Part I. David Lynch's Do's and Do-nuts
A man walks into a South Pasadena donut shop, across the
street from his house. He is struck on the head during an
ensuing altercation with two young Latino men. The following
day he is found dead in his home as a result of the physical
trauma received the previous evening. So what, right? Well,
when one learns that the victim was a friend of the director
David Lynch and had also acted in many of his films, this
rather unsensational occurrence takes on an entirely
different character. First of all, given Lynch's relative
celebrity, one's curiosity might become piqued where it
might not otherwise have been. More importantly, however,
the addition of Lynch into the equation prompts one to graph
onto the events described a certain sur-reality, to recast
the event through what one might understand to be Lynch's
sensibilities, to give more consideration to the latent
irony of the situation as Lynch might choose to represent
it (donut-good/death-bad). In other words, there is a
compulsion to view the event described above in abstract,
non-literal terms.
After all, the world that Lynch puts forth on screen is not
an alternate reality-it's just an abstract representation of
everyday reality. Rather than abstractions of Form, however,
the abstractions imparted are ones of Essence. Under his
direction the camera, serving by convention as our proxy
within the film's milieu, is free to dwell protractedly on
selected items or scenarios culled from real, mundane
existence. The premiation and unusual consideration of these
otherwise unremarkable objects, however, imparts to them a
bias and scale disproportionate to our conventional
understanding. Thus, these bloated abstracts introduce what
might be described as "gravitational anomalies" within the
fabric of our consensual understanding of Reality (which is
the film's fundamental context), disturbing, to varying
degrees, the remaining contents within the system and
helping Lynch to establish his desired mood.
The role that the donut has occupied within this schema is
likewise that of a cinematic ballast. And yet, for Lynch, it
imparts, as well, certain useful connotations. An aficionado
of donuts himself, Lynch never employs them as anything
other than positive agents, carriers of grooviness and
good-feeling ("Man, they are so good!" he pronounced in a
Twin Peaks era Rolling Stone interview). They act as a
cultural referent, injecting into the mix a sense of
times-gone-by-the postwar era when coffee shops and
"doughnuts" were cultural institutions, an era of good times
and gentility that Lynch uses to great effect as a foil for
whatever sinister aberration he might choose to uncover. As
well, their toroid form and fanciful decoration must
represent to Lynch a sense of beautiful, platonic
perfection. When arrayed in full splendor upon a draped
table in one episode of Twin Peaks, they presented a
spectacle that transcended the sheer decadence represented-a
formally beautiful image, undeniably awesome and wondrous.
This abstraction that Lynch would promote, however,
necessarily strays from accepted truth. For all practical
purposes, a donut is nothing other than its physical
reality: a fried cake-it's "perfect" shape a product of
pragmatic engineering, allowing the greatest surface area to
be exposed to the frying fat in a compact manner; it's venue
no longer the polite coffee shop, but the somewhat more
perfunctory, aggressive donut shop. The latter, especially
in urban areas, is generally a 24-hour establishment, and,
as a rule, plays host to a wide variety of thugs and
vagrants, as well as the officers of the law assigned to
protect us from them. It offers a sort of sterile,
brightly-lit neutral turf where each side (really two sides
of the same socially-maladjusted coin) can consort with each
other free from fear of reprisal, a complex locus of
late-night activity with ill-defined social boundaries-a
dangerous brew of guns, latent aggression, caffeine, and
polysaccharides.
Part II. Starvin' Marvin's Inscrutable Existence
So, on the one hand, the fact that Jack Nance, a 53 year old
character actor living in South Pasadena, would meet his
untimely demise as a result of a donut-shop brawl is, in and
of itself, completely unremarkable. Those familiar with his
career, however, or more specifically, his friendship with
David Lynch which fueled his later career, will certainly
not fail to note the amazingly weird congruence of events
and contexts that this unfortunate occurrence represents.
That this man, culturally inseparable from David Lynch (who
is, himself, an ardent donut-devotee) would die a
donut-related death is an irony so pronounced that it cannot
fail to go unnoticed. And unfortunately, since the majority
of people who will ever hear of his death will, most likely,
be fans of David Lynch, it is a virtual given that news of
his tragic death will only ever be communicated as an ironic
anecdote.
As mentioned, Nance's career as an actor is inextricably
tied to David Lynch's rise as a director. As far as I'm
aware, his first role of any note was as Henry Spencer, the
beleaguered subject of David Lynch's first feature film,
Eraserhead (1976). Nance was cast in the role partially
out of convenience: he was married, at the time, to Lynch's
AFI friend, Catherine Coulson, who was Eraserhead's
assistant camera operator, and would later portray The Log
Lady in Twin Peaks. And yet, it is obvious that the
grueling, four-year production of Eraserhead allowed an
independent bond to grow directly between Jack Nance and
David Lynch. Coulson remembers that they all "became like a
family," that "Jack's and my home life became 'Eraserhead,'
and oftentimes, after we were through shooting, David would
come over and we would eat pancakes at our house."
Jack Nance would go on to have small roles in Blue Velvet
(1984) as Paul, and Dune (1986) as a Harkonnen guard, and
then later appear briefly in Wild at Heart (1990) as
00-Spool. In 1987 he acted in a movie Lynch directed for
French television called The Cowboy and the Frenchman. And
four years later, Lynch's only realized American television
project would see Nance's only regular television role, as
Pete Martell in Twin Peaks. In David Lynch's forthcoming
film, Lost Highway, Jack Nance is slated to appear as a
police officer. (One wonders if donuts will figure
prominently in that role).
Outside of Lynch projects, unfortunately, Nance's work has
been intermittent and meager in scope. Apart from a small
role in Barfly as a private detective (acquired through
the influence of David Lynch), Nance's appearances have been
difficult to note. In one episode of the television drama
Crime Story, for instance, his character (another private
investigator) is killed off even before the opening title
sequence rolls. His brief appearances have also graced such
hard-to-catch films as Motorama, The Demolitionist, and
The Secret Agent Club (starring Hulk Hogan).
Given his relative invisibility within the industry, it is
difficult to gain a real sense about the man, himself, aside
from a few basic facts (he was born Marvin John Nance in
1943 and raised in Dallas, where he received theatrical
training before moving to California). And yet his
relatively meager acting skills have ensured, throughout his
intermittent work, a certain, palpable consistency of
character-a simple, plain-spoken ordinariness-which one can
suppose to be a glimpse of the real Jack Nance.
Those individuals whom I know who followed the career of
Jack Nance were always hoping that, at some point in the
future, Nance would, once again, take center stage in a
Lynch endeavor. Perhaps there was just such a project,
gestating slowly in Lynch's mind, which will now never come
to be. Perhaps having Nance's character deliver the opening
lines in the Twin Peaks pilot was, to Lynch, just such a
reprise. And yet, it is also possible that Nance never felt
or expressed the need for such exposure, that he was,
perhaps, perfectly content to take the small, obscure parts
as they occurred along the way. He was, after all, reported
to have been attracted to the role of Henry in Eraserhead
not because it was the lead, but because Henry's experiences
reminded him of feverish visions he once had during an
illness. So, perhaps he found the crazier, more absurd roles
particularly appealing, in spite of their small size.
Perhaps they liberated him, however briefly, from a
perceived plainness.
Perhaps, as well, such a disposition finally did him in.
What could it be that would cause a 53 year old man to enter
into a brawl with two young men in their twenties? Did Nance
say something to them? Did he behave in a strange or
unexpected fashion? Was he seeking to deny their perception
of him? I suppose we may never know. The only thing we know
for sure is that he's a goner. Deceased. No more. And that,
regrettably, the abstractable circumstances of his demise
might be considered to be more interesting than the reality
of his life and career.
But we can also infer that at least,
before he died, he had time to enjoy
his donuts. Man, they are so good.