‘A Screaming Event’: Exploring David Lynch’s love of The Beatles
“It’s a real big honour to interview, to t-talk to you, Paul,” David Lynch stutters and fumbles like a regular fanboy as he sits down with Paul McCartney. As he asks the Beatle about meditation, the director can’t keep the joy off his face. With every word spoken, his eyes genuinely shine with a mix of complete adoration and real shock that he’s, in fact, here and talking to this man right now.
In the same way that any of us would be if we were granted access to one of pop music’s most influential creators, Lynch’s status makes no difference to his reaction. Just like the rest of us, the director is a huge Beatles fan.
“People don’t know how important the Beatles were to our lives,” he once said, recounting the way the Fab Four soundtracked his childhood as he was born in 1946, a prime time to catch the band’s rise as it happened. “People who lived through it know, but young people don’t know,” he adds, and he’s right. Despite a whole series of generations willing to revel in the nostalgia for the early 1960s and the chance to have seen and been a part of Beatlemania, comparatively few can attest to having experienced it wholeheartedly.
For Lynch and all the other fans who got that experience, it made their love for the group even stronger as they were wowed month on month, year on year with each new step. “I lived through it, though, so meeting Paul and Ringo was beyond the beyond,” he continued in the 2014 interview, still in shock that it ever happened.
For Lynch, a person who has had an incredible career working with some of the biggest and best talents around and even had the experience of fans behaving to meeting him the way he was towards McCartney, nothing comes close to the band. They’re so integral to his youth that he remembers vividly his earlier memories of them as he got to see the band live.
“On their first trip to America in 1964, they flew into New York City, then they went down to Washington, D.C., and put on their first American concert, and I was there,” he said proudly as if he recalls the story of an award he won or a major movie he made. But no, this is a story of a concert, or as he considers it, less of a gig than a supernatural event.
“You could hardly hear them,” he remembered, setting the scene. “They were in a boxing ring, and it was wall-to-wall screams as long as they were there. When they left the stage they went up this steep stairway lined with police, but I saw a guy leap over the police and come back up with a chunk of hair from one of the Beatles. It’s a frenzy they created.”
But this is where the connection starts to feel less about being fans of the music and more about the way that the Beatles utterly shaped Lynch. There is something about that description of the show, one that he called not a concert but “a screaming event” that feels oddly Lynchian. The image of the four Liverpudlian boys, huddled together in a relatively small boxing ring, surrounded by tiny faces screaming and crying at them, feels like exactly the kind of half-normal, half-deeply unsettling scene the director would write. You can imagine exactly how he’d shoot it, flipping between close-up scenes of the singer’s lips, contrasting with the wide open, tonsil flashing, screaming mouths of their fans.
He would romanticise the musicians as he does with every musical moment in his projects. Even in the weird contexts he places them in, like the performance in the radiator in Eraserhead or the pause amidst the horror as Ben performs ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet. As Lynch routinely interacts with big, mainstream pop and rock songs in his work, he turns his strangest characters into star figures. Maybe in doing so, he’s considering the strangeness of star power? And maybe that thought all stems back from seeing that at its most extreme as he found himself in the centre of a Beatlesmania meltdown.
As Frank gets on his knees in a drugged hazy and begs frantically, “Baby wants Blue Velvet,” switching between lust, frustration and desperation, his states seem to mimic the videos of the crazy Beatles fans. Watching clips from those earliest concerts the band did, the scenes are almost dystopian, existing in the same odd yet suburban land that Lynch dominates. As these regular girls crumble into screaming, crying, and passing out messes, it’s like a documentary showing the surprising extremes desire can drive you to. It’s a documentary that it’s easy to imagine Lynch directing.
It’s a worthy reminder that while Lynch is an outlier in the world of cinema and his connection with the ubiquity of The Beratles seems at odds, that notion belies just how influential the group were. Without them, the world would have been short a few hundred of the 20th century’s artistic innovators. David Lynch is most certainly among them.
