“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a video posted online this past spring. The clip was a teaser for a music project, and it caught the eye via the director’s old-school cool — his shades and upswept silver locks, framed in close-up. But it was another bit of business that actually held attention: the jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.
Larger-than-life screen personalities are necessarily watchable. Some also prove mysteriously listenable. Lynch is among them, a member of the small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly indebted to the textures of their speech: the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the reminiscing tones of Agnès Varda, the runaway-train enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.
Over his long career, Lynch has offered his own locomotive thrills. It begins with that unmistakable voice — what the director Mel Brooks once called his “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” In fact, Lynch’s family moved frequently, and his childhood unfurled across a wide swath of midcentury America. Along the way, his voice settled into a faintly comic register: thin and tremulous, with a hint of helium, containing both the threat of a whine and the chirpy approachability of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.
Lynch is a raconteur of some renown; he has spoken of Wookiees, decaying factories and an overfed Chihuahua who resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He enjoys folksy turns of phrase (“Golden sunshine all along the way,” he often declared in the online weather reports he used to offer) and intriguing maxims (“A washed butt never boils”). Ideas, he argues, are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” You can sense a similar pursuit in his interviews: At times he speaks as if he were reciting the words of a dimly heard incoming transmission, wiggling his fingers and shutting his eyes. Even his mundane remarks can take on an air of profundity, ringing persistently in the mind.
And sometimes, the ears. Lynch “has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal,” the actress Naomi Watts once said, describing his on-set carnival barking. “When he’s two feet away from you as well.” He’s liable to stretch out words like “beautiful,” imbuing them with the deep emotion of an explorer bringing home tales of briefly glimpsed miracles. His born-in-the-’40s diction makes matters even stranger: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”
Lynch ‘has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal.’
Those words might as well be coming from the fellow monumentalized in Norman Rockwell’s 1956 painting “The Scoutmaster,” or emitting, tinnily, from a doll whose string has just been yanked. But Lynch’s old-timey lingo coexists with his ability to talk at length about rather odd subjects — like, say, a dead cat engulfed in tar. His voice echoes his films, in which the quaintness and birdsong of small-town America are as keenly felt as the blows of violent lunatics — the signature mélange that earned him the nickname “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.”
The alien qualities of Lynch’s speech are also its fascinations. This includes his approach to pace, which recalls the rhythms of a youth spent in places like Missoula and Boise — a boyhood during which, he once told an interviewer, “meals seemed to last five years.” Lynch speaks (and works) as if hoping to renew that glacial feeling. In Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” playing the director John Ford, he manages to turn the lighting of a cigar into a long, solemn ceremony. (He gets some help from the editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar.) A similar effect enlivened his own “Twin Peaks” series: Lynch played Gordon Cole, a strident character who speaks distinctly and stares contemplatively, sometimes pausing conversations for much longer than convention would dictate. “Most directors like things to move a hair faster than I like,” Lynch has said. “If it goes too fast, something is missing.”
Listening to Lynch initiates a kind of time travel. There’s a similar power in the Golden Age of Hollywood, which abounded in striking voices: the honeyed bravado of Lauren Bacall, the querulous outpourings of Peter Lorre, the rasp and flutter of Katharine Hepburn. The voices of stars like these had a career-long uniformity. They almost always sounded like themselves and, consequently, unlike anyone their audiences would have known.
See, for instance, the 1940 smash “The Philadelphia Story,” one of myriad films to deliver the trademark patter of Hepburn and Cary Grant. Both confected their own variations on the Mid-Atlantic accent, a mishmash of British and American that was seldom heard beyond the borders of the screen. To these voices, the film added the brassy idiosyncrasies of Jimmy Stewart — the one from Earth. Today’s actors regularly aspire to “disappear” into roles — or, failing that, into a superhero costume. (As Chris Evans recently said, reflecting on his role as Captain America: “The character is the star.”) But the appeal of “The Philadelphia Story” isn’t simply its characters; it depends on a star system that offered viewers consistent personas and recognizable, mellifluous sounds.
It’s tempting to argue that this type of performance is now fading into obsolescence — that actors like Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood are among the last of their kind. James Earl Jones, as forceful a cinematic voice as any, is gone. (And Lynch’s emphysema now prevents him from directing in person, though he has assured fans that “I am filled with happiness and I will never retire”; that statement was typed, voiceless, but you can just about hear it.) Recent box-office numbers notwithstanding, it’s difficult to believe that anyone’s soul is stirred by the action-hero prattle of someone like Ryan Reynolds — or even Tom Cruise, whose cadences so often call to mind an uptight Starbucks patron insisting he was first in line. But maybe things aren’t so bleak: As moviegoers, we are still frequently within earshot of actors like Emma Stone, with her incongruously husky voice, and Adam Driver, whose cartoonish yowl can breathe new life into old tantrums. Lynch defines cinema as “sound and picture, flowing together in time.” Surprising vocal qualities are an essential part of that alliance. If mainstream American movies are to have a future, their exhilarations will have to include new and unusual voices.
Certain voices, of course, have been afforded more latitude than others. Not all the stars of the silent-film era fared well when sound was introduced. The mere prospect of Vilma Bánky’s natural Hungarian accent in 1929’s “This Is Heaven” fell on insensate ears: “Gossip columnists had a field day disparaging Bánky’s allegedly incomprehensible speaking voice,” the film scholar Donald Crafton writes. But other distinctions enchanted viewers — including, Crafton observes, “Cagney’s nasalisms” and “Garbo’s sultry guttural.” As he explains: “These voices could never really be controlled. The debate turned away from how the movies talked to what they were saying.”
Now and again the debate has turned back. “I was not what they wanted,” Jack Nicholson has conceded, acknowledging an initially chilly reception from major movie studios. “My voice was weird; it still is.” According to the biographer Patrick McGilligan, the MGM producer Joe Pasternak detected something “terrible” in the actor’s “high-pitched Jersey twang.” A colleague, however, gave Nicholson some sage advice: “Everyone you meet in this business is going to try to get you to take voice lessons. Don’t do it.”
Consider another of Nicholson’s old colleagues: Stanley Kubrick. The final shot of his final film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” does not return to the cosmic scale and lofty visual design of his earlier work, but it’s just as entrancing: a mic-drop close-up of Nicole Kidman enunciating, with her inimitable air of dreamy abstraction, a four-letter expletive. Its hypnotic power is worthy of Lynch’s go-to superlative: “beyond the beyond.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Screenshots from YouTube.
M.D. Rodrigues is a writer in Ontario, Canada. He has previously written for the magazine about Larry David’s laugh and film dissolves in “The Holdovers.”
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