David Lynch
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Mulholland Drive Magician Richard Green on Catherine Coulson, The Log Lady
Catherine Coulson gathered her closest family and friends to help her survive her terminal illness just long enough to play the Log Lady on Twin Peaks: The Return, a character she had created decades ago with her lifelong friend, David Lynch. Why? Why must the show go on? What drives us as artists to overcome the obstacles, both real and within our heads, to finish the work? Lynch did seven years of newspaper routes delivering the Wall Street Journal till dawn to buy film to shoot Eraserhead, while Catherine took waitress jobs to feed him and everyone else on the crew. Why? I […]
by Richard Green on May 31, 2018 -
Watch: “David Lynch: The Treachery of Language”
“In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature.” Building off that observation, among others, from Dennis Lim’s fine work on David Lynch, video essayist Grace Lee examines the director’s ambivalent/averse relationship to language.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 2, 2018 -
Is Twin Peaks Season Three a Movie or a TV Show? Well…
I’m always up for an endless debate that paralyzes my Twitter feed into repetitive stasis for 12+ hours at a time, and accordingly braced for one last night upon seeing that Twin Peaks: The Return had landed at number two on Sight & Sound‘s annual year-end poll. (Minutes after I published this, it popped up at number one on Cahiers du Cinema‘s list as well.) Pedantic disputes about Category Fraud — i.e., if a performance is lead or supporting for awards purposes — have never been my favorite, and I can’t imagine a topic to get less exercised about than whether a TV […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 5, 2017 -
DOC NYC 2017: Peter Braatz on Blue Velvet Revisited
The past year has proven to be a uniquely rewarding time for David Lynch obsessives, with the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks being the obvious highlight, but also marked by recent Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD special editions of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the new documentary, David Lynch: the Art Life, focused on Lynch’s painting roots. However, one of the most fascinating Lynch-related features in recent memory has yet to receive the widespread U.S. exposure it richly deserves, and it reflects back to a more traditionally structured Lynch favorite (indeed, still the film that some cite as his key work) that those […]
by Travis Crawford on Nov 14, 2017 -
Watch: How David Lynch’s Unmade One Saliva Bubble Shaped Twin Peaks
From the LowRes Wünderbred account comes this video essay, the first in a series that will explore how the unmade comedy One Saliva Bubble — co-written by David Lynch and Mark Frost as a Steve Martin-Martin Short vehicle (!) — shaped Twin Peaks. (The screenplay, at least a version of it, can be found here.)
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 7, 2017 -
“…Much More Truthful and Much More Alienated than Anything I Would Produce Myself”: Jonathan Lethem on Fred Barney Taylor’s Lethem
Last week I was very much looking forward to talking with friend Jonathan Lethem about the new film Lethem, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, which screens at the Metrograph on Sunday, September 17, with the author in attendance. Before that happened though, we both received the news that Michael Friedman had died. A beloved friend and collaborator, Friedman co-founded The Civilians, a theater company where I’m an associate artist. He also wrote the score and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s 2003 novel. Fortress of Solitude tells the story of Lethem’s childhood on Dean Street in […]
by Alix Lambert on Sep 15, 2017 -
David Lynch and the Nightmarish Meanings of his Hollywood Star Casting
In episode four of Twin Peaks: The Return, an older gentleman has an obscure conversation with Gordon Cole (David Lynch) as he escorts him to the office of FBI Chief of Staff, Denise Bryson (David Duchovny). Their scene together is short but just by his brief appearance Richard Chamberlain evokes a mass of associations in the viewers who recognizes him, maybe as Cannon Films’ Allen Quartermain, maybe as the ambitious priest with impure thoughts of Rachel Ward in The Thornbirds, or maybe as Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia. An icon of classic television thanks to his performance in the prime-time […]
by Gillian Wallace Horvat on Aug 31, 2017 -
Twin Peaks: The Return: Last Looks Before the End
I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2017 -
Watch: David Lynch’s Bonkers MacDowell Colony Medal Acceptance Speech
David Lynch is an alumni of MacDowell, the storied New Hampshire artists colony. He was awarded this weekend their MacDowell Medal in a ceremony hosted by author and MacDowell Colony chairman Michael Chabon but, due to a prior engagement, was unable to attend. He did send, however, a personalized, appropriately Lynchian video thank-you. Watch it above.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 14, 2017 -
Kafka, Renoir and the 99 Percent: Ten Thoughts about Twin Peaks: The Return
“…there would remain the terrified feeling of the return.” — Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond. 1. Whatever else you say about Twin Peaks: The Return, it seems that to talk about it, if you are in good faith, you must begin by talking about the difficulty of talking about it. 2. Twin Peaks: The Return issues some fairly unique challenges to summary or description. It is difficult to describe what is happening in the story, if there truly is a story, if one of its many threads has some kind of priority over the rest. The original series had, […]
by Larry Gross on Aug 7, 2017
