The only movie David Lynch made for Disney: “I had the feeling it wasn’t my thing”
David Lynch honed such a specific style during his filmmaking career that the term ‘Lynchian’ was coined to describe the surreal, sometimes sexually charged, and darkly violent world that his work inhabited.
Making his feature film debut with 1977’s Eraserhead, the director revealed a bizarre odyssey into industrial and capitalist alienation, where fatherhood and sex cause anxiety and significant burdens. It was a hit with fans of offbeat and strange cinema, leading him to a career as one of the most iconic filmmakers of his generation.
With The Elephant Man, Lynch communicated the cruelty at the heart of many people’s lives, where kindness is transactional, and differences are frowned upon rather than celebrated. As his next feature after Eraserhead, the film demonstrated that Lynch could make something just as idiosyncratic but considerably more accessible for a mainstream audience.
This didn’t always work for Lynch, though. His attempt to make Dune was lambasted for being too weird and campy, failing to capture the book’s essence and succeeding as a sci-fi blockbuster, as it was intended. Instead, Lynch redeemed himself with Blue Velvet, a harrowing descent into sexual violence and manipulation, with seedy characters and severed ears lurking just below the surface of a seemingly perfect neighbourhood.
Still, when it came to Twin Peaks, the television show he created with Mark Frost in 1990, the filmmaker demonstrated his ability to blend familiar and accessible formats, such as the soap opera, with his signature surreal style. With an ensemble of unique characters, a murder mystery storyline, and plenty of other addictive plotlines weaving between each episode and uniting seemingly unrelated characters, Twin Peaks became a hit, changing television forever.
Although Lynch managed to hone his ability to bridge the gap between mainstream and avant-garde cinema, he was primarily known for depicting graphic sex scenes and violently charged exchanges, digging deep into the murky underbelly of suburbia. Thus, it came as a surprise when Lynch accepted the chance to make a movie for Disney.
It’s not something that anyone anticipated, including Lynch himself, but once he read the script, written by his then-girlfriend Mary Sweeney and her friend John Roach, he found himself intrigued by the story. Sweeney had collaborated with Lynch for many years previously, acting as an editor for projects like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway, so he certainly had faith in Sweeney’s creative ideas.
The film, The Straight Story, was released in 1999 to great acclaim, although it dramatically departs from Lynch’s typical surrealist style. Flexing his versatility, Lynch made a movie that could be enjoyed by a wide audience, telling the moving story of Alvin Straight, who journeyed across America on a lawn mower to visit his estranged brother.
Lynch explained (via The New York Times) that “the switch had nothing to do with getting older. When I first heard about The Straight Story, I had the feeling that it wasn’t my thing.” However, he soon realised it was a tale he wanted to helm. “I responded to the emotion in it. Then I felt it would be the correct thing to do. I felt its yearning for pure, intense feeling represented something that was in the air. I don’t know whether what’s in the air is also a desire to have a break from sex and violence or, rather, a yearning for more tender, more direct storytelling.”
