My day job desk sits beside one of those garage doors made out of windows — there’s probably a name for that — and it opens up to a balcony overlooking the south hills of Missoula, Montana. The distant Bitterroot range, mean-looking and snowy and blue. I was sitting there working when my buddy texted me, telling me David Lynch had died. I set the phone facedown and looked through the garage door glass peering out across the town in which he’d been born, wondering what it must’ve looked like in nineteen hundred and forty-six.
Lynch was maybe just a few months old when his family packed up and shuttled off to Boise, Idaho and Spokane, Washington and then Virginia. He studied fine arts in Boston, Philadelphia, and then the AFI Conservatory in LA, working on Eraserhead. He was from everywhere, and so fashioned his first feature from nowhere. A cold industrial nightmarescape set to a staticky pitch, the clanging gait of heavy machinery.
Eventually his works would inhabit — or be inhabited by — the bucolic spaces of his boyhood: the small town North Carolina of Blue Velvet, the Pacific Northwest simulacrum of Twin Peaks. It took some time getting there: his second feature, The Elephant Man, in nineteenth century England; the planet Arrakis in Dune — whose commercial failure gave Lynch the jolt he’d needed to venture out into his own world again, writing his own screenplay with no textual source material except his own mind.
Into the suburban 1950s of his youth. And the music that emerged in the era, from the fringes of his milieu. The tidal colossus of Rock’n’Roll flooding the mainstream countrywide, the shadow-laden private eyes and femme fatales skulking luridly about Lynch’s otherworldly and grainy, convex television screen like transmissions from some alien planet Earth of Danger and Weirdness.
Out of which he’d created something singular and signature. Blue Velvet setting the feng shui by which his name became an adjective.
A few years after Blue Velvet, Lynch discovered a textual source he could get down with, by a writer — born the same year — who’d grown up in motel rooms between Chicago and New Orleans. A rare artist whose material could help furnish Lynch’s vision as much as Billy Wilder and Luis Bañuel and coffee and cherry pie.
Barry Gifford is an outsider. After a boyhood of transience — raised by a liquor-running racketeer cavorting with gangsters, pimps and showgirls — Gifford attended the University of Missouri on a baseball scholarship. He dropped out, became a merchant seaman in Europe just because he felt like it, settling in London for a time in the mid-sixties and then Haight-Ashbury San Francisco, hanging with small-time rock’n’rollers on the cutting edge of the psychedelic scene. A self-made bibliophile, Gifford nourished himself with the Beats.
Like Denis Johnson — born just three years after — Gifford’s appetite for the ethos of Neal Cassady and American weirdness and darkness led him first to poetry.
Just a hair more privileged than Gifford, Denis Johnson was the son of a roving U.S. State Department liaison. Johnson clearly suffered his own darkness, but Gifford was borne of the Real Thing.
Johnson dabbled in Weird America — and did so most fully in his four enduring works, in four different forms: the poetry of The Incognito Lounge, his debut novel Angels, the short stories of Jesus’ Son and the novella Train Dreams. (Johnson, a chameleon, followed Neal Cassady’s dictum: Life goes into new forms.) Gifford’s work never quite reaches these heights of lyrical brilliance, but Gifford — a devoted acolyte of film noir as much as Beat poetics and spirit — has spent much of his career headlong into the smoky depths of American Shadow and Grime.
By the time he’d composed the novel Wild at Heart: the Story of Sailor and Lula, Gifford had crafted a wholly original Americana Berserko, a noir-dripping yet almost cartoonish rendering of this country’s crooks, runaways, gangsters, romantics and freaks. Its heroic legion of lost souls.
Wild at Heart: the Story of Sailor and Lula was published six years after Johnson’s Angels. Johnson’s is a story of wayward lovers on a cross-country Greyhound ride through a bleak, hallucinatory country of black-lit drug dens and bars in which “men drank alone, staring out of their faces.” There’s a bumbling-bro bank robbery scene gone terribly awry, strikingly similar to that which occurs in Wild at Heart. It’s fun to think about what might’ve been had Lynch chosen Johnson’s book instead.
In the eighties, Denis Johnson, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum, was creeping towards the literary darling status he’d achieve with Jesus’ Son, but along the way Denis — whose output, despite his horrific talent, was wildly inconsistent — had followed up Angels with the loping post-apocalyptic Fiskadoro. Meanwhile Gifford was holed up at a motel off the mouth of the Cape Fear River, working on a book about sport fishing. While writing, voices of a young couple sifted through the walls, igniting his imagination. Gifford, ever the outsider, threw out the fishing book, sent back his advance and started working on Wild at Heart.
Just a year after Gifford’s novel was published, Wild at Heart was booed by the audience at Cannes — while Lynch just stood there grinning — yet won its prestigious Palm d’Or.
The story in between is a simple one: Lynch read the novel, loved it, and gave Gifford a call. Lynch had asked Gifford to write the screenplay, but Gifford was busy working on its sequel. He told Lynch, “You write it and send me the screenplay and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”
What’s exhilarating about Gifford’s and Lynch’s brand is its gaudy fusion of schlock and deep artistic feeling. And an unceasing current of humor that, when encountered for the first time, might seem puzzlingly childish or self-mocking — or worse, hateful of its people.
And then these people crush you. Crush you with their awe and terror and love. Made more powerful by the whole hammy put-on. You giggle and you roll your eyes. And then you cry. You realize you’ve been had. You know what these haute American barkers are getting up to now.
It’s all shot through some neon-surreal telescope, precisely expressing some crazed amalgamation of American Weirdness. All cooked up in a potful of twentieth century lore: Doo Wop and Rock’n’Roll, Beat poetry, carny culture, Eisenhower-era suburban sheen and its underbelly of barroom burlesques, ramblers and gamblers and soot-blacked troubadours and road warriors; the selfsame amalgamation which informs Bob Dylan’s post-Time Out of Mind output, the Vaudevillian wallop and stomp of his late-period masterpiece Love and Theft. All achievements made possible by a century’s worth of absurdities.
It’s difficult to say anything new about anything unless you make something up. I call it Rockabilly Noir. It’s been crawling all over my brain while I’ve been thinking about this, and I doubt I’m the first person who’s ever thought of it. Heretofore I’ve not encountered it, so I’ll use it.
Say it with me now: Rockabilly Noir. Bumpa-ditty-bumpa-ditty-blappity-pow! Rockabilly Noir! Sounds good!
Rockabilly emerged smack in the middle of the twentieth century with a frenzied exuberance drawn from all manner of cultural ephemera: Hank Williams and Black Fashion and velvety shoes and Delta Blues and pomade and Arthur Crudup and Bill Monroe and the Jitterbug and amphetamines, polka dots and leather jackets; it gave rise to Sun Records and practitioners like Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, artists whose sheer flamboyance was unprecedented and then unfathomable still. This kind of radical swagger set the table for Gifford and Lynch and even Johnson — and Nicolas Cage, the Elvis-obsessed Sailor Ripley of Wild at Heart, Cage the Elvis-loving, quintessential American Berserko of acting.
The last American Berserko actor. And David Lynch is dead. And Denis Johnson is dead. And Barry Gifford is old.
One hopes that Timothee Chalamet will take some piece of Bob Dylan with him — there’s already evidence that he has — and it’d be good if he went just a little bit crazy from it, just a little bit crazy.
It’s a rarer thing than in film: for a book to express the exuberance and madness and buffoonery of the carny or the young Elvis Presley. The Wild at Heart series (there are seven) does it, and Gifford’s Night People, another slim, gritty Berserko Southern Noir. There are characters with names like Big Betty and Cutie Early and Bosco Brulliard — Bosco Brulliard! These are strutting pink ponies amid a literary pasture populated by high manners aplenty — addled Rockabilly gusto in short supply.
Who are all these other Rockabilly Noirists? You might be wondering that. Must be a bunch of stinkers. Skulking in alleyways smoking off Stinker Street. High off their own snake oil yet certainly not high on the hog.
But what will you do when they come for your hogs?
Here’s a conversation from Night People in which Big Betty and Cutie drive the Lost Highway in Betty’s black Dodge Monaco:
“Travelin’ along the way we are, without no home or reason to be or stay anywhere, that’s what it means bein’ on the lost highway. Most folks don’t know what they want, Cutie, only mostly they don’t even know that much. Sometimes they think they know but it’s usually just their stomach or cunt or cock complainin’. They get fed or fucked and it’s back to square one. Money makes ‘em meaner’n shit, don’t we already know. Money’s the greatest excuse in the world for doin’ dirt. But you and me can out-ugly the sumbitches, I reckon.”
“How’s that?”
“Just by puttin’ two and two together, sweet pea, then subtractin’ off the top, one at a time.”
“I ain’t sure I understand you, Bet, but I’m willin’ to learn.”
Big Betty threw back her head, shut her wolfslit green eyes and gave out a sharp laugh.
Gifford’s characters, with “wolfslit” eyes, travel the Lost Highway, out-uglying all the sumbitches and conjuring hatchling crimes while ruminating on what it means to be alive. And doing so with confectionery crude humor and grit, in the parodic manner employed by Lynch. Their techniques are akin to Flannery O’Connor’s, who shone a light upon her characters’ most exaggerated grotesqueries, excavating truths of humanity and ugliness in this world. The reader beholds them shimmering in this country’s grimmer terrains.
Much Rockabilly exuberance comes out of the South and Interior West, of the flyover country: Mississippi authors Barry Hannah and Lewis Nordan juxtaposed caricature and cartoonish violence with great tenderness and psychological realism. Of the West, Thomas McGuane (actually nicknamed, in his wilder days, “Captain Berserko”) transmitted the Rockabilly spirit through his early works, chiefly The Bushwhacked Piano and his screenplay Rancho Deluxe. Hell, anything with a name like Rancho Deluxe has got the spirit to it.
Of the West too E. Annie Proulx writes with a lyrical derring-do fast fading in American fiction, and you can look to Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles for the poetry of transience and American lostness. Seems all the spirit’s coming from The Interior. Make a note of that: look for the spirit in The Interior.
It’d be ridiculous not to mention Kerouac, about whom Gifford co-wrote an “oral biography” called Jack’s Book. Kerouac surely did bop and howl, and there’s an excitement to reading On the Road at, say, twenty. You’re thinking, Whoa, this is some whole new rambler, a party bag of what Tennessee Williams called “something wild in the country that only the night people knew.” But Gifford and Denis Johnson molded the spirit and verve of The Beats into some fresh, more mature thing — maybe “mature” isn’t the right word. After all, we could use a few more boppers and howlers in our midst. But there’s something to be said of the clean line, of the craftsmanship in Johnson’s and Gifford’s prose. As wild as he is, Gifford’s prose is as whittled as a frog-gig.
The Beats are simply source material for the Berserkos, the Rockabilly Noirists — along with Presley and Night of the Hunter and Out of the Past and Patricia Highsmith and snakeskin jackets that symbolize your individuality and sense of personal freedom.
Lynch, on the other hand … I haven’t found any evidence that he held affinity for the Beats. But Lynch was an alien. The director-producer Mel Brooks called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” for his golly-gee-whiz manner and Eisenhower-era Dad persona. His duck-honky brogue. Whatever macabre neon tincture coursed about Lynch’s veins was borne of some other secret thing, some thing I don’t think anybody could ever put a name to. He was certainly an Elvis fan. You can see it in his haircut. A pompadour from Mars.
Spin interviewed Lynch for the release of his album (Lynch was also a musician, of course) — an album called Crazy Clown Time, of course — and he was asked about its “mutated rockabilly feel.”
Spin: How did that music first affect you as a kid?
DL: Like being hit with a truck filled with happiness. It was a thrilling truck, and you know, I sort of wish everybody could experience that feeling. You’ve heard these stories. So many musicians when they saw Elvis for the first time, they just slammed their head with their fist and said, “Damn! This is it!” And it was just suddenly so obvious. It wasn’t there. And then it was there.
A thrilling truck. Denis Johnson, close cousin to Gifford and Lynch, was also haunted by the specter of The King.
Johnson published his masterpiece as a long short story in The Paris Review in 2002. Like Jesus’ Son, it’s a work to which Gifford bears no lyric equal, and matched in brilliance by the most sublime moments in Lynch’s best work (i.e. Club Silencio, part eight of Twin Peaks: The Return).
Train Dreams is the story of a tenderly dimwitted railroader in the early Twentieth Century’s Interior West, wandering about the nation’s wide open spaces and the bizarre interstices thereof, in the wake of personal tragedy. Robert Grainier traverses the rails and ties racing between the pastoral and the new strange America to come. An America in which Grainier would pay ten cents to see the World’s Fattest Man, would witness a Wonder Horse in a theater, the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy and the Wolf Boy and an America that would “tremble with a massive inner dynamism.” Later in his life Grainier would behold, in Troy, Montana, “a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley.”
The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the barber shop across the street too late to see this. He’d only had it told to him by the townspeople standing in the late dusk, strung along the street beside the deep bass of the idling diesel, speaking very low if speaking at all, staring into the mystery and grandeur of a boy so high and solitary.
Trains Dreams is elegiac in a way Gifford’s work is not, and is closer to Lynch’s the Straight Story than Wild at Heart. But a shared affinity for the cultural dynamite of rockabilly — and its strutting, pompadoured avatar — informed the voices of two widely heralded American masters (Johnson and Lynch) and an under-appreciated rogue (Gifford).
Johnson’s final work, the collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was, by the author’s dying wishes, unaltered following his death. The book ends with the story “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist,” about an Elvis-obsessed poet who entertains conspiracy theories concerning Elvis’s twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, who’d died at birth — or did he?
The closing line of “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” — thus the closing words from Denis Johnson — is this: Elvisly Yours.
Johnson was Elvisly aligned with Lynch and Gifford, yet aligned too by his affection for noir. Johnson eclipses Gifford as a stylist, and Gifford eclipses Johnson as a documenter of criminal escapades. But much of Johnson’s spottier work is noir or noir-adjacent. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is about a suicide survivor turned half-disc-jockey-half-private eye (what’s more Rockabilly Noir than that?), and its opening lines, some of Johnson’s most memorable, are written in the hardboiled, anaphoric language of film noir:
He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off. He’d been through several states along the turnpikes, through weary tollgates and stained mechanical restaurants, and by now he felt as if he’d crossed a hostile foreign land to reach this fog with nobody in it, only yellow lights blinking and yellow signs wandering past the car’s windows silently.
Off and off and off. You can hear the voice-over narrator in a Forties noir telling in stoic and clipped language that everything was off, and then Johnson slides into his inimitable lyricism — “weary tollgates” and “stained mechanical restaurants” — very much akin to the visual lyricism which heightens Lynch’s work. Its lurid tones and its grotesqueries. Resuscitation’s Leonard English is then “drawn into a very interesting conversation with a man whose face got to look more and more like a dead pig’s face in the dim red light.” This comes just after our narrator exclaims All bets were off. Like Lynch, Johnson effortlessly oscillated between the hardboiled and the darkly surreal.
These three major artists, Lynch and Gifford and Johnson, were acolytes of film noir and the explosive music of the middle Twentieth Century. They pushed this milieu of American Weirdness and Darkness into the stratosphere of tremendous storytelling and poetic beauty. Say it with me aloud again: Rockabilly Noir!
They are guiding lights in the darkness, calling artists to plumb the shadowy depths of what’s mean and gaudy and raucous in America and draw out and nourish what souls are hidden there.
Lynch and Gifford stayed in touch, and really got down together in the mid-1990s, writing the screenplay for a Neo-noir about a stoic yet excitable saxophonist who wakes up in a prison cell — as a different person.
Lost Highway wound up being David Lynch’s most Metal fucking movie. Maybe he thought the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein was the New Dangerous Thing in Rock’n’Roll — a gimp-suited gaggle of Elvis Presleys from Hell. This was Lynch and Gifford’s last ride down the Lost Highway together, and there’s a sense that once it was completed, David just didn’t need Gifford anymore. He’d accumulated all that was required over his career to craft his singular stroke, his Lynchiest of the Lynchy masterwork Mulholland Drive. That movie really settled it: Lynch was Lynch, and Lynchian was simply of Lynch. He took The King, Kiss Me Deadly, Barry Gifford, soap operas, Nine Inch Nails and everything in between and melted it all in a forge, neon lava staring back at him in his own, extraterrestrially pompadoured image.
Now David Lynch takes the long black ride down the Lost Highway. The Lost Highway is America’s great thoroughfare. Hank Williams rode it and named it. It’s just a carnival ride of mystery and darkness.
Off the road shoulder, Johnson, terrified, speaks softly with the Pig Man. Elvis is there in his black and pink suit and he’s happy he’s young again and off the pills. But Vegas is somewhere off the Highway too. Maybe looking like Hunter Thompson’s Vegas, yet there are no forced residencies. Not for Elvis. He’s at the Arcade in Memphis eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Lynch is not taking the Vegas Exit. Nor Memphis. He prefers the road and its endless night and racing yellow ticker-tape, marking the Lost Highway.
You might think this is all some myth but you’ve seen the Wolf Boy. You’ve seen the stars light up the Western Montana Fair. You’ve seen the mermaids swimming behind the bar of a dim tiki lounge in Great Falls, and you’ve seen the World’s Largest Bison and the plaster dinosaurs of South Dakota. The shapes of ghost towns and ghost motels receding in the night. The sun sets in the west but boy is it ever boiling red. You’ve seen the Carny in Chief’s weird rallies on your wild glowing screen. You’ve seen the hitchhiker from Hell.
You’ve seen the black road flowing beneath you like a snake.
hell yeah dude
Great piece -- revisited Wild at Heart recently and was curious about Gifford's writing, which I'll have to check out now (in addition to Train Dreams).