and a view of the Clark Fork River. The river moved slowly at that stretch, east to west, carrying mountain water down out of the Bitterroots toward the Pacific. In the winter the river took ice along its banks. In the summer it ran green. The Lynch family had come to Missoula in January 1946 because Donald Lynch had taken a position with the United States Department of Agriculture's research station in the valley, studying the effects of fungus and weather on experimental stands of western pine. The family would stay two years. In 1948 they would move to Sandpoint, Idaho. In 1949 to Spokane, Washington. The family's itinerary over the next decade followed the promotion-track of a federal research scientist — a series of small western cities arranged around laboratories and test plots, each house a little different from the last, each school a little different, each bedroom a little different.

The eldest child, born January 20, 1946, at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, was given the name David Keith Lynch. The first photograph of him shows an infant in his mother's arms, his eyes open, already looking past her at something on the other side of the room. His mother's name was Edwina Lynch, née Sundholm, known to everyone as Sunny — she was from Brooklyn, a graduate of Duke University where she had studied English and taken a degree that had, in the mid-1940s, been an unusual academic credential for a woman from a working family. She had been hired, in the years before motherhood, as an English teacher. She brought to the household the disciplines of her training — grammar, close reading, the demand for precision in language — alongside the storytelling instincts that the training had refined. She read to her son. She read to him early and often. She read him the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. She read him stories with witches in them and stories with forests in them and stories in which small children encountered things they could not understand.

The father did not read aloud. The father kept a journal of weather observations, studied photographs of fungi under microscopes, and spoke in the slow, careful way of a man who was trained to describe natural phenomena without ornament. Donald Lynch's vocation — the precise description of natural phenomena, the patient observation of what fungi did to wood under specific conditions of temperature and moisture — was not, in its practice, entirely unlike his son's later vocation. Donald observed. He described with precision. He published, in agricultural journals, findings that depended on the quality of his observation being accurate and specific. David, in a different medium and for different purposes, would spend fifty years doing something structurally similar: observing human and natural phenomena with precision and then finding the medium — paint, film, television, digital video — in which the observation could be transmitted accurately. The father's method of slow, careful, specific observation was not in conflict with the son's artistic development. It was one of its sources.

The parents were gentle with each other. The house was orderly. There was no shouting. The family took holidays together and said grace before meals and attended the First Presbyterian Church on Sundays. The son, decades later, when journalists asked him about his childhood, would describe it in terms so bright they seemed suspicious. Picket fences. Fire trucks. Apple trees. A blue sky. He was not lying. The surface of his childhood was exactly what he described. The surface was genuinely radiant. What would fascinate him, for the rest of his life, was what lay beneath the surface — and the question of whether the radiance had been a preparation for what lay beneath, or a consolation against it.

The family's subsequent moves — Sandpoint, Idaho (1948); Spokane, Washington (1949); Durham, North Carolina; Boise, Idaho; Alexandria, Virginia (where the family settled when David was fourteen) — gave him a kind of mid-century American childhood that was both common and strange. Common because millions of American children of the postwar era were being raised in small towns and suburbs exactly like the ones he was passing through. Strange because the repeated relocations taught him, before he could articulate it, that the surface of any place — any street, any neighborhood, any house — was temporary. Houses looked substantial. They were not. A father could take a new job. A moving truck could come. The same family could exist in three different houses in three different states in five years, and each house could feel, while you lived in it, like the only house you would ever live in.

In Alexandria, Virginia, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout in late 1962, at sixteen. The scouting materials he kept — the handbook, the merit badges — would be found, sixty years later, in his home in Hollywood, preserved with the care that most men reserve for photographs of their children. He had been in Troop 113. He had learned to tie knots, to start fires, to identify trees, to read topographic maps. The skills had been useful and the skills had been pleasurable and the quality of the Boy Scout ethos — an America that taught its boys to be competent, useful, and respectful — had impressed him in ways that the subsequent culture, and his own subsequent art, would never quite erase.

In Alexandria, Virginia, where the family arrived in 1960 when David was fourteen, he made the first friend who would matter outside the family. The friend was Toby Keeler, the son of a painter who lived down the street, and one afternoon — David would tell and retell this story across the decades, its details worn smooth by repetition — Toby took David to his father's studio. The father, Bushnell Keeler, was working on a canvas. The paint was thick on the surface. The smell of linseed oil and turpentine filled the room. Bushnell stood at the easel, moving his brush, responsible to no one but the painting. David, fourteen years old, watching a man paint, understood in that moment what he wanted to do with his life. He would be an artist. The life of an artist was possible. A person could live by painting. The revelation — and this was the word Lynch used, decades later, when he described the afternoon — was that a person could be free.

The wanting was instantaneous. The pursuit of it would take the rest of the decade.

What the nine-year-old and the twelve-year-old and the fourteen-year-old David Lynch also learned about America, across those mid-1950s and early 1960s years, was that American towns had surfaces that did not always match what happened inside the houses.

There was, in each of the places they lived, a awareness a child accumulated that the adults did not discuss. A house on a street where a father had left. A house on a street where a mother cried. The house of a neighbor in Boise where, some nights, sounds came through the walls at frequencies a child was not supposed to register but did. The father of another friend, in Spokane, who beat his son with a belt in the garage while the neighborhood went about its business. A girl in Alexandria who had run, one afternoon when David was twelve, naked and crying down the middle of the street, and whose parents had not come out of the house, and whom nobody had ever explained.

The streets looked ordinary. The lawns were mowed. The cars in the driveways were waxed. The surface was radiant. Beneath the surface, things were occurring that the surface was designed to conceal. David did not know, at nine or twelve or fourteen, what to do with this information. He stored it. The storage would, decades later, become a body of work. The naked girl running down the street in Alexandria would become, recognizable but transformed, a scene in Blue Velvet in 1986. The friends' fathers and the strange sounds at night and the quality of a mid-century American suburban dusk — the light going blue, the crickets starting, the sense that something was happening just out of sight — would constitute the primary material of every film he would make.

The child had not yet decided to make the films. The child was, in 1960, taking the Eagle Scout oath and delivering newspapers on his Schwinn and looking forward to the weekend. But he was also, without being able to name it, compiling.

The family's religious life, through those years, was the mild American Presbyterianism of the Eisenhower era — pot-roast Sundays, hymnals in the pew-backs, a pastor who gave twenty-minute sermons and did not press hard on doctrinal points. Edwina was the devout parent. Donald attended church but did not speak of God in the house. David, asked as an adult about his religious upbringing, would say it had been fine. He had enjoyed the hymns. He had enjoyed the quiet of the sanctuary. He had not enjoyed the Bible stories — they had seemed, to him, to be about violence and suffering in ways the adults who recited them did not seem to notice. He would not carry the Presbyterianism forward into his adult life. What he would carry forward was the quality of a Sunday morning in America in 1956: the sun slanting through stained glass, the particular smell of a mothballed wool suit, the organ chord that marks the end of a hymn and the beginning of a silence. These sensory registrations, accurate and nostalgic at once, would become the fabric of the films. He would not make religious films. He would make films in which the religious rituals of an America that no longer existed were quoted, with exquisite specificity, as the surface beneath which he would then show what actually occurred.

Donald Lynch lived to be ninety-two. He would die in 2007, still tending the same garden, in the Virginia house where the family had eventually settled. Edwina had died before him, in 2004, at eighty-five. David would speak of them, in interviews across the subsequent decades, with a simple and unironic love. They had been good parents. They had given him a childhood that worked. The childhood had, in its ordinary American surface, contained everything he would spend his life putting on film. He did not blame them. He thanked them.

Donald, in his final decade, had lived long enough to see his eldest son become famous in the specific way that artists become famous — not the fame of politicians or athletes, but the fame of a person whose name had become an adjective. Lynchian had entered the critical vocabulary before Donald's death; he was aware of it; he did not fully understand what it described. He had watched, with the puzzled pride that a careful rational man brings to his offspring's irrational achievements, the films his son had made. He had, by his son's account, been unable to finish Eraserhead — he had watched approximately forty minutes and had then quietly suggested that perhaps the two of them might take a walk. But he had watched The Straight Story twice, and had found it, he told David, exactly right: a man on a lawnmower, traveling slowly, doing what had to be done. That, Donald said, he understood. David told this story, in interviews, as the funniest and most affectionate thing his father had ever said to him about his work.

Edwina, for her part, had understood all of the films. She had been the reader of the Brothers Grimm at the kitchen table, the one who had given her son the dark stories early, the one who had told him, at fourteen, I think you should do it. She had known, from that kitchen-table conversation onward, what he was going to do. The films had been the logical continuation of the stories she had read to him. She had never been surprised. She had occasionally, David admitted in interviews, been frightened. But she had never been surprised.

The first years in Alexandria were also the years in which David's drawing practice became, quietly and without institutional direction, a private discipline of close observation. He had, through the Spokane and Boise years, drawn the undersides of things — the tool chests, the spiders' webs, the garage corners — as a private practice without audience or validation. In Alexandria, with the introduction to Bushnell Keeler's studio and then with the Corcoran weekend classes, the practice acquired, for the first time, a social dimension. He was now a person who made drawings that other people could see, that teachers could evaluate, that the institutional structure of art education could respond to. The response was, in general, favorable in a conventional sense and insufficient in the sense that mattered: the teachers who liked his drawings liked them for their technical accuracy, for the close observation that was already visible even in his teenage work. What they did not have the vocabulary to address was the quality that the drawings were already reaching for — the quality that would, decades later, be described as Lynchian: the specific discomfort that accurate observation of small things could produce when the observation was sustained past the point that social convention suggested. David's drawings of the undersides of things were technically accomplished. They were also, even at sixteen, already uncomfortable in a way that most student work was not.

The memoir — Room to Dream, which alternated Lynch's own recollections with reported biographical sections by McKenna — was, at the time of its 2018 publication, the most extensive public statement Lynch had made about his personal life. He had, across his career, maintained a strict separation between the biographical material of his life and the artistic material of his work. He did not, in interviews, explain what his films were about. He did not, in discussions of his personal life, connect the personal experiences to the artistic choices. The memoir maintained this separation while giving both sides — the personal and the professional — more room than any prior publication had provided. It was, for Lynch scholars who had been working from interviews and production records, an invaluable if partial document. For his general audience, it was the first extended experience of Lynch's voice at length — the flat, deliberate, specific Midwestern voice that his interview style had established, now sustained across three hundred pages.

Readers of the memoir often wondered where the darkness in the films had come from. The answer was not a single originating wound but a long accumulation — what the child had already intuited from the streets of Spokane and the houses of Alexandria and the silences around neighbors. What David Lynch had figured out, by seventeen, was the governing observation of his adult career. The surface is real. The surface is not all that is real. Beneath the surface, other things occur. The artist's job is to show, simultaneously, the surface and what it conceals.

He graduated from Hammond High in 1964. He enrolled at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He did not last a year. Boston did not suit him; the art was academic; the winter was brutal; the other students seemed to him uninteresting. He dropped out in the spring of 1965 and took a trip to Europe with a friend, intending to travel and study with the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. The trip lasted fifteen days. Kokoschka was not in Salzburg when they arrived. The other plans did not materialize. David came home.

In the fall of 1965 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It was the right choice. Philadelphia was the wrong city. Both of these things were true. The next chapter is about what happened there.