When director/musician/mixed media artist/celebrity embodiment of the uncanny, David Lynch died earlier this year, it was inevitable that career retrospectives would hit the market. Into that space enters Tom Huddleston’s David Lynch: His Work, His World, a hardcover, picture-filled overview of his career from the Frances Lincoln arm of the UK’s The Quarto Group.
Slipcased in a box featuring an extreme close-up of frequent Lynch collaborator (and one-time girlfriend) Isabella Rossellini in 1986’s Blue Velvet on the front, the book inside is wrapped in a picture of the iconic floor of Twin Peaks‘ The Black Lodge and fronted by a white unicorn standing in the shadows and backed by Lynch’s own signature in neon green. It’s nothing short of a statement piece. And for devoted fans of Lynch’s work, it’s well worth having. However, for newcomers looking for a deep understanding of the artist’s work and its impact, His Work, His World may leave them grasping for more.
While Huddleston explores Lynch’s entire life and oeuvre from his uneventful Montana upbringing to his early demise in Los Angeles, he roughly structures that telling chronologically, through Lynch’s film and TV work. While these works will be the easiest entry point for most readers, Huddleston’s expertise and research are most evident when he explores lesser known subjects. An early example is his discussion of Bushnell Keeler, the artist father of one of Lynch’s childhood friends who introduces him to “the art life”, an existence devoted to the pursuit of creating and conceiving art essentially without distraction. This concept becomes a motivating factor in Lynch’s life and Huddleston refers to it throughout.
However, while Huddleston includes a picture of Keeler himself, he doesn’t include any of Keeler’s art. Whether it influenced Lynch’s own work or not is really incidental. Either way, by mentioning this little known yet essential person in Lynch’s life, the reader wants to know more about him, but His Work, His World leaves them wanting. In fact, despite the fact that hardly two pages pass without a picture or even, more indulgently, a two-page spread of screenshots from Lynch’s work, the images included can often feel like non sequiturs. While a picture of Marilyn Monroe during a section discussing the Monroe biopic, Venus Descending, that never got past a first draft feels like padding, something like the section where Huddleston discusses Lynch’s nearly decade-long comic strip in the L.A. Reader, The Angriest Dog in the World without giving us a single panel as an example feels egregious. Instead, all we get is a full-page printing of Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette, which is not even referenced as a direct influence on Lynch’s work.
That said, giving Huddleston and Quarto the benefit of the doubt, we can assume that omissions like this likely results from difficulties obtaining the rights to reprint more obscure pieces and Huddleston often makes up for these limitations in the moments when he showcases his access to and expertise in Lynch’s work. While moments where Huddleston quotes his own interviews with Lynch are certainly convincing (for instance, one of Lynch’s many thoughts on transcendental meditation on page 39), the moment when he mentions that Lynch talked about the spiritual practice in every interview from 2003 on suggests the staggering breadth of his research. Indeed, some of his best writing in His World, His Work‘s comes when Huddleston details more obscure chapters in Lynch’s career, like his descriptions of the internet shorts that made up much of Lynch’s late career work in the chapter on INLAND EMPIRE or the aborted video game that inspired the woodsmen who are among Twin Peaks: The Return‘s most indelible and disturbing imagery.
Indeed, perhaps the moment where Huddleston’s authority on the more obscure aspects of Lynch’s career is clearest is in his discussion on the fan conventions that sprung up in the years after Twin Peaks first aired. Still, while his descriptions of Lynch-inspired performances by UK-based cabaret artists, The Double R Club are fascinating, his familiarity with the fan culture surrounding Lynch’s work also reveals how embedded he likely was in it and the more Huddleston’s fan side slips out in his writing, the less effective his analysis can be. Though Huddleston openly praises the more challenging works in Lynch’s oeuvre, he often seems loath to humor criticism from other sources. While firing back at director Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill after quoting an admittedly absurd quote from the filmmaker dismissing Fire Walk with Me as self-indulgent feels merely misguided, later, when, in defiance of Lynch’s own words, Huddleston tries to ascribe deep political meaning to Twin Peaks: The Return borders on hagiography.
However, while Huddleston can occasionally be too generous toward his subject in David Lynch: His Work, His World, by the end of the book, it’s certainly clear to both acolytes and newbies alike that Lynch was a great and influential artist. Given the breadth of Lynch’s work, it would be simply impossible to cover all of it in a single, easily digestible book. Huddleston, with his expansive research and the book’s stylish layout, has delivered something pretty close to that ideal. No doubt other Lynch scholars will try to craft something more analytical, more detailed, but Huddleston has delivered a grand first attempt.
David Lynch: His Work, His World is now available at booksellers everywhere.
