ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Room to Dream. Kristine McKenna
Читать онлайн.Название Room to Dream
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118404
Автор произведения Kristine McKenna
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
“We were in Troop 99 together,” said Mark Smith. “We had all these activities—swimming, knot tying—and one of them was a one-night survival camp where some guy taught us what you could eat in the forest to survive, how to catch a squirrel and cook it, and so forth. We had a few sessions learning this stuff, then we went into the mountains to survive. Before we left we bought all the candy we could, and after the first hour we’d eaten it all. So we get to this lake and we’re told to catch a fish—which none of us could do—and by nightfall we thought we were going to die of starvation. Then we noticed a plane circling overhead, and out came a box on a parachute. It was really dramatic. The box was full of things like powdered eggs and we all survived.”
Lynch was one of those children with a natural ability to draw, and his artistic talent became evident at an early age. His mother refused to give him coloring books—she felt they constricted the imagination—and his father brought loads of graph paper home from work; Lynch had all the materials he needed and was encouraged to go where his mind took him when he sat down to draw. “It was right after the war and there was a lot of army surplus stuff around, and I’d draw guns and knives,” Lynch has recalled. “I got into airplanes, bombers and fighter planes, Flying Tigers, and Browning automatic water-cooled submachine guns.”9
Martha Levacy remembered, “Most kids wore plain T-shirts then, and David started making customized shirts for all the neighborhood kids with Magic Markers, and everybody in the neighborhood bought one. I remember Mr. Smith next door buying one for a friend who was turning forty. David made a kind of ‘Life Begins at 40’ drawing of a man staring at a nice-looking woman.”
A gifted, charismatic child, Lynch was “definitely somebody people were attracted to,” said Smith. “He was popular and I can easily see him running a movie set—he always had lots of energy and lots of friends because he could make people laugh. I have a memory of sitting on the curb in fifth grade and reading stuff in Mad magazine out loud to each other and just howling, and when I saw the first episode of Twin Peaks I recognized that same sense of humor.” Lynch’s sister concurred that “a lot of the humor from that period in our lives is in David’s work.”
Lynch was president of his seventh-grade class and played trumpet in the school band. Like most able-bodied citizens of Boise, he skied and swam—he was good at both, said his sister—and he played first base in Little League baseball. He also liked movies. “If he went to a movie I hadn’t seen, he’d come home and tell me about it in detail,” said John Lynch. “I remember one he particularly loved called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that he went on and on about.” The first movie Lynch recalls seeing was Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, a downbeat drama directed by Henry King in 1952, which culminates with the lead character being gunned down in a barbershop. “I saw it at a drive-in with my parents, and I remember a scene where a guy is machine-gunned in a barber’s chair and another scene of a little girl playing with a button,” Lynch has recalled. “Suddenly her parents realize she’s gotten it caught in her throat, and I remember feeling a real sense of horror.”
In light of the work Lynch went on to produce, it’s not surprising to learn that his childhood memories are a mixture of darkness and light. Perhaps his father’s work dealing with diseased trees imbued him with a heightened awareness of what he has described as “the wild pain and decay” that lurk beneath the surface of things. Whatever the reason, Lynch was unusually sensitive to the entropy that instantly begins eating away at every new thing, and he found it unsettling. Family trips to visit his grandparents in New York made Lynch anxious, too, and he has recalled being highly disturbed by things he encountered there. “The things I’d be upset by were mild compared with the feelings they’d give me,” he’s said. “I think people feel fear even when they don’t understand the reason for it. Sometimes you walk into a room and you can sense that something’s wrong, and when I’d go to New York that feeling covered me like a blanket. Being out in nature there’s a different kind of fear, but there’s fear there, too. Some very bad things can happen in the country.”
A painting Lynch made in 1988, titled Boise, Idaho, speaks to these sorts of memories. Positioned in the lower right quadrant of a black field is an outline of the shape of the state, surrounded by tiny collaged letters that spell out the title of the painting. Four jagged vertical lines disrupt the black field, and a menacing tornado shape in the left of the image plane seems to be advancing on the state. It’s a disturbing image.
Apparently the more turbulent currents of Lynch’s mind weren’t evident to his Boise playmates. Smith said, “When that black car is winding up the hill in Mulholland Drive you just know something creepy is going to happen, and that’s not the person David was as a kid. The darkness in his work surprises me and I don’t know where it came from.”
In 1960, when Lynch was fourteen years old, his father was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia, and the family moved again. Smith recalled that “when David’s family moved it was like somebody unscrewed the bulb in the streetlight. David’s family had a 1950 Pontiac and the Pontiac symbol was the head of an Indian, so there was an ornament of an Indian head on the hood of the car. The nose on their Indian was broken, so we called the car Chief Broken Nose, and they sold the car to my mom and dad before they moved.” Gordon Templeton remembers the day the Lynches moved, too. “They left on the train and a bunch of us rode our bikes to the station to see them off. It was a sad day.”
Though Lynch flourished as a high school student in Alexandria, the years he spent in Boise have always held a special place in his heart. “When I picture Boise in my mind, I see euphoric 1950s chrome optimism,” he’s said. When the Lynch family left Boise, a few other neighbors moved, too, and John Lynch recalled David saying, “That’s when the music stopped.”
Lynch had begun edging out of childhood prior to leaving Boise. He’s recalled the dismay he felt as a young boy when he learned he’d missed Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he’d become seriously interested in girls by the time the family moved. “David started going steady with a really cute girl,” said Smith. “They were so in love.” Lynch’s sister recalled that “David always had a girlfriend, starting when he was pretty young. When he was in junior high I remember him telling me he kissed every single girl on a hayride his seventh-grade class went on.”
Lynch returned to Boise the summer after he completed ninth grade in Virginia and spent several weeks staying with different friends. “When he came back he was different,” Smith remembered. “He’d matured and was dressing differently—he came back with a unique style and had black pants and a black shirt, which was unusual in our group. He was really self-confident, and when he told stories about experiences in Washington, D.C., we were impressed. He had a sophistication that made me think, My friend has gone somewhere beyond me.
“After high school David stopped coming back to Boise and we lost touch,” Smith continued. “My youngest daughter is a photographer who lives in L.A., and one day in 2010 she was assisting a photographer who told her, ‘We’re shooting David Lynch today.’ When they took a break during the shoot she approached him and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, I think you might know my dad, Mark Smith, from Boise.’ David said, ‘You’re shitting me,’ and the next time I visited my daughter I got together with David at his house. I hadn’t seen him since high school and he gave me a big hug, and when he introduced me to people at his office, he said, ‘I want you to meet Mark, my brother.’ David’s very loyal, and he stays in touch with my daughter—as her dad, I’m glad David’s there. I wish he still lived next door to me.”
The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes—everybody smoked in the 1950s; classic rock ’n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle