How a projectionist became David Lynch’s harshest critic: “It just triggered something”
There’s always going to be someone who thinks your art is shit. That person is probably yourself – we’re our own worst critics at the end of the day. Yet, in David Lynch’s case, it wasn’t himself; it was a projectionist.
It’s obvious that Lynch always had faith in his own creativity, consistently making a string of daring and utterly singular projects that couldn’t have been conjured up by anyone else but himself. A certain projectionist didn’t seem to have the same faith in Lynch, though, unaware that he would soon become one of the most important filmmakers of his generation.
Lynch’s oeuvre is marked by an interest in the intersection between reality and fantasy, where dreams can sometimes be a saving grace, and other times they can be futile. The horrors that lurk beneath the everyday and mundane are exposed in his work, as demonstrated by the severed ear found at the beginning of Blue Velvet, sharply contrasting with the beautiful red roses and white picket fence. Twin Peaks epitomises this idea, too, with the cosy atmosphere of the town, where a waterfall flows and it feels like perpetual autumn, covering up a deeply entwined web of abuse, deception, and manipulation.
Before he became the renowned filmmaker responsible for bringing surrealist cinema into the mainstream, Lynch made a series of short films that sowed the seeds of his recognisable style. First was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), a rather self-explanatory animation that demonstrated Lynch’s tastes in off-putting imagery, which he then followed with a few others, like the absurd mixed-media project The Alphabet. The director made some pretty harrowing early shorts, using nightmarish imagery that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would have certainly been rather shocking.
The projectionist who refused to screen David Lynch’s early films
It’s no surprise, then, that these early short films left a certain projectionist somewhat disturbed, leading him to refuse to screen Eraserhead, Lynch’s feature-length debut. Talking to Stephen Saban and Sarah Longacre in 1977, Lynch revealed, “There’s a guy, a projectionist, who will not see this film, and he couldn’t stand to see the film I made before this, The Grandmother.”
The Grandmother, released in 1970, is another example of Lynch mixing various media (he was an avid painter as well as filmmaker) to create a fascinating collage of ideas. In this short film, a boy grows up with a grandmother to look after him while suffering a difficult home life, a plot that certainly paved the way for his future explorations of abuse in the home, which is seen in Twin Peaks.
To Lynch, this projectionist clearly wasn’t able to confront the ideas explored in the film because they cut too deep: “It would do something to him inside that he could not stand. It wasn’t the film at all; it just triggered something. Everybody has a subconscious, and they put a lid on it. There’s things in there. And then along comes something, and something bobs up. I don’t know if that’s good.”
It seems that the main ethos of Lynch’s work was to open that lid and let the subconscious roam free, no matter how terrifying or bizarre the ideas that come out of it might be. Yet, not everyone is comfortable with confronting their psyche on such an intense and frightening level, like this poor projectionist who seemed to be a little traumatised by Lynch’s cinematic world.
