DAVID LYNCH'S EERIE SNOWMEN

As winter finally turns to spring, Catherine Corman considers David Lynch's photographs of melting snowmen.

David Lynch once said, "I like the nowhere part of America...They're little truthful places, but they're not obvious." This "nowhere" is the setting of his black-and-white photographs of snowmen, taken while driving around Boise, Idaho, where he lived as a child.

At first the snowmen are clothed and have faces, but in successive pictures they begin to melt, their features going soft, limbs melting into bodies, bodies toppling over completely. The last snowman no longer has arms or a head. It is a lopsided pile of grey snow near the side of a brick house.

In his handwritten introduction to "Snowmen", a book of these images, Lynch writes:

- old neighborhood
- gray days
* - quiet

There is an eeriness to these photographs, so quiet and grey. Unlike the "organic, violent comedies" of his earlier paintings, they hint at our mortality and capture some of the grime of suburban America. Such ordinary Christmas decorations--plastic Santas, oversized lights, unadorned wreaths--echo the bizarre/mundane aesthetic of Lynch's films. "A pine tree and a cup of coffee--the combination of those things is pretty dramatic to me," he once said after making "Twin Peaks". These snowmen melt into abstraction, their limbs and features slumping into vague shapes.

The tenderness Lynch feels for the nowhere part of America is what lets him capture these modest homes and melting snowmen. "There's the relationship of shapes, one to another, that are pleasing," he said in an interview for an essay in the Cartier Foundation catalogue of his snowmen. "And just this word 'pleasing' gets into something maybe about love."

~ CATHERINE CORMAN

Picture credit: David Lynch