TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001990.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 20KB | 419 lines

                [                                                          COVER STORY, Page 84

Czar of Bizarre


As his haunting Twin Peaks begins a new season, David Lynch
tests whether a brilliantly eccentric film artist can move into
the mainstream

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/Los Angeles


    A peg-legged woman walks past David Lynch's table. She might
be a victim from Blue Velvet or local color from Twin Peaks.
But the man who dreamed up both of those nightmare
entertainments pays her no heed. In the woodsy main dining room
of Musso & Frank's, Hollywood's oldest eatery, the 44-year-old
multimedia auteur concentrates on ordering his usual lunch: "A
Swiss cheese, real Swiss cheese, on whole wheat. A side order
of steamed broccoli. And a Coke." In his soft tenor voice, he
discusses nutrition: "Do you like it when your sandwich is
burned like that? That's not supposed to be good for you. But
it sure tastes good, though." He chats with the waiter: "Does
this bread get thrown away? It could go to the homeless. They'd
only have a little-bit-later lunch."

    Some people want to know who killed Laura Palmer, the Twin
Peaks homecoming queen with a past, the identity of whose
murderer has been kept secret nearly as long as that of Jimmy
Hoffa. More people, it seems, want to know about David Lynch's
eating habits. How many damn fine cups of coffee (lots of milk,
gobs of sugar) does he drink each day? Does he share the
cherry-pie fixation of his TV hero, Special Agent Cooper? On
the Tonight Show, Jay Leno quizzed Lynch about his Guinness
Book-worthy consumption of chocolate milk shakes at the Bob's
Big Boy chain in Los Angeles. The astounding stats: one every
day at 2:30 p.m. for seven years, 1973-79.

    So let's break the big news first: David Lynch's current
favorite liquids are red wine, bottled water and coffee. "I
like cappuccino, actually. But even a bad cup of coffee is
better than no coffee at all. New York has great water for
coffee. Water varies all around. We've got to drink something.
Do you just drink water, sometimes? It's very good for you."
And, stop the presses, David Lynch doesn't cook at home. "No,
ma'am! I don't allow cooking in my house. The smell. The smell
of cooking -- when you have drawings, or even writings -- that
smell would go all over my work. So I eat things that you don't
have to light a fire for. Or else I order a pizza. The speed at
which I eat it, it doesn't smell up the place too bad. The smell
doesn't last too long."

    In Hollywood nothing lasts long -- except the work. Lynch
has earned his 15 minutes of celebrity with 15 years of the
strangest characters and most hallucinogenic images an American
filmmaker ever committed to celluloid. His early career traced
a paradigmatic arc of hotshot movie eminence, from a $20,000
underground classic (Eraserhead in 1977) to a $5 million Oscar
nominee (The Elephant Man in 1980) to a $50 million sci-fi dud
(Dune in 1984). Each film had segments of  bafflement and
spectral beauty. But Hollywood, looking at the escalating price
tags and plummeting ticket sales, wrote the director off. So
Lynch made Blue Velvet (1986), a magnificent revenge drama --
his revenge on fettered movie conventions -- about small-town
life and lust, drugs and death. Twin Peaks, you could say, is
only the TV domestication of that warped masterpiece.

    Only! Long before the series' April premiere, ecstatic
critics were priming TV viewers to expect the unexpected.
Lynch's two-hour pilot didn't disappoint. It was frantic and
lugubrious in turn, a soap opera with strychnine. In one night,
the show had hip America hooked. Twin Peaks stoked a media
frenzy unseen since the Dallas heyday. But this time the
director, not the star, was the prime beneficiary. David Lynch
was J.R.

    Suddenly, like a high-cult Larry Hagman, Lynch was
everywhere. The director whose pre-1990 oeuvre comprised just
four features -- eight hours of public film -- will have more
than matched that total this year. Two two-hour and three
one-hour episodes of Twin Peaks. The rambunctious road movie
Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival and now in theatrical release. Four TV commercials for
Obsession perfume. A 50-minute video, Industrial Symphony No.
1, featuring a dwarf, prom teens, a floating topless lady, a
skinned deer and ethereal warbler Julee Cruise singing from a
car trunk; it's Lynch's most brazenly avant-garde work. If
that's not enough, how about a weekly David Lynch comic strip
called The Angriest Dog in the World? Or a book of his own
photographs? Or a flurry of Twin Peaks merchandise, including
the unexpurgated Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by
Lynch's daughter Jennifer?

    He has proved that an eccentric artist can toil in American
TV without compromising his vision, and in doing so he helped
loose the bonds of the prime-time straitjacket. Who was the
last fellow to pull off that parlay -- Ernie Kovacs? And what
filmmaker as inimitable as Lynch has ever sponsored other
directors to clone his style? The quirky outsider is close to
becoming David Lynch Inc.

    But even Lynch must know that every fad must fade. Any
enthusiasm with the velocity of Twin Peaks mania is bound to
boomerang. "Fame is an unnatural thing," says Mark Frost,
Lynch's TV partner and Twin Peaks co-producer. "There is no
equivalent to it in the animal kingdom." A director on the edge
gets critical indulgences when he steps into the mainstream;
a director on top is ripe for a raspberry. The trick for Lynch
is to keep the ebb of acclaim from affecting either his work
or his attitude toward it.

    So as Twin Peaks' fall season begins next Sunday with
another of the two-hour episodes he directed, Lynch arrives at
a perplexing crossroads. He is too familiar to some admirers
of his early movies, yet too weird for the Hollywood
establishment -- or for the American couch potato.

    Wild at Heart, which sends a pair of loser lovers (Nicolas
Cage and Laura Dern) on a trip into the dark night of the
Southern Gothic soul, is a tonic for the senses and an assault
on the sensibilities. Heads splatter, skulls explode, biker
punks torture folks for the sheer heck of it, and a pair of
loopy innocents find excitement in a side trip to hell. Pretty
much like Blue Velvet. Yes, it's different, but the same kind
of different; Lynch could no longer shock by being shocking.
Many critics figured they had solved the mystery of his visual
style and thematic preoccupations. Next mystery, please. By
August, when the film opened in the U.S., the Lynch mob was more
like a lynch mob.

    Barry Gifford, on whose novel the film was based, blames the
critics for the film's lukewarm reception. "The faux
intelligentsia can jump on or off a bandwagon," he notes.
"Andre Gide said that writers should expect to lose 50% of
their audience with each new work, that the rest never
understood it in the first place. Perhaps that has happened to
David."

    "I can't try to second-guess the critics," the director
says. "The world is changing, and we are changing within it.
As soon as you think you've got something figured out, it's
different. That is what I try to do. I don't try to do anything
new, or weird, or David Lynch. But I'm real happy with the
picture. See, I love 47 different genres in one film. I hate
one-thing films. And I love B movies. But why not have three
or four Bs running together? Like a little hive!"

    Even on the Twin Peaks front, the entrails from last week's
Emmy Awards make for cautionary reading. The show, nominated
for 14 Emmys, was virtually shut out, winning only technical
prizes for editing and costume design. Lynch, up for the Best
Director citation, lost out to Thomas Carter (Equal Justice)
and Scott Winant (thirty something). The Twin Peaks cast put
its best face on defeat. "We kind of like the idea that we
didn't get any Emmys," maintains Ray Wise, who plays Laura
Palmer's spectacularly bereaved father. "We're not about winning
awards; we are about doing what we do. If the great American
public accepts it, fine. If they don't, we will still have our
core audience. And even if we don't have our core audience, we
know we have done it right."

    But will Twin Peaks be done in by ABC's Saturday-night
graveyard slot, where the show will run after Sunday's
premiere? Will the mass TV audience still care about (or keep
track of) the town's residents, their loves and fetishes? Will
viewers have grown weary of the show's cliff-hanging teases,
as when Special Agent Cooper gets shot in the chest, only to
revive in the next episode, or when he determines Laura's
murderer in a dream and then forgets the name the next morning?
Can they submit to the pleasures of texture, the luxury of the
show's somnambulist pace, the comic-opera grandeur of the
performances? Most important, will they keep watching Twin
Peaks when it is no longer culturally compulsory to do so?

    For the first clues to these answers, tune in to next week's
Nielsen ratings. And attend to the show's spiritual leader as
he considers his delectable career crisis. "I'm real busy,"
Lynch says. "And I'm busy not always on things that I think are
important. Making a new film is important. Making each episode
of Twin Peaks is important. And painting and music. But there's
a lot of things in between that take a lot of time. Take this
day: I haven't shot a scene, I haven't written anything, I
haven't done anything. It's really frustrating." He pauses
between bites of broccoli. "The good side of failure is you've
got plenty of time to work."

    These days he has little time for a primo passion: painting.
"A guy told me that in order to get one hour of good painting
done, you need four hours of uninterrupted time." He describes
a recent favorite, Oww, God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me: "There's
a clump of Band-Aids in the bottom corner. A dark background.
A stick figure whose head is a blur of blood. Then a very small
dog, made out of glue. There is a house, a little black bump.
It is pretty crude, pretty primitive and minimal. I like it a
lot."

    Lynch doesn't analyze his dreams much; his consciousness
percolates plenty provocatively, thank you. But he remembers
being depressed once because "in my dream, I see these
fantastic paintings that were done by somebody else. And I wish
that I had painted them. And I wake up, and after a while the
impression wears off. I say, wait a minute, those are my
paintings. I dreamed them; they're mine." Another pause. "Then
I can't remember what they were."

    This courtly man doesn't stay depressed for long, though.
He has seen too much. Life, to him, is an endless search, one
long lesson. He is proof of the notion that every artist is a
scientist, obsessed with discovering how things and people
work. His eyes go electric as he skims the subjects of his
forthcoming photography book. "I've got a real lot of beautiful
industrial landscapes. And I'm real interested in dental
hygiene, so I'm going to have a chapter on that. Maybe
something on fictitious archaeology: I'd like to bury some
things, then wait a little while and dig them up. I like to
photograph plastic people in little scenes. Then I might have
a chapter on spark plugs. Kind of amazing things, spark plugs;
our lives revolve around them.

    "This is good food today."

    Lynch brings this canny naivete, this promiscuous curiosity,
to every aspect of his life and work. It could be a trait bred
from childhood -- a sylvan youth of eagle-scout badges and
family camping trips, spent amid the Pacific Northwest trees
that today loom over Twin Peaks. "My father was a scientist for
the Forest Service," Lynch says. "He would drive me through the
woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads,
through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very
tall and shafts of sunlight come down and in the mountain
streams the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides
catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the
woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in
the woods. There were odd, mysterious things. That's the kind
of world I grew up in."

    A different world greeted Lynch when, in his early 20s, he
and his young wife were in Philadelphia to study art. (Lynch
has been married twice, each union producing a child, and had
a four-year bicoastal relationship with actress Isabella
Rossellini.) The neighborhood was hairy, hostile, especially
for a lad trying to fit his bucolic vision into the urban
nightmare around him. Lynch says Eraserhead sprang fully formed
from nights in that "crime-ridden" city. "My original image was
of a man's head bouncing on the ground, being picked up by a
boy and taken to a pencil factory. I don't know where it came
from." Some movie folk didn't know where Eraserhead was going
either; it was twice rejected by the New York Film Festival.
Could it have been the picture's grim gray palette that put the
festival off? Or the man with seared skin? Or the snakelike
creatures in the radiator? Or the hideous mutant baby in the
bureau drawer?

    Lynch made Eraserhead at the American Film Institute in
Beverly Hills, with financial help from his boyhood pal Jack
Fisk (a talented production designer) and Fisk's wife, actress
Sissy Spacek. Around him the first-time director gathered
technicians and players he has used ever since: cinematographer
Frederick Elmes, sound-effects ace Alan Splet and, as
Eraserhead's high-haired Henry Spencer, actor Jack Nance. "It
seemed like we were never going to finish the film," recalls
Nance, who plays henpecked Pete Martell in Twin Peaks. "We had
to scrap an awful lot, and we failed an awful lot. But we were
kids then. Now we're old." Fortunately, the film found an
audience. With its loping internal logic and its unapologetic
otherness, Eraserhead soon became a hit on the midnight movie
circuit.

    Then everything started coming up robins in springtime. Mel
Brooks, looking to produce films other than his own, saw
Eraserhead and determined that Lynch should direct The Elephant
Man. The film, cued by the parable of physical deformity as a
kind of saint's sackcloth, embellished by Lynch's
phantasmagoric direction and anchored by John Hurt's delicate
performance as John Merrick, won the director big-studio
notice. He could do anything now -- anything but turn Frank
Herbert's daunting science fantasy into a movie Dino De
Laurentiis would like. "I sold out on Dune," Lynch says today.
"I was making it for the producers, not for myself. That's why
the right of final cut is crucial. One person has to be the
filter for everything. I believe this is a lesson world; we're
supposed to learn stuff. But 3 1/2 years to learn that lesson
is too long."

    A character in Dune says, "Let me teach you the weirding
way." In 1986 Lynch took moviegoers the whole way with Blue
Velvet (also, ironically, made for De Laurentiis). "I started
with the idea of front yards at night," Lynch says, "and Bobby
Vinton's song playing from a distance. Then I always had this
fantasy of sneaking into a girl's room and hiding through the
night. It was a strange angle to come at a murder mystery." The
murders were the least mysterious element in this feral,
fertile inversion of It's a Wonderful Life. Each shot was
crafted with the off-center elegance and pristine passion of
a modernist painter. But with its mix of battered beauties and
severed ears, Blue Velvet might have been his drop-dead letter
to Hollywood. Instead, it made the maverick bankable. His next
big project would find takers on network TV.

    "We were in exactly the right place," says Mark Frost, "at
the right network, at the right time. The end of the Reagan
era, a new decade -- there were a lot of pointers." So who
deserves credit for Twin Peaks? Movie people, knowing Lynch,
may think it is his miraculously conceived love child. TV
people, knowing Frost as a gifted graduate of the Hill Street
Blues team, may see him as the Tom Cruise character in Rain
Man, artfully manipulating an idiot savant. Neither legend fits
the facts. Frost is Mr. Inside, Lynch Mr. Outside, and together
they make an ideal odd couple. The show's pilot and atmosphere
are clearly vintage Lynch. Frost runs the show day to day. Both
fabricate the major story lines. "Mark is very straightforward
and supportive," says Tina Rathborne, who directed the finest
non-Lynch episode last season (Laura's funeral). "He is
brilliant in his own right."

    "David is the keeper of the flame," says Kyle MacLachlan,
who plays Dale Cooper. "This is his world." Ever since Dune,
when Lynch plucked him out of anonymity in Seattle, MacLachlan
has been the director's onscreen face. It is a startling
visage, as pure of line as an art deco vase, with soft,
all-American features and a comic-book hero's jutting chin --
you could park a Packard on it. Blue Velvet needed his reckless
innocence; Twin Peaks profits from his daft righteousness. "The
show is unique because of the combination, the balance, of Mark
and David," MacLachlan notes. "That uniqueness is not
necessarily transferable. It may madden the staff when David
directs a segment, because he throws the rules out. But to us
actors that freedom is an elixir, a magic potion. It's hard to
have it watered down once you've tasted it."

    Lynch directs, his actors suggest, through osmosis. "He
might say, `A little more,' then `Peachy-keen,' but that's it,"
says Dennis Hopper, the actor-director who was the memorable
sicko Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. "However grotesque or violent
or weird one of David's scenes may be, the whole is coming from
a place in his brain that I trust," says Grace Zabriskie, the
spikily hysterical mother of Laura Palmer. "It's that razor's
edge of knowing and not knowing what he's doing."

    Right now Lynch and Frost are walking that edge even as they
hone it. They want Twin Peaks to keep surprising its audience
while they defer surprises. They want the show that couldn't
be made to be the hit that keeps on coming. And when they get
bored or exhausted, they want to get out. "We own the show,"
Frost notes. "There is no studio around that can milk this
thing until it drops dead." Lynch, with his tunnel-vision
focus, is the last Hollywood figure one could imagine extending
a project just to pick up a paycheck. He doesn't want to stay
around; he wants to stay young.

    Lynch's films shout that sentiment in every frame, of
course. But listen to him on the subject of aging -- which, as
so many things do, attracts and repels him. "Scientists are
working right now, while we are having lunch, to give us a
better life. I hope they make some big breakthroughs soon. If
you could only reconcile the mental with the physical, then
throw in the emotional! These growth hormones, where can I get
a bunch of them? Is there some way that, with electricity, you
could stimulate your own growth hormones? Plug yourself in for
five minutes, there'd be a little jolt, but you'd get used to
it. It wouldn't be bad at all; in fact, you'd get to enjoy it,
probably. Then away you'd go, and youth wouldn't be wasted on
the young anymore. You'd be 25, with a 95-year-old mind.
Granddad would start breaking into liquor stores and staying
out late. Hope we have it soon!"

    David Lynch has finished his meal. A $20 tab, cheap at twice
the price for lunch with a gee-whiz genius. "Do you mind to
take me home?" he asks. "It's only a five-minute drive. But you
can't come in!" And up he goes into the Hollywood Hills, where
the entertainment industry's most beguiling outsider can find
refuge in the daydreams and nightmares -- the forests and
Philadelphias -- of his pinwheeling mind.