A compelling crossover between a biography and a memoir, Room to Dream makes no attempts to explain Lynch’s films and, thankfully, stays largely clear of drawing clear-cut connections between his life experiences and the motifs present in his work. In its dual narrative – each chapter in Lynch’s life being presented first by the biographer, followed by the artist himself – it draws a rough picture of a man who grew up in the perfectly standard environment of the 1950s/60s middle-class America, and went on to pursue and build a formidable artistic career as a filmmaker, painter, sound designer and musician.
Starting from nearly idyllic childhood and the post-war optimism typical of his class and environment, proceeding throughout the rough era of the 1960s Philadelphia, the crucial years at the American Film Institute – where Lynch was a student of the Czech emigree František Daniel – to the various ups and downs of Lynch’s career, McKenna always pays attention to period detail and attempts to provide important social and political background. She makes use of a vast number of interviews with scores of Lynch’s present and past collaborators, thereby offering valuable insight into the circumstances of breaking through into the world of filmmaking, the process of film productions large and small, the workings of the Hollywood studio system and, naturally, the specific methods and quirks of the filmmaker himself. Lynch provides his own take on each of the discussed periods of his life and career, the result being a fruitful combination of a carefully researched account of the recorded events and the artist’s deeply personal reflections.
You may have already read or seen some interviews with Lynch and, therefore, are aware of his reluctance to provide authoritative interpretations of his work. The motif of intuition, of personal journeys through art of any form, the preciousness of our own, specific ways to cope with the unknown, the visual, acoustic and emotional worlds of an artwork, is prominent in Lynch’s sections of the text. The book is in no way a clue to “the puzzle of the films of David Lynch”, all the more since it is not a puzzle we ought to solve. Rather than solving puzzles, we should experience the films on our own terms, and to be proud of any ways they enrich our inner worlds.
From the uncompromising, gruelling shooting of Eraserhead in 1973–1976 through the first successes and what Lynch himself calls his single artistic sell-out in the case of Dune, to establishing his very own, definite position between the worlds of arthouse cinema and popular culture, Lynch has long been occupying the precarious space between what some still call “high art” and the world of Academy Awards, late night talk shows and TV fame. The book subtly underpins the more relatable, accessible side of Lynch and his perception of film and his audiences. The fact that his films – with the exception of The Straight Story – have become somewhat darker and more abstract since 1992’s masterful, yet ill-fated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me seems in no way a conscious (or bitter) move away from his audience, rather an evolution of the artist that always approaches his audience with an open mind – and encourages the audience to do the same.
Ever since I was mesmerized by Lost Highway as a teenager in the cult Prague Kino Aero around 2001, I’ve always found Lynch’s work particularly powerful and impactful. There may be a number of reasons, and, no doubt, some have more to do with me than with Lynch himself. But I have always been a bit puzzled by the tendency of some to render Lynch’s films as extremely complicated and obscure. Surely, there is a level of obscurity, or, to be more precise, abstraction in his narratives. But Lynch’s films have, to me, never been examples of exclusive cinema, of arthouse fares that require an arsenal of knowledge, codes and references that exist outside the films themselves. Lynch’s films may well be abstract, but they are decidedly intuitive and inclusive: they are all there is and all that needs to be. This makes Lynch somewhat unique among contemporary arthouse auteurs. Sure, one may watch and enjoy, say, Haneke’s White Ribbon or the features by Lars von Trier without substantial knowledge of European mythology, history and literature. But I imagine such experience must be severely limited, since these works rely heavily on various references and/or prior knowledge. (And, since I mentioned Haneke, his anti-horror Funny Games is an example of a film that, seen without experience with horror films and self-conscious meta-narratives, may prove deeply misleading.) It makes perfect sense that Lynch himself relates to the directors of the modern rather than post-modern cinema, and connects with the likes of Werner Hezrog, another great filmmaker whose films are often deemed “strange”, but whose cinematic language has always been direct and devoid of snobbish exclusiveness.
The “difficult” part of Lynch’s films is that they make us leave our comfort zone, to embrace different types of logic, to experience the narrative on a more abstract level. But even the more demanding works, such as Inland Empire, are dominantly intuitive, sensual, evocative. And although it may well be interesting to watch Inland Empire with deep knowledge of narrative structures and while finishing a Ph.D. on the history of Hollywood, not once did I have a sense of being deprived of the film’s riches due to my lack of such knowledge. Lynch’s films are open, “democratic”, and strangely accessible, not arrogant or indulgent. (The book actually includes a quote from Quentin Tarantino, who sneered at Fire Walk with Me, calling it overly indulgent. Coming from the man who made Kill Bill Vol. I and II., two festivals of utter self-indulgence, this is one of the most amusing pieces of trivia I’ve encountered in quite some time.)
Xan Brooks in The Guardian gave the book a lukewarm review, criticising it for not going deep enough. Frankly, I have no idea where it should have gone; Lynch himself acknowledges this degree of superficiality, dictated by the limitations of a biography/memoir. Perhaps the true “deep” work is, in the end, always up to us: how we choose to experience Lynch’s films, paintings and music and to what extent do we intend to reflect on ourselves, our subconscious, our daydreams and the spiritual realm of our lives in general. No biography can do that for us.
David Lynch, Kristine McKenna: Room to Dream (New York: Random House, 1998). In Czech: Místo snění, translated by Michal Prokop and Lucie Kořínková (Prague: Paseka, 2020).
Antonín Handl 