Beneath the Surface

The man who made Eraserhead also made The Straight Story. Both are David Lynch, and neither is a detour from the other. Donovan Hadley's biography takes that as its starting problem rather than a curiosity to be explained away.

Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and spent five years building Eraserhead on a $10,000 American Film Institute grant. The 1977 result became a cult horror film and a career. What followed refused to settle into a line: The Elephant Man in 1980, Dune in 1984, Blue Velvet in 1986, Wild at Heart in 1990, and Twin Peaks, made with Mark Frost for ABC, the same year. Then Lost Highway in 1997, The Straight Story in 1999, Mulholland Drive in 2001, Inland Empire in 2006, and Twin Peaks: The Return for Showtime in 2017. The Academy gave him an honorary Award in 2019.

Hadley works with the documentary care this subject's interior demands. The book covers the Montana childhood, Lynch the eldest son of a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the moves through Idaho, Washington and Virginia before his teens. It covers the Philadelphia years and the short film Six Men Getting Sick, the AFI Conservatory, the studio period of The Elephant Man and Dune, the Blue Velvet breakthrough, the marriages to Mary Sweeney and Emily Stofle, and the Transcendental Meditation practice the book treats as central rather than eccentric. It carries through to the emphysema diagnosis of 2024 and the Pacific Palisades fire of January 2025 that forced him out of his Mulholland Drive home in his final weeks. He died in Los Angeles on January 16, 2025, at seventy-eight, of heart failure complicated by emphysema.

What emerges is a portrait of an American director whose forty-year career changed what an American narrative film could feel like, and whose meditation foundation may outlive the films critics have been arguing about for the better part of fifty years.