I Don't Know Jack

Jack Nance stood listening to the rain pound against the windowpane. On the phone, down miles and miles of line, his wife, adult film actress Kelly Van Dyke, was sobbing hysterically that if Jack left her, she would kill herself. "Jack," she said, "if you hang up this phone, I'm going to kill myself," she threatened. Just then, the phone line, due to the storm, went dead.

Nance quickly went to the bungalow of his director on the film he was shooting, Meatballs 4, Bob Logan, and told him, "Bob, I think my wife may have just killed herself." Logan and Nance headed to the local sheriff's office, where the officer on duty picked up the phone, dialed, and began to shake his head sadly.

"Jack, she didn't make it, Jack."

Such tragedies were the shadows cast across the life of actor Jack Nance, who most famously portrayed Henry Spencer in David Lynch's 1977 cult classic avant-garde horror film Eraserhead, a film that saw one image of him—his hugely-coiffed head floating against a backdrop of "pencil eraser dust" with a transcendent, virtually hypnotic otherworldly gaze—become a cultural icon. Before the days of easily accessible internet streaming, Eraserhead was a much sought-after, coveted videocassette find for the cult film enthusiast. Now we assume everyone that ever wanted to see it has, and can draw their own conclusions.

Jack Nance is remembered in this video documentary of his life from 2002 by friends, colleagues, and David Lynch himself, the man who helped propel Nance into stardom and who fondly remembers the eccentricities and foibles that marked the very strange and difficult actor's brief span. Also appearing are actors such as Wayne Grace, ex-wife Catherine Coulson, Charlotte Stewart, Catherine Case, and "Frankie" Phipps-Wilson, with whom Jack starred in Eraserhead and also the "Doo Dah Gang," a performance art theater troupe in which he portrayed Prohibition Era gangster "Tony Rebozo." (Jack also portrayed his brother.)

Jack's brothers appear here, recounting his brief moments of clarity and good fortune, as well as the depths of drunkenness and substance abuse that would create for him a tortured path in the backwaters of film production, often relegating him to roles in films that seem straight from the dustbin. His brief sojourn on Twin Peaks as "Pete Martell" buoyed him for a brief space before his death. Dennis Hopper, who appears here as an interviewee, probably extended Nance's life by ten years, helping him into an actor's rehab.

Nance, alas, let the demons that drove him—his sense of being the eternal "outsider," what actor Wayne Grace describes as the "mad man" (mad as in gifted with unpredictable, unstable genius)—take hold. He once shot out a television screen in his favorite hotel room because he couldn't stand Sam Donaldson. Actress Charlotte Stewart opines that Jack, whose—at the very least—strange death after an altercation with two suspects never apprehended while walking home from a doughnut shop, would have "loved the fact that his death was ruled an 'unsolved homicide'." She perfectly imitates Nance saying this, and it sticks in the viewer's mind as the final culmination of this strange, troubled life.

Nance's final scene is no stranger than his beginning, and his life will forever be associated with Henry Spencer, the protagonist in Eraserhead who lived trapped inside the clanking, grinding, hissing, and repellent world born in the subconscious of director David Lynch. After viewing I Don’t Know Jack, you may be no closer to knowing him than before. Some figures walk through the shadows of the world—a world they didn't make—until, as in the opening music sung by Brantley Kearns, the "Sweet Chariot" comes for them, carrying them, if not to Heaven where, (in the words of murdered musician Peter Ivers who sang the song in Eraserhead), "Everything is fine," at least to the place wherein they are finally a part of the Universal One. For Jack Nance, whose long shadow was still longer than anyone ever knew, it's a rest well deserved.

I Don't Know Jack (2002)

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