This 1989 French TV profile is one of the more fascinating documentaries on the late David Lynch. Made by the veteran documentarian Guy Girard, DON’T LOOK AT ME stands in direct opposition to most Lynch docos, which tend to emphasize his sunny and approachable nature. Girard goes the opposite route, highlighting Lynch’s odd and idiosyncratic proclivities in an atmosphere of amplified weirdness.
The film begins in December 1988, with Lynch and L.A. WEEKLY journalist John Powers chatting in a Bob’s Big Boy, viewed through a window from outside the venue. Among the topics Lynch discusses are ice cream consistency and the possibility of a “very, very, very heavyset woman” entering the restaurant and livening things up.
We next see Lynch in his office, working on a script with an unidentified female typist, and then in his LA home, fashioning a clay figurine. The latter sequence, intercut with footage from the closet scene in BLUE VELVET (a key line from which provides this film’s title), has an offscreen Powers peppering Lynch with questions about morgues, corpses and morality—and Lynch, engrossed in his creation, growing visibly irritated, answering a query about the “dark things” in his films with the refrain “I don’t make dark things!” A subsequent interview occurs in a hallway of Lynch’s home, with Lynch positioned in the doorway of his kitchen, talking about a proposed (and discarded) adaptation of Franz Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS.
We also see Lynch working with singer Julee Cruise on a song recording and seated by a swimming pool looking at polaroid photos taken on the sets of his films. Eventually Lynch visits the LA settings where ERASERHEAD was filmed together with that film’s headliner Jack Vance, marveling at industrial scenery Lynch calls “too beautiful.”
Surprisingly, Lynch’s weirder penchants, such as his “Animal art” consisting of animal innards pinned to canvases (the only hint of which is a mention by Powers of the “Bee Board”), are largely absent. I’ll also complain about John Powers, whose delivery is excessively halting and deferential (with lots of “ums”).
Guy Girard gives the proceedings a chilly and elliptical air that may have been intended to ape the filmmaking of his subject. Discordant sound effects and a disquieting drone fill the soundtrack, while inanimate objects are given ominous and intrusive close-ups. Girard also favors off-center compositions and quirky touches like a TV monitor playing scenes from ERASERHEAD in the background of Lynch’s office while he and his partner confer before a computer screen. Precisely how Lynchian such touches truly are is open to interpretation, but in its alien strangeness DON’T LOOK AT ME is affecting without question.
Vital Statistics
DON’T LOOK AT ME: DAVID LYNCH
La sept-art productions
Director: Guy Girard
Cinematography: Jacques Audrian, Nicolas Eprendre
Editing: Lise Beaulieu
Cast: David Lynch, John Powers, Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Jack Nance