David Lynch, the director of cult classics such as Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead passed away last week. Known for his cryptic storytelling, surrealist imagery, and eerie moodiness, the filmmaker’s career was defined by a distinct visual style, perhaps shaped by his childhood in suburban Idaho.
In his 1986 neo-noir thriller, Blue Velvet, the main character finds a moldy severed ear in a field. In an interview published in the book Lynch on Lynch, the director said he first imagined this scene happening in Boise. Mixing vintage pop music with images of white picket fence americana, the movie is an unnerving study of the 1950s.
“Let’s take a look at it. Yes. That’s a human ear alright,” Detective John Williams, dialog excerpt from Blue Velvet.
Born in 1946 in Montana, the director moved to Sandpoint, Idaho when he was two years old, then Boise where he attended South Junior High.
Mark Smith lived in the house next door to the Lynch family. Both the oldest siblings in their family, they became good friends. Their yards bordered one of the city’s steep canals, he recalled, and their parents told them to stay away.
“It was forbidden,” he said. “There were quite a few kids that died from drowning in the big ditch. We'd sneak down there anyway.”
At the time, Vista avenue was still just surrounded by fields, ranches and a couple of burger drive-ins. Smith and Lynch were in the boy scouts together - Lynch was the bugler - and they spent summers in McCall. In Boise, they ran around with a gang of neighborhood kids.
“As soon as we could get out and play, we'd get on our bikes, go on to South Junior High and we'd throw rocks,” Smith said. “We loved throwing rocks.”
In his 2018 memoir Room to Dream excerpted in the Literary Hub, Lynch described the quaint but unsetling strangeness of suburban life, something he felt biking late at night as a child in Boise.
“I didn’t dwell on it, but I knew there were things going on behind those doors and windows,” he wrote.
One time, while out with his brother, the filmmaker described seeing a nude woman appear in the middle of the street.
“Maybe it was something in the light and the way she came out of the darkness, but it seemed to me that her skin was the color of milk, and she had a bloodied mouth,” Lynch wrote, with no further explanation.
“An image can stay with you a lot longer than perhaps even a well plotted movie,” says history writer Rick Just, who wrote about Lynch’s connection to Boise for the Idaho Press. He said the director enjoyed mainstream success, despite making movies with disturbing and often enigmatic imagery. Or maybe it was because of it.
“Maybe he dragged mainstream his direction a little bit,” he added, saying Lynch had a way of making the ordinary feel dreamlike but creepy.
“Going through pine trees. Why is that scary?” Just said. “But he made it scary. The normal, he always liked to peek behind it and see what was there.”
Lynch’s description of his time in Idaho is filled with graphic body horrors, haunting vignettes of inexplicable weirdness and childhood mischief.
In his memoir, he writes about a day playing badminton in the back of the Smiths’ house.
“We heard this giant explosion and ran to the street, and we saw smoke rising at the end of the block,” he wrote.
An older kid had accidentally ignited a homemade pipe bomb and injured his foot.
“[It] was hanging by tendons in a pool of blood and billions of burned-out match heads. They sewed his foot back on and it was fine,” Lynch casually describes, noting that there was “a lot of bomb building and gasoline-powered things in Boise.”
“We had a, maybe, two or three weeks period where we were just really into making bombs,” Smith recalled.
Lynch, Smith and a small group of friends bought bolts and matches from the hardware store on Vista and made three bombs. After the first two exploded in the air blowing shrapnel all over the place, they threw the last one in an empty swimming pool.
“It just went KA-BOOM!” It was just like, ‘Holy mackerel!’” Smith said, “We just took off. We ran down the big ditch, came in the back door and my mom asked me ‘what are you guys doing?’
“We made up a story,” Smith said with a smile.
But a while later, Lynch describes seeing a police officer park his motorcycle in the neighborhood.
“He put his helmet under his arm and walked to the door and rang the bell and he took us to the station,” Lynch wrote. “I was the seventh-grade president, and I had to write a paper for the police on the duties and obligations of leadership.” Smith was grounded.
The sweet stench of suburbia and death first experienced in Idaho seem to have lingered in the filmmaker's mind.
The director moved to Virginia when he was in eighth grade but returned to Boise the following summer to visit his ailing grandfather. The day his grandpa died, Lynch ran into an older neighborhood kid about to blow up yet another homemade pipebomb.
“He set the bomb in the freshly mowed backyard and it smelled so beautiful,” Lynch wrote, “I haven’t smelled that in a really long time.”
In August of 2024, Lynch told the magazine Sight and Sound he was diagnosed with emphysema. He died at the age of 78.
The audio version of this story features the titular 1950 song by Bobby Vinton used in the Blue Velvet movie soundtrack, as well as music composed by Angelo Badalamenti for Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Drive. Excerpts from the director’s memoir are voiced by James Baker.
