In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964.
I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering… crying… screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.
Lynch continued:
Music is one of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire, water, and air. It’s like a thing. It does so much.
“David had the idea to interview not just people who like the Beatles, because we’d be still making this movie forever. But it was people who’s who had some kind of pivotal, profound reaction or moment when the Beatles first came to the U.S., or when they first heard or saw the Beatles,” Bodde explained. “We had done extensive research on people who had that level of connection and we learned that David Lynch was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with his family. His father was in the Department of Forestry and they moved around a lot, [but at that time] they lived in Alexandria. He had met JFK. Had been at the inauguration of JFK as an Eagle Scout. And then had gotten a ticket to the to the Beatles concert, the first US concert at the Washington Coliseum. We were kind of amazed that he had multiple connections to the story that was being told.”
The central point of Dr. Brooke Harrington’s essay about the destabilization of “basic systems we count on to make our society function” over the past month is bang on:
This promises to be a tough way for Americans to learn a critical fact too often overlooked: that one of our country’s greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we’ll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.
In this video, David Lynch talks about the effect of depression on creativity:
It stands to reason: the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create. It occupies the whole brain, poisons the artist, poisons the environment; little room for creativity.
But his assertion can be easily extended to how instability in one’s life leads to an inability to live fully. Stability and lack of corruption allows people to live their lives, make art, engage in commerce with each other, build families, and strive to be their best, authentic selves. The US has never been completely stable or uncorrupt, but we’re at real risk of losing something incredibly valuable here…and it’ll be difficult to get it back when it’s too far gone.
David Lynch is not having any of that “you need to struggle or be tortured in order to be creative” stuff. In this video compilation, the director talks about how poor mental health inhibits art & creativity.
It stands to reason: the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create. It occupies the whole brain, poisons the artist, poisons the environment; little room for creativity.
Open Culture has more on how Lynch uses transcendental meditation to improve his mental health…and a great anecdote about the one time Lynch tried therapy:
In one Charlie Rose interview, a clip from which appears in the video, he even tells of the time he went to therapy. The beginning of this story makes it in, but not the end: Lynch asked his new therapist “straight out, right up front, ‘Could this process that we’re going to go through affect creativity?’ And he said, ‘David, I have to be honest with you, it could” — whereupon Lynch shook the man’s hand and walked right back out the door.
The title of this video is “David Lynch being a madman for a relentless 8 minutes and 30 seconds” is perfect and requires no further information or contextualization. (thx, david (no relation))
Did you know that George Lucas approached David Lynch about directing Return of the Jedi? After a visit to Lucas’ studio described here by Lynch, Lynch turned Lucas down pretty quickly. But what might have been, huh? Well, this fan-made trailer gives us a taste of a Lynch-helmed Star Wars movie. (via one perfect shot)
From Nelson Carvajal, an examination of the visual influences of Beyonce’s Lemonade visual album, from Pipilotti Rist to Terrence Malick to David Lynch.
The biggest influence present in Lemonade, is that of the great Terrence Malick. Imagery from his films To The Wonder and The Tree of Life (in particular a standout sequence involving a bedroom underwater) definitely inspired a lot of the overall tone of introspection and spiritual reflection that Beyoncé is striving for here. One of Lemonade’s directors, Kahlil Joseph, shot B-roll on Malick’s To The Wonder, so the impressionistic style of filmmaking has obviously carried over.
Upon watching Inland Empire, I was so immediately immersed, my first thought was that David Lynch should only ever shoot video. Apparently, he feels the same.
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