The Red Curtain Falls

David Lynch

David Lynch

 

When film director David Lynch was creating his first great works back in the 70s and 80s, it seems fairly unlikely that he envisaged an America sliding into full-blown authoritarianism or fascism in what would be his latter years.

One could argue that there exists the art of emotion, and the art of ideas.  There are very, very few artists who seem to operate inside and outside of both categories.

Many if not most humans seem to prefer art, music, film which takes them by the hand and leads them on a journey with clear waymarkers, with their patient guide periodically pointing to the things they should notice.

Some artists, like David Lynch or the late author Cormac McCarthy, refused to take the reader or viewer’s hand, choosing instead to assemble an entire world out of vignettes – often horrifying – and leaving us as witnesses to navigate the meaning of it all.

One thing which seems clear (to this writer at least) is that both Lynch and McCarthy were mesmerized and possibly traumatized by a darkness at the heart of American society, in which The Truth is never spoken.

David Lynch in particular appeared to be obsessed with the dissonance between the popularly agreed perception of American society and the actual realities lurking just behind the curtains…

All of this is visible in what is arguably his masterpiece, “Blue Velvet”, in which the American myth of itself is scraped back with a metaphorical razor until reality lies exposed and bleeding.

As someone far less oblique and artistic than David Lynch, this writer is happy to blurt it right out:

The pomp which will surround the “return of a great America” tomorrow – desired largely by a very “un-great” people – is exactly the sickly-sweet ersatz shopping mall confection which caused artists like Lynch to scream and spew into the unredeeming void…

Lynch was no product of the “coastal elites” so despised by MAGA types.  He was born in Montana just after WWII, the descendant of Irish and Scandinavian immigrants.

It would be his travels to both coasts of America which opened his eyes to the stark contradictions between the conjured “fluffiness” of small-town America and the lives of not-so-quiet desperation being acted-out on the streets of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Lynch did not look to the privileged classes when seeking long-term collaborators.

The people in his close circle were artists like Dennis Hopper and Sissy Spacek, heartland Americans willing to show up when he needed help – including financial help.

*****

Probably his most long-term collaborator – maybe even a “muse” if that word is appropriate – was Jack Nance.

Jack Nance played the lead in Lynch’s first feature length film – the surreal and profoundly disturbing “Eraserhead” from 1977.  Nance would later show up in everything from “Blue Velvet” to “Twin Peaks”.

The year “Eraserhead” came out was also the year Elvis died, and there is no figure in American history who more embodies the Lynchian red curtain between glitzy stardom and backstage human reality than Elvis Aron Presley.

Jack Nance came from a similarly complicated background to Elvis, although falling on opposite sides of the tracks by a trick of birth.

Jack Nance with grandmother Maude

Jack Nance with grandmother Maude

 

Both men had mixed-ethnic ancestors in their family trees including “free people of color” – and in Nance’s case, his ancestors included both slaveholders AND “free people of color”.

Having “free people of color” actually inside a slaveholding household in a census from the 1800s was often a sign of the “Pater familias” taking sexual liberties with his “property”.

And that’s a charitable way of describing such ugliness…

In America, two people might have common ancestors, but how the cards fall down the generations in terms of happiness, normality, and economic security is often very, very different.

The much-vaunted promise of America was dependent on whether the mixed offspring of slaveholders and their consorts were accepted by their fathers and later able to “pass as white” – the less usual scenario.

More common was a situation in which mixed-ethnic children arrived into the world just a shade too dark-complected, meaning they were rejected, shunned, or even exiled or sold by their “white” family.

Whether a particular family line was seen as “colored”, “passed as white”, or worked slowly towards “passing”, the internalized shame and self-loathing became a part of America’s fabric among both the descendants of the enslaved, and the descendants of slaveholders.  It is a transgenerational poison in the bloodstream of American culture.

It is difficult to know if Jack Nance was descended from the “mulatto” children of his prosperous slaveholding forefathers such as the van Dorn family.  His Heathcock ancestors were certainly free people of color.

But a couple of things ARE certain.  Jack Nance was a troubled man, and Jack Nance was a hardcore alcoholic.  You know something has gone terribly wrong when even Dennis Hopper decides to bring you to rehab.

With a failed marriage behind him, Jack Nance managed to get dry eventually, but I guess “America” kept getting in the way.

Jack Nance and Kyle McLaughlin in Blue Velvet

Jack Nance and Kyle McLaughlin in Blue Velvet

 

He ended-up married again, this time to a porn actress named Nancee Kelly – whose real name was Kelly Jean Van Dyke – niece of that symbol of American show-biz razzmatazz and smiling good cheer, Dick Van Dyke.

In one of the most absurdly depressing stories ever, Jack Nance phoned Kelly Jean while filming a low-rent B-movie in California to say that he would break off their relationship if she continued drinking.

He tried to hang up, but Van Dyke threatened to kill herself if he did.  Apparently the phone lines went down due to a passing lightning storm.

Van Dyke was found hanging, dead, shortly after.

Jack Nance went back to the bottle, and died in mysterious circumstances five years later.

*****

David Lynch set the film “Blue Velvet” in Lumberton, North Carolina – which oddly enough, is home to the largest mixed-ethnic community in the eastern USA – the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, one of the original American communities comprised mainly of “free people of color”.

Filming actually took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, not Lumberton.  Which is in some ways even more odd, as Wilmington is the picturesque and centuries-old seaport town where in 1898, white supremacist paramilitary terrorists known as “Redshirts” staged one of the most outrageous insurrections in US history.

Post-Civil War, Wilmington was one of the few bright spots for Black Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Through ambition and industry, African-Americans had created a thriving local economy which included the first wholly Black-owned newspaper.  Elected offices were held by both “white” and Black citizens, with the latter forming a majority of the city’s population.

Southern Democrats (who were the more racist of the two mainstream political parties back then) led a 1500-strong “white” militia against the legally elected aldermen of Wilmington, murdering dozens and installing their own gang in local offices.  Wilmington’s Black population never recovered following the mass exodus in the face of racist violence and new laws created specifically to disenfranchise Black voters.

I have no idea whether the darkness behind the modern gentrified and mostly “white” Wilmington, NC played any role in David Lynch‘s decision to film a tale of the violence and lies lurking just beneath the surface of white picket fence American gentility.

It doesn’t really matter.  Lynch saw the weirdness at the dark and violent heart of American culture, and refused to flinch.

David Lynch never gave up on the damaged souls skirting the shadowy margins of Americana, either.

I wrote something years ago, and have found no reason to amend my thoughts:

If it weren’t for his great good fortune in being born to a wealthy, racist property developer, the man being sworn into office tomorrow has the character of a slimy traveling salesman propping up the bar after midnight in a cheap-ass Vegas motel.

The kind who keeps trying to get the woman at the table nearby to notice his fake Rolex.  The kind who tells racist and misogynist jokes to the bartender in a loud voice.  The guy well past his prime hitting on girls half his age, not noticing their nausea at seeing his fat, translucent, gouty feet spilling out of cheap and near-to-bursting loafers.

A villainous side character in a David Lynch film is president of the USA tomorrow.

And we get no astonishingly brilliant soundtrack to compensate…

RIP David Keith Lynch [1946-2025]

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