The brand spankin' new exhaustively researched DL book by our friend from the SAM in WA, Greg Olson.

Right now amazon is giving it a shipping estimate of 1-3 weeks. 

It's $45, but from the sounds of it, worth every shiny penny from dugpa's review, even just for the FWWM chapter.

Hot off the press, kiddies, get 'em while the gettin's good!

i just received my copy! it got here in just over a week! im two chapters into it, and am quite impressed. other than the book "Lynch on Lynch", this may be the most definitive book on Lynch so far. my advice to those who are sifting through the many books on him, skip "weirdsville usa" and "the cinema of DL", or "the passion of DL"(which are usually available in most college libraries, and are pretty quick reads anyway), and use that money to buy "beautiful dark". not only does it contain more content than those books combined(its over 700 pages long), but if you get it now, you get a wonderful first edition hardcover, in case you care about such things.
anyway, "beautiful dark" so far looks to me to now be the best starting off point for introducing yourself to all things lynch. if youre looking for something shorter then i suggest "lynch on lynch" as still one of the best books on him(actually that entire directors series is great, i highly recommend "herzog on herzog" and "trier on von trier" as well(skip the robert altman one tho, its one of the few in the series that doesnt do the director justice)), but if you want something more in depth and not formated in an interview-ish way, then get "beautiful dark" as soon as you can. THIS MEANS YOU TOO COOLSPRINGSJ!

angel-did you get your copy yet?

I've always been partial to David Hughes' The Complete David Lynch. What a great resource.  Then Lynch on Lynch. Both volumes are essential.  I agree, that other titles mentioned have been mediocre at best.

My copy of Beautiful Dark is due Wed. 

Thanks for responding, JFK.  I was getting worried no one here cared :(

The Complete Lynch has a foreward by Barry Gifford,so you know it has a little more cred than the usual slapped together, semi-scholarly cob job.

The book then goes by work chronologically, so it's easy to used as a reference. Each subcategory contains film specs and credits, a brief summary and analysis of each up through Mulholland Dr, the sources of inspiration/influences,  quotes both from the movie and from Lynch regarding each project, the sound and music, production notes, awards and box office, and other trivia that I never saw in any other book.

It even includes a section on "films that never were", and a final section on other art projects.

Best of all, it covers each episode of Twin Peaks!  

It sounds like Olson's contains more intimate biography and narrative. Yes?

very much so. it could be considered a biography, except that he does quite a bit of analysis as well. even some childhood photos! and from skipping around, it seems like he gives you the behind the scenes of each film, including IE(as well as including some of the actors' interpetations of the films they are in). all and all, its pretty sweet. im looking forward to hearing yours and others reactions once you/they get the book.

I got mine today (well, it arrived yesterday and it's now in my hands.)

Content:

Thumbs up.  This is an approach that works, to work from the inside out, narrative style, with a staggering amount of detail.  This might be the last word on the Lynch biography, for now, if simply because it's thorough- and current. (finally!)

Style:

Leaves a lot to be desired. It's tone is obsequious and the prose is sentimental. Some details are lingered on to excess, betraying Olson's awe with his hero. 

There is a great deal of editorializing, (ie and you can see this or that in Lynch's work, and this/that defines Lynch as an artist, and this is why Lynch is like "x" character.) which factors into the length of the text and is, imo, unneccessary. None of these insights so far are anything special. Olson's editor should have reminded him that the Lynch fans he's addressing are an intelligent audience, who are adept at processing abtractions, or at the very least, are familiar with Lynch's body of work and, therefore, his tendencies.

I've found that the best biographies are vivid images created through facts and personal accounts that paint a whole, lifelike -- and most importantly, human-- portrait.  Olson comes so close to that mark, but this plays out more like a research project on a Great American Genius.

It doesn't help matters that nearly every paragraph is riddled with huge, distracting footnotes and partial quotes, many of the attributions to these footnoted, which lends itself to an overall effect of sloppy and stilted disorganization. You're left wondering whose commentary you're reading and why it's important half the time.

To be continued...

By the time I finish it, I'm sure I'll have gotten used to these flaws. I love Lynch, too, and I've held many of his films (and Twin Peaks, of course) close to my heart over half of my life, so I truly appreciate this intimate biographical treatment, rich in facts and testimonies.  All in all, I'm grateful for the opportunity Olson has given us to access new information that probably would never appeared anywhere else were it not for all the care and consideration he gave to Beautiful Dark.

"Ardent" is the problem, as in lips affixed to the holy Lynch a*shole.  

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

 I know, 12.

Do you wanna fight? (like one of those fights in the movies where a man and a woman start wrestling and end up on top of each other)

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

Oh God. It sounds like a curious hybrid of editiorial (personal anecdotes and musings) and academic (footnotes and partial quotes). If you set out to write a serious book on film theory the editorial style is going to undermine your academic authority (too lowbrow) and if you're writing a memoir footnotes and partial quotes can be distracting.

I'm looking forward to reading this book but given the price and the hyperbole my expectations are extremely high. 

I must admit I dislike the title immensely if only because I used that phrase in a poem when I was young and tormented. I found the poem years later and that phrase was etched into my memory by merit of being particularly awful. Dark isn't beautiful when you fall down and break a leg looking for the light switch... although I'm sure DL would find beauty in splintered bone and ruptured flesh emerging from darkness, perhaps lit by the light from a paramedic's torch.

I never wrote a poem called My Friend Dave: A Memoir so that would have got the all-clear.                     

Right! 

And using quotes is an art form.  If it's truly quotable, you use the whole thing 1) so someone else can cite you as their source, 2) because it just reads better. 

If 80% of your sentences are partial quotes, at a certain point it stops being an original work.  And when an author quotes a few words out of context, even if he's incorporating it into his own paraphrase, it can change the original speaker's intended meaning.

Lots of journalists do this intentionally, as an insidious way to twist words.  Readers know this. So not only is it undermining his authority as an academic, as you said, faceinthe leaves, it's undermining his credibility.  

His credentials only say that he's a movie expert, btw, NOT that he ever knew DL, or even interviewed him personally.  Was he being modest by not putting this in? Because a Foreword detailing how this information was compiled and his stylistic objective would have fixed this whole problem.

I've read art criticism, too. I've read all the books in his bibliography, too.  What should make Olson's books stand above the others is that he did do firsthand interviews with friends and family of DL.  So Olson was was acting as neither objective biographer nor academic researcher, but journalist. 

Follow the rules of  journalism: keep the editorializing separate from facts, and use complete direct quotations with respect to the source.  

This could have been effective in Rolling Stone style, putting us in the interview with him. What opportunities for really good material! I don't want to know just that DL's parents hung his paintings all over their house, but what the house smelled like, did Donald Lynch have a firm handshake. did they serve tea?  He imagines scenes based on these interviews, but since he wasn't there to see DL scared by the subway, I want to hear how DL described it. 

The good news is, I am getting used to how amateur it is because the biography part is actually quite enjoyable, and I think everyone who has the time for 750 of Lynch should BUY IT.  I just expected more.

                                                                              ***

That is nice imagery, faceintheleaves.  You can tell when a novice writer has promise.  But if Sam Stanley from FWWM was a bad poetry writing emo kid, he'd be Greg Olson. 

obsequious - 12 knows how to get a man's motor running WOW

I am going to hold back a bit to see what the reviews are like for BD - 750 pages and years in the making seems like a lot of time and care went into the project.

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

Pshaw.  Yes, it does cover Inland Empire, j.

 It's readable, don't get me wrong. I've just seen better writing here on the Gazette.  He's so adverb-y.  

He actually says Laura was incestuously molested by her father.  ?!   Did he even have an editor?

EDIT: The FWWM chapter, and parts of the TP chapters, are as rewarding as dugpa said it would be.  When Olson takes the memoir approach, having snuck onto the set and attended the local TP parties, it made me forgive just about everything that came before. (Well, there's a Ben Horne misquote, he phonetically spells out Andy's crying... I'll stop, really. They're minor.) 

Where his attempts at creating a pop culture context fell short of the relevance mark in previous chapters, here they're SOLID. He could have milked those experiences far more, and done less of the tiresome, wordy, synopsis/offhand analysis & direct quote soup.  If you end up scanning, keep your eyes peeled for the rare times he does slip into the first person (or quotes Jen. She's a quotable gal!)  Here is where Olson's personality comes through and the book succeeds.

I haven't seen too much talk about the BV and EH original scripts before in other books.  DL's philandering is also amusing to hear discussed candidly. 

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Olson starts actually interacting with DL around the time he was making the Eat My Fear cow and making the Mulholland Dr pilot. At this point (about halfway through the book), Beautiful Dark starts to work. 

I don't know if this is because the book took so long to write that he actually matured as a writer while he was writing it, or because he became more directly involved in the material he was working with and therefore more excited about it, but DL's voice becomes more vivid (as it is in Lynch on Lynch) and Olson gets more forthcoming about his own unique experiences getting interviews.

(In case anyone's wondering, he mentions the TP Fest once, but only to relay that his dream for Julee Cruise sang at the SAM was fulfilled.)  

I still think the first half could have done with a lot of doctoring for consistency, and lots of the esoteric fat could stand to be trimmed. If he went overboard describing the features (seriously, there's about 150 pages of scene by scene narrative) I do like the descriptions of the commercials and Cannes footage (that you could only see on DL.com.) 

This is not a tell-all. It's all very sanitized PR. There's a Peggy Reavey quote in there about David has not problem with dropping his associates if they displease him. He also says Lynch is very sensitive to criticism. so the book really stays on the surface and puts DL in the most flattering light possible (family man, ladies' man. man's man, man about town, hehe) and he's careful to advocate all of Lynch's spiritual and political views. DL would almost definitely take issue with anything more personal, or controversial.

When more people have read this, there's bound to be some gossip. But Olson does ultimately make DL out to be a human character by the end, if an exceptional one, while leaving plenty of mystery.

3.5 stars  Nicely done, overall

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

That's a joke right?

This book has been received favourably in most places, maybe it depends what you expect.

What, my comments, or just the lack of response?  Same thing happened here with Inland Empire.  

Look at it this way:

Most people willing to pick up a book of that girth on a single subject are going to be predisposed, by their interest alone, to celebrating it. ( I love Lynch fans to death, but as a group, I'll be the first to admit that we tend to fawn.)

Some people become even tougher critics when it comes to their interest in said subject.

I'm afraid the price tag is going to scare all but the superfans off.  Honestly, I just googled reviews and only saw 3.

I haven't had a chance to even buy the book yet, let alone read it. Probably won't until sometime around Christmas. I'm looking forward to it but I can't say I'm surprised by Angel's review. Greg is definitely a Lynch-lover and I more or less expected there to be a lot of editorializing going on. I'll just read it with a grain of salt. :) In the meantime, I've not chatted in this thread because I simply have nothing to add that's of any use to anyone. But really, I'm quite happy just reading what Angel and JFK have to say right now. :)

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."