“Set a fire in my head”: the summer evening in Idaho that made David Lynch fall in love with music
The Twin Peaks theme song is easily one of the greatest in TV history. Composed by Angelo Badalamenti, the whole score for David Lynch’s seminal surreal mystery is a masterpiece, proving the importance of a solid soundtrack with recurring motifs and proper cinematic immersiveness.
Music has long been intrinsic to Lynch’s work, and it helped that he had a musically gifted mind himself, releasing several albums and contributing to his own movie scores, often taking a rather industrial and bizarre approach. The filmmaker knew the importance of merging a great piece of music with an indelible sequence of images, which can heighten your senses and give a scene even greater impact.
Just think of when Lou Reed’s cover of ‘This Magic Moment’ plays in Lost Highway or Lula and Sailor dance to Powermad’s electrifying ‘Slaughterhouse’ in Wild at Heart. Lynch also loved to get his characters to lip-sync to pre-existing songs, like Dean Stockwell’s unforgettable performance of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet or Rebekah Del Rio’s Spanish version of ‘Crying’, fracturing reality and the dream world.
The filmmaker’s love of music has long defined his work, but he can credit the initial spark in his musical mind to an evening spent in Idaho, where he had no choice but to use his imagination, to dream, to conjure up a reality that might not have really existed.
Asked by Chris Rodley if he can remember when his passion for music began for Lynch on Lynch, the filmmaker said, “Oh, absolutely. The exact moment”. He could pinpoint the atmosphere in the air that led him to realise the importance of music and its legend, describing, “It gets dark, you know, very late in Boise, Idaho, in the summer. It was not quite dark, so it must’ve been, like, maybe nine o’clock at night, I’m not sure. That nice twilight and a beautiful night. Deep shadows were occurring. And it was sort of warm.”
Then, he was alerted to the existence of Elvis Presley, recalling, “Willard Burns came running towards me from about three houses down the street, and he said, ‘You missed it!’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Elvis on Ed Sullivan’. And it just, like, set a fire in my head. How could I have missed that? And this was the night, you know.”
Presley took on a prominent role in the world of Wild at Heart, Lynch’s 1990 road movie romance, which saw Nicolas Cage perform ‘Love Me’ by the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ after asserting his dominance at a metal gig when a man hits on his girlfriend; it’s camp and ridiculous, but it perfectly fits the movie’s bizarre tone, snakeskin jacket and all.
Continuing to reflect on missing out on watching Presley perform on TV, Lynch said, “I’m kind of glad I didn’t see it: it was a bigger event in my head because I missed it. But I felt this was, you know, the beginning of rock ’n’ roll for me, around the time Elvis really appeared.”
The Wild at Heart sequence, in a way, feels like Lynch imagining what could’ve been if he’d seen Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, bringing a theatricality inherently wrapped up with someone as legendary and idolised as the singer.
