It was a cold autumn day when I interviewed David Lynch inside his Paris art studio. The film-maker sat at an ink-splattered table while I ran through my questions with a sense of mounting desperation. “Well, yes and no,” Lynch would reply with a smile. “No, well, maybe,” he’d say, beaming at the far wall. He lit one cigarette from the butt of another and asked Mindy, his assistant, to keep him supplied with hot coffee. The tobacco smoke mingled with the steam from his mug. It felt as though he were kicking up clouds to hide himself from view.
Lynch’s cigarette was his magic wand, his familiar, conceivably his paintbrush as well. It allowed him to draw pretty circles in the air to illustrate a point he was making, or to throw up a smokescreen like the Wizard of Oz. Without a cigarette in his hand, the man resembled a wholesome small-town pharmacist. With it, he looked like a hardboiled noir detective. Maybe both men were Lynch; maybe neither was Lynch. He liked being mutable and fiendishly hard to pin down. His sister, he told me, used to be scared of garden peas – and he said that he understood why, because peas are confounding. The outer shell splits to reveal a soft centre, just as people can switch from lightness to darkness in the blink of an eye.
Lynch’s best work contains themes of doubling and twinning. Fred Madison becomes Pete Dayton in the fabulous Lost Highway. The two women merge in Mulholland Drive. Lynch contained different sides to him, too, but he held his seemingly jarring extremes in a loose, happy harness. He kept his fans guessing, or hopelessly chasing red herrings. How did one square his bland, pleasant manner with his dark, twisted films? How, for that matter, did his longtime devotion to transcendental meditation dovetail with his lifelong nicotine-and-caffeine habit? Surely one must cancel out the other: the irresistible force of transcendence versus the immovable object of his addictions.
“No, no, no,” Lynch interrupted, quick to reassure me on this point. There was no contradiction. All the elements worked in harmony and combined to lift him to a higher plane. “You don’t have to give up anything. You just add meditation to anything you want to do. Embrace the experience and kapow, you’re ready to boogie. You can drink all the damn coffee you want.” Cigarettes, he implied, were no great problem either – at least not on an emotional or spiritual level.
Lynch, by his own account, smoked his first cigarette at the age of eight (which is four years older, incidentally, than Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart). Smoking was part of his identity as a painter and film-maker. It calmed his nerves and focused his thoughts. “It was part of the art life for me,” he told Sight and Sound last year. “The tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work or thinking about things. Nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.”
But if Lynch’s cigarette habit was the making of him, it was eventually, inevitably the unmaking as well. Smoking ruined his health and shortened his life and by the time he finally quit, in 2022, the damage was done. He was diagnosed with emphysema, rarely left his house and required supplemental oxygen to even walk a short distance. Smoking, he confessed, was entirely to blame. He urged others to quit and said that he wished he’d done so much sooner. He’d tried to give it up before, he explained. “But when it got tough I’d have that first cigarette and it was a one-way trip to heaven.”
Last month, researchers at University College London released a report that found that an average cigarette takes 20 minutes off a smoker’s life. Lynch, I suspect, smoked at least one pack a day, which would add up to a decade of lost time. Or to put it more crudely, it equates to two or three unmade films and maybe a hundred-odd paintings that never found their way to the canvas. That feels tantamount to the Pompidou burning down.
As for Lynch, his relationship with his cigarettes was outwardly placid and yet fraught with ambivalence. It swung from one extreme to the other in the classic Lynchian style. The cigarette was nirvana and it was hell; his loyal assistant and his saboteur. He loved it and it killed him, but it helped him make his pictures, too. It was his dirty, deadly habit, his one-way trip to the grave. All the same, if Lynch is right and heaven exists, I hope that his particular version is kitted out to his requirements, with a bottomless mug of coffee and an inextinguishable cigarette. It could be like JFK’s eternal flame, with added white smoke and the faint whiff of danger.
