Content warning: contains brief mention of alcoholism
If a director’s life cycle begins with their collaborators, David Lynch will live forever. His decades of directing screen virtuosi like Harry Dean Stanton and Grace Zabriskie comprised a steady accumulation of partners—life partners. In Lynch’s world, an actor’s career does not briefly overlap with his own; it is subsumed. Destinies unify; they share beginnings, cinematic glories, and inevitable, irreversible declines. For this unnatural connection between director and actor, there arises a natural fascination with asynchrony. What happens when the bond brittles? What happens when it breaks? What happens in death?
By the time he appears in Chris Leavens’s 2002 documentary, I Don’t Know Jack, Lynch has already survived Jack Nance by six years. Still, sitting in front of Leavens’s camera, his instinct to narrate, to direct, remains. He begins with a story—Jack Nance, as presented by David Lynch.
In early childhood, Nance was struck by a Buick en route to an ice cream parlour. His vertebrae curved under the front tire until flesh and bone sheathed the rubber entirely. When the driver stepped outside and noticed the child, and when the ambulance was finally beckoned, Jack was laid out on a stretcher, bloody, torn, and limbs loosened. His little fist, however, remained tightly clenched. Held in its white-knuckled grasp was the dime his mother had given him for the ice cream.
Jack Nance was born an Irish Catholic Yankee in Boston and raised a Southern Baptist redneck in Dallas. Raised on the pulpit, he quickly took to theo-dramatics, and then to real dramatics. By 1963, he was a fixture at Los Angeles’s infamous Pasadena Playhouse. He was audacious; it took a single audition to land the titular role in David Lindeman’s Tom Paine. Lindeman would recall, years later, that “the character didn’t exist for [Lindeman] except through Jack… On stage, he looked twice as big.”
Nance was a stage actor—his early forays into film were largely incidental. By 1971, he had two film credits and was considered for the role of Benjamin in The Graduate. (So too, famously, was Robert Redford, deemed too blonde and bronze to play the underdog. Perhaps the opposite was deemed of Nance, who had a baby-face and the drawl of a geriatric cowboy.) But California’s theatre scene in the 70s played out on the small stage. Everyone, it seemed, knew everyone. And by chance, Lynch knew Lindeman, and Lindeman knew the perfect actor for Lynch’s new work, a 21-page screenplay entitled Eraserhead.
A Nance performance is a theatre of the eye. In Eraserhead, Nance’s eyes flit restlessly around an industrial wasteland; they jut out witnessing a roast chicken spurt blood; they convulse as he punctures his newborn’s organs. “His minimalist features, unchanging expression, tight dark suit, and short, almost crippled steps suggest many silent-film comedians,” a New York Times critic wrote in 1980. “ Tellingly, Nance’s paralyzed stare of horror is the film’s most iconic image. Nance fixated on the minutiae of every movement—of the body, but especially of the eye. It was a meticulous study. Years later, in the hominess of Twin Peaks, Nance’s eye-bugging appears cartoonish, but not out of place. Where the gaze is constantly assaulted (by washed-up bodies, by alien newborn babies), the only action is reaction.
Near the end of his life, Nance’s roles were cut shorter and shorter, relegating him to the background. He accepted it. He wasn’t dogged by fame, nor was he gorged on self-importance. However, there were some problems with alcohol. On the set of Blue Velvet, the newly sober Dennis Hopper scheduled an intervention. Hopper had found Nance hunched over a window ledge, threatening to jump. For two years, Nance sobered up. He refused a role in Miracle Mile because it conflicted with his new job as a security officer. “I’m tired of waking up in parking lots,” he told casting director Billy DaMota. “It’s really important to me that I do the best job I can.” This is the Jack that David Lynch remembers, the one that exists beyond his films, clenched fist and all.
Jack Nance died on December 30, 1996, from an apparent brain hemorrhage. The day before, he had been struck in a drunken brawl at Winchell’s Donuts in Temple City. It was an unresolved homicide, and at a donut shop, no less—Premiere Magazine asked if it was “Lynchian.” Lynch rebuked:
“Oh, that’s baloney. It’s really Nanceian.”
