BEFORE: Today's film is another one that got pulled from last year's Doc Block, the main reason being that I just couldn't link to it. To get here, and then go somewhere else, I would have needed two other films with David Lynch in them, because apparently there's no archive footage here from Lynch's movies, which could have made this a lot easier. So since I didn't have two other movies with him in them, I had to table it. The process this year was easier, because I found two other movies with David Lynch in them so OK, just build the chain outwards from HERE, start with these three in a row and see where that takes me, and eventually I connected another mini-block HERE and another section THERE and I Lego-ed my way up to 50 films.
So David Lynch carries over from "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man" and this also helps me cross off another state, because it seems Lynch moved around a lot, as both a child and an adult. Idaho, Washington, Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and obviously some time in California - but I was elated when I saw where he was born, Missoula, MONTANA. So let's get some mileage out of THAT.
Date admitted to the U.S.: November 8, 1889 (41st state)
Claim to fame: Umm, let me get back to you on this one. The Battle of Little Bighorn, aka Custer's Last Stand?
Nickname: Big Sky Country, or The Treasure State. That second one seems like a trap.
State Motto: "Oro y Plata", which is Spanish for "Gold and Silver". Another trap.
State Flower: Bitterroot. Does not sound fun.
State Fish: Westslope cutthroat trout.
State Bird: Western meadowlark
State Tree: Ponderosa pine
State mammal: Grizzly bear
Notable Sports Teams: Not a chance. This is a place where rodeo is king, I'll wager.
Fun Facts: The Homestead Act of 1862 provided free land to settlers - come on, we've got treasure here, we've got silver and gold, you just need to get here. This tells me a lot if they were just GIVING away plots of land - if they didn't do this, nobody would have ever moved there. Then in 1877 there was the Desert Land Act, where they were selling Montana land for 25 cents an acre if people would come and work the land and irrigate the desert, but mostly people just raised cattle and sheep there, and forgot about their promise to irrigate the desert. So that didn't work either. I'm guessing over time they had to keep upping the price and offering more and more money to get people to move there. How did that work out?
Montana also had the first female representative in the U.S. Congress, Jeannette Rankin, who famously voted AGAINST the U.S. entering World War I and World War II. That lady had some balls, I mean, financially it was the wrong thing to do for Montana, because the state profited greatly from a war-time economy, but there was a large percentage of pacifists in Montana, and they didn't feel it was our place to get involved in foreign wars. Considering that 10% of Montana's population served in those wars and a large number of them died, maybe she was on to something, we'll never know what happened in the other timeline.
Obviously I've never been to Montana, so I'm holding at 19 states visited out of 24.
THE PLOT: Artist and filmmaker David Lynch discusses his early life and the events that shaped his outlook on art and the creative process.
AFTER: Well, I didn't need this documentary to tell me that David Lynch had the condition known as Artist Brain, I already knew that from watching "Twin Peaks: The Return" and his last few movies. But now I think he caught it from Mel Brooks, who hired him to direct "The Elephant Man", and I didn't even know the condition was contagious. If not for Brooks, Lynch might have tried to get hired again on the surprise success of the midnight movie "Eraserhead", and perhaps failed, in which case he might have given up on filmmaking and returned to the process of making bizarre sculptures. That was the "road not taken" and maybe the world might have been a better place, who can say? I mean, then we would not have had "Blue Velvet" or "Twin Peaks" (the original show) but we also would not have had the confusing films "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive".
Look, this guy already owes me for making me watch 10 hours of "The Return" where absolutely nothing happened, plot-lines from the original series were continued but NOT resolved, and I ended up annoyed as heck. Now he owes me another 90 minutes for watching THIS doc and I don't know how I'm going to collect that debt, but I'll think of something. This is just 90 minutes of watching Lynch make art, paintings and sculptures, in this art studio in the Hollywood Hills, while he tells stories from his childhood, which, SPOILER ALERT, are all rambling tales that go nowhere. In other words, he's an old man.
Late in the film, there's something of an origin story, which leads us right through the making of "Eraserhead", so when you combine this with what we learned yesterday, this is kind of the "Rogue One" of David Lynch movies, it brings us right up to him getting hired to direct "The Elephant Man", when he had moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to study at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film Studies, which had on their campus a set of unused stables, and Lynch ended up filming "Eraserhead" there, also in a building called Greystone Mansion, which the AFI also happened to lease from the city of L.A. Technically it's a public park, which may have helped keep the budget down on "Eraserhead", the shooting location belonged to, you know, all of us.
But to get this story, there's a cost, and that cost is watching David Lynch paint and tell those stories from his early days. His fights with his father over his career, his move to Massachusetts to study at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (where his roommate was future J. Geils Band frontman and future Faye Dunaway husband Peter Wolf), going to Austria with a friend to try and train with a painter named Oskar Kokoschka, only to find out that he was quite busy and they really should have telephoned first.
Lynch returned to his family in Virginia, only to find that they had moved to California, perhaps hoping that he would not follow. So he decided to move to Philadelphia because it was much, much closer, and his friend Jack Fisk was enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, so fuck it, why not? Great art was being made there, but Lynch preferred the neighborhoods with the abandoned factories, the broken windows, railroad tracks that went nowhere and somehow busy late-night diners. (Hell, that sounds a lot like the town of Twin Peaks, doesn't it?). He fell into a relationship with another student, Peggy Reavey, who became pregnant, so for a time they lived as a family in a 12-room house in a terrible Philly neighborhood. He got a job in a printing shop, and made short films on the side that are, well, quite disturbing, even when the topic was just "The Alphabet". If David Cronenberg made shorts for Sesame Street, they might look a little bit like that. Live-action and animation mixed with body horror and grotesqueness, swell.
So naturally that got him a grant from the AFI, and with that money he made a short film called "The Grandmother", starring people he knew from work and school and filmed in his own house, which you may recall was in a very bad neighborhood called "Philadelphia", so it looked like a horror film. But it was about a neglected boy who grows his own grandmother from a seed to care for him. It was "arty" so it was a lock to get him into proper film school, that's why he moved out to L.A. with his first wife (soon to be his ex-wife) and he was set up to make "Eraserhead". That took him two years, not a single reviewer understood the film (I still don't) but it became popular on the midnight movie circuit, and it got him the job with Mel Brooks. OK, we're all caught up now.
Fast forward to 2020, after the "Twin Peaks" revival, and he was essentially retired, not by choice. Someone with Artist Brain will never retire, but since COVID had sidelined the entire industry, he didn't have to. Movies were just NOT being made, so Lynch went online with daily videos he called "Weather Reports", but were more about him making art collages at home, picking a random number from a set of 10 ping-pong balls, and talking about his dreams or what Beatles song he was thinking of that day. Well, you know, it's good for seniors to keep active. I consider this a form of retirement, if he was NOT making movies
But of course there's no OFF switch on the Artist Brain, and it turns out Lynch was making art, like paintings and sculptures again, and this documentary sees fit to show us every single one of them, to the point where it's actually painful. I would say, "Hey, maybe show us only the good ones..." but this probably means that there are no good ones, they're all equally terrible. So by all means, please show us every single one while I keep checking how much time is left in the film. The one thing he did movie-related in the last few years of his life was to make a cameo in Steven Spielberg's movie "The Fabelmans" in 2022, playing Hollywood director John Ford. I watched that back in February, finally worked it in, however that left this doc kind of stranded until I found two more docs with Lynch in them. So, umm, mission accomplished, can I please close the book on David Lynch now?
One last thing, Lynch was diagnosed with emphysema in 2020, which was one more reason to stay home during the pandemic and not go anywhere, so it turns out smoking cigarettes from the age of 8 to 72 is NOT a good idea. (And STILL he said he would not retire, because Artist Brain.). However, in January 2025, those California wildfires struck, and he had to be evacuated from his home, still the smoke caused a decline in his health, and he passed away at his daughter's home. So that bad habit of yours WILL kill you, it just might take a little time.
Directed by Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm (editor on "The Apprentice"), Jon Nguyen.
Also starring Lula Lynch, with archive footage of Jack Fisk, Bushnell Keeler, Donald Lynch, Edwina Lynch, Peggy Reavey.
RATING: 3 out of 10 numbered ping-pong balls (what else?)
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