The Dark Arts of Cinema: Inside the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts
I’m in the back of a nondescript passenger van weaving through the Hollywood Hills. I’m here for the reason I promised myself I’d never be here for; A tour of Hollywood studios and production companies with a film school. Despite my best expectation management, I’m completely engrossed with one final meeting with a filmmaker best understood as an untamed lion of auteurism. He’s here living in this sun-cooked circus, surrounded by tentpole features erected by an unseen autocratic force of agents and producers listening to algorithms and box office numbers.
The door glides open. I pile out with a dozen MFA students who spent the past two years studying, critiquing, and discussing the work of their chosen luminary. As I exit, a grey Brutalist-style building stands before me, about three hundred feet below Mulholland Drive. It’s more contemporary art museum than home. We are welcomed into a side entrance that opens up to a spacious recording studio. I take in a mix of analog and digital recording devices, neatly organized below a projection screen. I grab a seat in the center of movie theater-style seats. Next to me is a barbaric black ashtray that gleams in the light. This is the home studio of filmmaker David Lynch, a modern sanctum for original ideas.
After enrolled in his namesake cinematic institution, The David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts, based at the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, it’s essential to provide an account of a school not well known. It’s one of the more affordable and accessible cinematic institutions far from the culture of mainstream Hollywood and further from the rigid curriculum of elite universities. Master Class just released a David Lynch course on creativity and film, so I find it fitting to reflect on the experience.
Much is written about Lynch as a way to interpret his films, but I’m writing this essay to understand my own experience with The David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts and how I came to be entangled in the mysterious magnetism that pulled me further into the subconscious, offering a new perspective on art and life.
The Maharishi University of Management was founded on the teachings of the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The university’s primary methodology is Consciousness-Based Education, forming their academics around Vedic practices and knowledge. I found the confluence of a Lynch writing program and Vedic philosophy to be aligned with the Transcendentalists Movement, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman, to name a few. It was a movement in American literature in the early 1800s based on the belief that its institutions had corrupted the purity of the individual and that people are at their best when genuinely self-reliant and independent.
The David Lynch MFA Screenwriting program started in February 2017. It was formed in a time following the 2016 election and the rising chorus of #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, and the litany of objections pressing the film industry to do better. At that point, I had been working as an assistant director and independent film producer in New York City. For 10 years I had facilitated the visions of directors and producers who controlled vast expanses of the entertainment industry. From the foundation of Netflix to studio tentpoles, I saw a range of ideas forming the complex societal and viewer shift facing Hollywood on the ground floor. By late 2016, work in the industrial lots of film studios started to feel more like an Upton Sinclair novel than Sunset Boulevard. I needed to get out, get a fresh perspective, and start writing a better version of the industry.
I was hesitant to pursue an MFA for reasons that would hold anyone back pursuing higher education in America. I found myself at a juncture where I was the only person I knew who could or wanted to do something about the industry. I knew at a young age there would come a moment in my life when I’d pursue writing full time and craft more serious films. I didn’t imagine then I’d be doing it for reasons like social justice, global warming, income inequality, and access to education.
I discovered the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts Screenwriting MFA through a simple announcement that crossed my feed. Its low-residency aspect made it possible to maintain my life in New York City. It’s methodology and mentorship practice aligned with everything I desired, and the location in Iowa was something born out of the simplicity of an American pastoral idea much like it’s founder. When I informed my baby-boomer parents I was enrolling in Maharishi University, they warned me about the brainwashing effects of chanting ceremonies. This, of course, had the opposite effect and only deepened my resolve to journey into the heartland.
When I first arrived at Des Moines Airport, I was greeted with a normal skyline, stock photos, and fat-reduction advertisements. But as I peeled away, the cityscape became lost in the infinite cornfields that produce the raw materials of modern American living: ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, and whiskey. One cigarette-selling truck stop and a traffic-less 119-mile drive southeast is the rural municipality of Fairfield, Iowa, home to Maharishi University of Management. It’s an idyllic, peaceful setting in Grant Wood’s plains, juxtaposed with the ideas of an eastern community. In some sense the campus and student body could be described as a Midwest Amherst or Hampshire; I’m sure discourse about the comparison would ensue amongst Ultimate Frisbee teams.
The university and the town of Fairfield are incredibly welcoming. It appears to be a quintessential Midwestern town, but the rural backdrop provides an ongoing intellectual discourse between the blue-blooded “Townies” and the “Roos” (as in guru). The school cafeteria, aptly named Annapurna, serves only vegetarian dishes. Architecturally the university is spotted with Vedic-style homes, two large Golden Domes for meditation, and, at the center, a Tower of Invincibility rises above the campus.
The screenwriting MFA program is led by Dorothy Rompalske, formally a screenwriting professor at Brooklyn College. She too was escaping an increasingly unequal and gentrified New York City for Iowa, where she would run a program based on fostering a new generation of cinematic voices. For two years I had the privilege of being surrounded by an incredibly diverse group of classmates, from horror to rom-com writers. They quickly became the most inspiring group of people I have come know. A vast array of talent, yet all understanding of one another, unified in our sense of the progress and change we want to see in the industry.
As part of the university’s practice, Transcendental Meditation is taught to each student, instilling what I found to be a profound sense of peace and self-awareness. David Lynch carries a torch for TM and the work of Maharishi through his life and work. He created the David Lynch Foundation, which works with at risk populations such as the homeless, U.S. military veterans, war refugees, prison inmates, and participates in successful crime reduction programs throughout the county.
My friend and fellow graduate student Selena Burks-Rentschler, a filmmaker from Cincinnati, Ohio, describes her experience:
“I felt incredible support and encouragement from my peers, instructors, and staff. I wasn’t someone who meditated regularly before I enrolled. After I learned and practiced the TM technique, I was surprised by the gradual transformation it had in all areas of my life. My ego, anger, and long-standing insecurities began to melt away over time as my creativity, patience, and confidence grew in my writing. I was able to root out my anxious thoughts and listen to my artistic voice. I gained my creative freedom as well as a new family of friends from this experience.”
In two years, my work ranged from writing features and shorts to TV pilots. My studies explored the many screenwriting methodologies in structural theory, character, and dialogue. I explored visual abstractions, nuanced philosophical conversations about race, sexual identity, gender, and spirituality. Lynch’s work and our individual understanding of it opened us up to many of these discussions. Professor Martha P. Nochimson, a scholar on Lynch who has written several books analyzing his films; touched on everything from quantum physics and behavioral psychology to progressive feminist theory. I found this to be wildly stimulating for my work and creative endeavors.
After Nochimson’s class, I started to realize something so rare about Lynch as an artist and filmmaker. I’m reminded of this quote from Poe:
“There is no exquisite beauty … without some strangeness in the proportion.”
Lynch inspires an original aesthetic, something I find to be missing throughout many films that appeared to be jeopardized by our institutions. The school felt more appreciative of unique, rare, and bold ideas. The setting felt more like an artist’s studio than something institutionally manufacturing my work. It was uncanny that, for a brief moment, I found myself in a place that deeply cared about an original narrative.
“Our education is something that runs deep in all of us,” said by Sir Ken Robinson, who has the most viewed TED Talk of all time. “We’re educating people out of their creative capacity.” Many have to struggle through a faulty American education system that stigmatizes mistakes and setbacks as failures and dismisses original thought. Coupled with expensive universities, it delivers a one-two punch to our ideals and our finances. In a world where the growing ideal profession is Influencer, a barrage of obsessive means of self-optimization or branding, and originality overlooked for market viability before the wholeness of an idea takes shape; In a society seemingly falling into the monoculture of genre dictated by publishers and studios, the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts appears to be a clear outlier.
Like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Lynch’s films usher in a new understanding of our humanity and art. A type of genius that comes along once in a generation that flips the world upside down, all for the pleasure it brings. To the masses, it may be avant-garde; to those who speak the language of cinema, these are defining moments in our humanity.
David Foster Wallace said it best:
“Imagine you’re a hyper-educated avant-gardist in grad school learning to write. But at your grad school, all the teachers are realists. They’re not at all interested in postmodern avant-garde stuff. They take a dim view of your writing, you assume because they just don’t happen to like this kind of aesthetic, but actually because your writing isn’t very good. Amid all this, with you hating the teachers but hating them for exactly the wrong reasons, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet comes out. Not only does it belong to an entirely new and original kind of Surrealism, it shows you that what the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
Throughout the residencies I met filmmakers and writers like Susan Seidelman, who directed the seminal 80s picture Desperately Seeking Susan; Kate Purdy, who wrote the phenomenal award-winning Bo-Jack Horseman episode “Time’s Arrow”; screenwriter and speechwriter Roger Wolfson, who became my mentor in the final semester, whose work in Hollywood and Washington deeply resonates throughout society. I must also mention TV writer Chad Gervich - Screenwriting professors Roz Sohnen, Adam Nadler, and Alex Kustanovich. Their time and commitment offered to me was invaluable.
I also had the opportunity to speak with the writer-director Peter Farrelly, who had just started working on his now Academy Award-winning film, Green Book. Farrelly shared incredibly personal insights into the business and his creative process, and gave the MFA program a well-rounded sense of things in contrast to Lynch. It was in the meeting of Lynch and Farrelly that I noticed finer egalitarian ideals overlapping. Each mentor was so different in their individual body of work, yet all were drawn in by this force that brought us together. All were so gracious with their time, and many of the relationships that were fostered between mentor and mentee have become long-lasting.
At the end of the MFA program is a Los Angeles residency, a trial run “water bottle” tour. We were welcomed into many of these places with interest and intrigue. The end of the residency culminated in a face-to-face meeting with Lynch himself at his home studio. At the beginning of every semester, we were asked to come up with questions for David. We would do so one last time in person.
David walked out of a side door and greeted us with a smile. We cheered. When you have someone like David Lynch as the force guiding your academics, it’s both strange and electrifying. In prior conversations, David pressed me on always insisting final cut, something many studios refuse to give younger filmmakers. This time I asked him about the space we were in. Lynch’s head drifted upward, and his eyes gazed forward above the seats and described time and space in only the way David Lynch could; he informed me that Fred Madison’s head in Lost Highway laid in a bedroom where I was sitting. He went into the details of how he had built his studio and the projects it’s been used for over the years.
My writer peer Nichol Himmel mentioned that, as Michelangelo got more spiritual at the end of his life he lost the urge to create paintings, sculptures; it didn’t fulfill him as it had before. She asked Lynch if he had ever experienced that. He said he never felt that. The desire to give up art was never there. As the new season of Twin Peaks was released during our residencies and as we concluded our final semester, Lynch had mostly taken to painting.
Lynch’s affection for decay and his fearless ability to explore the dark and strange recesses we collectively experience is evidently unique amongst the landscape of American higher education. Where many universities are afraid to go, this one celebrates the conflict. His simple reminders to us throughout the program ring so clearly when you’re looking for answers to complex questions that have no firm answers. His experience with this catharsis was never gleamed over by the romance of it. He never impressed a right or wrong way, but effortlessly transferred his dark art to us.
