David Lynch: The Art Life

David Lynch: The Art Life (2017) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and Olivia Neergaard-Holm, it follows Lynch from a quiet Midwestern childhood through increasingly unsettled student years in Philadelphia, tracing the formation of the sensibility behind Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive.

There are no talking-head interviews, no archival clips of cast and crew. Lynch sits in his studio, paints, smokes and talks. He describes smells and sounds from specific places — a backyard, a street corner, a school hallway — and you start to see exactly where the images came from.

His daughter Lula appears beside him for brief moments, and those scenes feel different from the rest: quieter, warmer, less guarded. For anyone trying to understand how Lynch's imagination actually works, this is the closest he ever got to explaining it. Stream David Lynch: The Art Life (2017) online on iFILM.