Note: This review reveals who killed Laura Palmer.
Lynch has always characterized his childhood as idyllic, and he resists autobiographical readings of his films. Yet The Art Life includes at least one traumatic incident that marked young Dave for life and would inspire one of his greatest works. As Lynch recalls, his father would emerge from their house every evening to call him and his younger brother in for bed, but one evening, right around that time, the boys were stunned to see a nude woman emerge from the dusk. “She had beautiful, pale white skin, and she was completely naked,” says Lynch. “I think her mouth was bloodied. . . . She came closer and closer, and my brother started to cry. Something was bad-wrong with her, and I don’t know what happened, but she sat down on a curb crying.” Lynch would stage the scene in all its perverse horror near the end of Blue Velvet (1986), when the half-crazed heroine, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), appears naked after escaping from her kidnappers and throws herself upon the hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan).
The Art Life also climaxes with a confrontation between father and child. As Lynch recalls, he had divorced Peggy and was living at the stables when his father and younger brother sat him down for a talk. “The whole thing was, ‘Give up this film and get a job, because you’ve got a child, and this film isn’t gettin’ made, and you’re wasting your time,’ this kind of thing. And it got me really in a deep, deep way, ’cause they didn’t understand. I just couldn’t believe what they were saying to me, and they were totally serious.” With the benefit of hindsight, one might easily side with Lynch, but how could a father have known that something as grotesque and off-the-charts crazy as Eraserhead would make his son an internationally acclaimed filmmaker with a 40-year career? The story is blunted somewhat by Lynch’s vindication, but central to many artists’ lives is the pain of being driven by a creative vision even as those you love the most fail to grasp it or even lose confidence in your ability.
Directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm
