The Women of David Lynch: A Collection of Essays

By Scott Ryan, David Bushman, Mädchen Amick and 7 more

David Lynch has been accused for decades of sexism and even misogyny in his work, due largely to frequent depictions of violence against women. Yet others see in Lynch's work the deification of the female, and actresses like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts jump at every opportunity to work with him. "He is the master of the juxtaposition of the creepy and the sweet, the sexual and the chaste," wrote W's Lynn Hirschberg. "And at the heart of this tense, intriguing friction, you will always find Lynch's women." The Women of Lynch is a deep, provocative dive into this paradox, featuring ten essays, thought pieces and impressionistic interpretations of Lynch's depiction of women on screen, by an eclectic array of accomplished female critics, scholars, performers, and writers, each tackling this vexing conundrum in her own unique way. The book also contains an interview with actress MÄdchen Amick (Shelly Johnson in Twin Peaks) where she gives first hand knowledge on what it is like to be a woman of Lynch. Lisa Hession interviews the original woman of Lynch, Charlotte Stewart (Eraserhead, Twin Peaks) about being the actress with longest active span of working with David Lynch.

This is the first essay book about the work of David Lynch by all female writers. Readers will enjoy The Women of Lynch: A Collection of Essays.

This book contains essays by:

x. An Introduction by Philippa Snow

1. The Uncanny Electricity of David Lynch's Women by Leigh Kellmann Kolb

2. Women's Films: Melodrama and Women's Trauma in the Films of David Lynch by Lindsay Hallam

3. A Colorless Sky: On the Whiteness of Twin Peaks by Melanie McFarland

4. Warding off the Darkness with Coffee and Pie by Mallory O'Meara

5. "This is where we talk, Shelly." An Interview with MÄdchen Amick by Lindsey Bowden

6. Welcome to the Bipolar Silencio Club! by Hannah Klein

7. The Triple Goddess by Lauren Fox

8. Isabella Rossellini: The Shocking "Real" in Blue Velvet by Kathleen Fleming

9. Tea And Sympathy: Mrs. Kendal and The Elephant Man by Rebecca Paller

10. Jade: Ornamental Gem or Protective Talisman? A Character Study by Marisa C. Hayes

11. "Mary X Marks The Spot." An Interview with Charlotte Stewart by Lisa Hession

12. Impressions of Lynch: Journaling a Requiem by Mya McBriar

Edited by David Bushman

Concept by Scott Ryan

Front Cover by Blake Morrow

Art by Wayne Barnes & Hannah Fortune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fayetteville Mafia Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781949024036

Scott Ryan

SCOTT RYAN has been teaching Earth Science at Ardsley Middle School in Ardsley, New York, for almost 20 years. His teaching career spans almost 30 years and includes teaching Earth Science, Science 8, Biology, and Physics. He resides in Ossining, New York.

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Notes

Table of Contents

Credits

A Note

The Major Film Works of David Lynch

An Introduction  by Philippa Snow

1. The Uncanny Electricity of Women in David Lynch’s Worlds  by Leigh Kellmann Kolb

2. Women’s Films: Melodrama and Women’s Trauma in the Films of David Lynch  by Lindsay Hallam

3. A Colorless Sky: On the Whiteness of Twin Peaks by Melanie McFarland

4. Warding Off the Darkness With Coffee and Pie by Mallory O’Meara

5. "This is where we talk, Shelly." An Interview with Mädchen Amick By Lindsey Bowden

6. Welcome to the Bipolar Silencio Club!  by Hannah Klein

7. The Triple Goddess by Lauren Fox

8. Isabella Rossellini: The Shocking Real in Blue Velvet by Kathleen Fleming

9. Tea and Sympathy: Mrs. Kendal and The Elephant Man by Rebecca Paller

10. Jade: Ornamental Gem or Protective Talisman? A Character Study by Marisa C. Hayes

11. Mary X Marks The Spot. An Interview with Charlotte Stewart by Lisa Hession

12. Impressions of Lynch: Journaling a Requiem by Mya McBriar

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Buy The Women of David Lynch in Hard copy form.

Fayetteville Mafia Press

2019

For all our daughters.

The Women of David Lynch

© 2019 FMP

All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without the authors’ permission is strictly forbidden. This book is not affiliated with any movie studio or Lynch/Frost Productions. All photos and/or copyrighted material appearing in this book remain the work of its owners.

Special thanks to:

Janet & Jason Jarnagin

Book designed by Mark Karis

Front cover picture: Blake Morrow

Inside original art: Wayne Barnes

except chapter 2 by Hannah Fortune & chapter 8 by Lauren Fox

Edited by David Bushman

Concept & art design by Scott Ryan

Published in the USA by Fayetteville Mafia Press

in association with Scott Ryan Productions

Columbus, Ohio

Contact Information

Email: [e-mail]

Website: fayettevillemafiapress.com

ISBN: 978-1-949024-02-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-949024-03-6

All pictures are for editorial use only. The Women of David Lynch is a scholarly work of review and commentary only and no attempt is made, or should be inferred, to infringe upon the copyrights or trademarks of any corporation. All photos from Twin Peaks: The Return are courtesy of Showtime. All photos from films are publicity shots from the studio that released the film.

A NOTE

"In Blue Velvet, Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character."

Roger Ebert, September 19, 1986

You work in the system. You see possibilities and you’re glistening. Eyes show the hell you’re gonna give ‘em, when they back off the mic for once and give it to a woman.

Emily Saliers, Pendulum Swinger, 2006

Ever since 1977, when Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) in Eraserhead pulled her suitcase out from under Henry’s (Jack Nance) bed and screamed, I’ll do what I want to do, males with typewriters have been mansplaining David Lynch’s work and his female characters—sometimes making good points and sometimes being Roger Ebert. In almost every Lynch film, female characters have been in front of the red curtains and have stood in the bright spotlight—demanding and deserving that attention must be paid. They have been complex and infuriating, strange and bewildering, difficult to pin down, and impossible to dismiss. In other words, they were created just like male characters.

American audiences and critics have always had trouble handling a female (character or real-life public figure) who couldn’t be easily labeled. Give them Madonna or give them Hillary Clinton. Give them Gloria Steinem or give them Doris Day. Extremes they can handle. But throw a Nikki Grace or Laura Palmer at them and expect some boos at the multiplex or in print media.

Despite all of the complex female characters Lynch has filmed, there has not been a book written exclusively by multiple women expressing to the world what these characters represent from their perspective. Solo authors like Kristine McKenna and Martha P. Nochimson have written books about Lynch and with Lynch. This book was born with the idea of letting authors womansplain¹ what they see as misogyny and what they don’t. Shouldn’t they be the ones who define that? Female bloggers, podcasters, and academics (some included in this book) have always been vocal in their critiques of Lynch’s films and their theories about what they mean.

When I started The Blue Rose, a quarterly magazine that covers Lynch’s work, I proposed an issue called The Women of Lynch. Ten females wrote about forty Lynch female characters. The results were inspiring. Their words, views, and ideas were enlightening. By design those essays were short and specific. It made me want to read more, and with a wider scope.

Editor David Bushman and I gave the thirteen female authors in this book no guidelines, no rules, no suggestions other than that their contributions should be about the work of David Lynch. The submissions were captivating and original. We think this book will spark debate; it will take readers down new paths and, like most Lynch films, provoke more questions. The writers in this book were eager to analyze, deconstruct, and debate Lynch’s work. That is exactly why Lynch creates art.

We eagerly present to you a diverse group of women writers, performers, academics, sitcom writers, Lynch fans, and short-story writers. Each brings a unique perspective. Angelo Badalamenti demands in Mulholland Dr., This is the girl. I will paraphrase and say, These are the women.

Scott Ryan

Editor of The Blue Rose

The Major Film Works of David Lynch

Eraserhead (1977)

The Elephant Man (1980)

Dune (1984)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Twin Peaks (1990)*

Wild At Heart (1990)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

Hotel Room (1993)*

Lost Highway (1997)

The Straight Story (1999)

Mulholland Dr (2001)

Inland Empire (2006)

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)*

*Premiered on television

Some women, David Lynch mused in his recent memoir, Room to Dream, are real mysterious. Typically, I loathe the attribution of mysteriousness to women, and most often only women, as a quality, due to the fact that men’s mysteriousness has been depleted by the constant airing of their thoughts, their fascinations, their particular complaints. Women are mysterious by virtue of having been, for a long time, if not especially silent, then not listened to. To hear Lynch call my kind mysterious, however, does not bother me at all—perhaps because of all men, and of all heterosexual men specifically, Lynch is the most unknowable. The qualities that he ascribes to women in his movies (duality, secretiveness, a conflicting interior and sometimes exterior play between the forces of light, and the forces of extreme, uncanny darkness) are his qualities. When Lynch says, as he did in Lynch on Lynch, that certain aspects of [straight] sex are troubling, it is a familiar sentiment to women, but one rarely mentioned by other men or male filmmakers prior to the too-little, too-late Hollywood reckoning of #MeToo. When Lynch does not wish to explain his ideas because, as he has exclaimed on more than one occasion, "the film is the talking," it follows that Lynch’s women—the heart of his movies—are the talking, too.

Or, to put it differently: the women are the ideas. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it’s like falling in love with a girl, he also writes in Room to Dream. It could be a girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your parents, but you don’t care what anybody else thinks. You’re in love and it’s beautiful and you stay true to those things. Since Blue Velvet, Lynch has stayed true to a particular type of woman in his work, and in his L.A. trilogy—Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire—it’s arguable that he perfects her. If she is not technically an actress, she looks and behaves like one, and if she is not actually two women, she appears to be. Perhaps the best example of his identification with his female characters, and in my view his best film, is the insane and claustrophobic Inland Empire, which is a film about an actress: Nikki, who is played by Laura Dern and married to a Polish mobster, undergoes a kind of a mental fracture, unspooling into not two but at least three blonde, frightened women with distinct names, discrete lives. She is visited one morning in her L.A. mansion by a wild-eyed Eastern European neighbor, played by Grace Zabriskie, who is possibly a gypsy or a witch. The neighbor tells her—in the manner of a character designed by David Lynch, which is to say circuitously, and without the normal sentence-logic of a human—that Nikki is about to get the comeback part she has auditioned for. The script, she says, contains a brutal fucking murder! Nikki can’t recall one. One suspects that Nikki, whose reactions are as large and open as a fully opened bloom, perhaps a blue rose, may not be especially skilled at improv.

The shade of Twin Peaks’ blue rose returns here, first as rhapsody and then as fugue. Lynch has conjured what appears to be a Sirkian melodrama, called On High in Blue Tomorrows, for our heroine to star in. Nikki’s character is called Sue Blue, and is involved in an affair with a man named Billy Side. On the set, she starts to screw the actor playing Billy. She begins to think that she is Sue, and he begins to think that he is Billy, although neither ever seems quite certain who is speaking through them when they talk, or whose script they’re even following. They are never sure if anyone is watching. A gloomy daydream was once called, in old-school parlance, a brown study. Inland Empire, filmed on digital and bleeding out like a bright stab wound from a phantom screwdriver around each light source, pixelated and devoid of true black, might be Lynch’s brownest film. I don’t know how much might be a dream, the most Cimmerian study. I don’t know if there’s a happy ending. I do think that Inland Empire is a film about the act of making films—that the action, looped and overlaid and frantic with the logic of a nightmare, captures something of the feeling of creating, of destroying something in oneself for larger gain—and that the last ten minutes might describe, if not exactly joy, then something like catharsis.

Ending pain can feel as good as pleasure, which is why when Nikki-Sue is stabbed on Sunset Boulevard, now morphed into a hooker with a bruised face, two-and-something hours into Inland Empire’s three-hour running time, it is not necessarily a tragedy. The death is, it turns out, a metafiction. I can’t tell if I should feel relieved. The parallels between the actress and the prostitute, the actress and the wife who is abused, the actress and the woman who is forced to fend off rapists, robbed of her identity, coerced into a life she does not recognize, neglected on the Boulevard, projectile-vomiting her blood, her insides, literally, while passersby discuss the schedule for the bus, are naked to the point of being pornographic. Lynch shows us what men, America, and Hollywood do to women’s bodies and psyches, writes Leigh Kellmann Kolb, in her essay in these pages about Lynch and electricity. He does not condone or encourage; he shows. Here, he appears to show us not only what men, America, and Hollywood might do to women; he alludes to what America and Hollywood have done to him.

Prior to making Inland Empire, whose lawlessness and low budget permitted him to dream, Lynch had spent months battling ABC over a new, Hollywood-centric pilot, and his vomiting up of his (artistic) insides had been met with short, uninterested shrift from the TV execs. Before this, he received near-uniformly bad reviews for Fire Walk With Me, which critics did not, maybe would not, get. It’s easy to imagine him as Nikki-Sue, expending himself to the point of feeling near dead, only to be overlooked by people interested in the more prosaic realities of L.A. (One would never dare to ask him whether there really is a bus to Pomona from the Boulevard.) When Nikki rises from her metadeath, she is dazed, oblivious to the chatter. What for her was an experience so terrifying and shamanic that she feels as if she is a different person is, for the attendant, unappreciative film crew, just a reason to yell cut. Of course Lynch would choose Laura Dern—a woman, yes, and also one of his oldest and dearest friends—to act out his filmmaker’s trauma, his feelings of alienation and frustration, on-screen.

A further illustration of Lynch’s ability to channel the feminine just as smartly as the masculine is his thematic pairing of Lost Highway with the project he encountered all that deadening, soul-killing opposition at ABC on, Mulholland Dr., each movie serving as the other’s gender-flipped reverse. Where the industrial, chill aria of Lost Highway—a film that was both soundtracked by and resembled heavy metal, in the sense of factory steel, hard chrome—unfolded from the viewpoint of a sexually inadequate man who may or may not have killed his wife, Mulholland Dr.’s murderous-glamorous Hollywood fantasia belonged to a romantically rejected woman, another failed actress, who may or may not have killed her girlfriend. To describe the two films this reductively is to divest them of the aspect that is truest to the fact of heterosexual sex, or heterosexual romance, or the interplay between women and men in general, which is to say their elusiveness, their blurring of the real and the imagined. Never mind, since each deserves a thesis of