Richard Green’s documentary I Know Catherine, The Log Lady has two openings. In the first, David Lynch declares, “One of my dearest, closest friends is Catherine Coulson, for sure.” In the second, a voice recording is heard playing, in which Coulson calls a mortuary on 24 September, 2015, announcing that she suspects her end is near, and asking what steps she has to take. Four days later, Coulson would indeed die, aged 71, of stage-four cancer – but not before she gave one last performance, gravely ill in her deathbed, as her iconic character Margaret Lanterman, aka Log Lady, for Lynch’s belated third series of Twin Peaks. For this swan song, aired posthumously, Coulson was playing a character who was also dying – and Lynch, who directed, and then said his good-byes, to Coulson over Skype, as though beaming in from another dimension, has himself died since, in the same year in which this documentary comes out. As Coulson says over the phone to the mortuary’s receptionist, “It’s okay, it happens to us all.”
Yet I Know Catherine, The Log Lady is as much a celebration of life as of death. Coming with a double narrative that keeps switching between the last year of her life and all the years that preceded, this is a portrait, from beginning to end, of a generous, talented woman who Twin Peaks’ co-writer Mark Frost insists was nothing like the Log Lady in real life, but rather “lively, fun and present” (‘present’ recurs as a descriptor from many of this film’s contributors). As the very title implies, her collaborations over many years with Lynch are foregrounded, beginning with her work as assistant director, assistant camera and general factotum on his feature debut Eraserhead (1977), while she was unhappily married to its star Jack Nance. Yet we also find out about her many other relationships, both personal and professional. She worked regularly as focus puller to Eraserhead’s cinematographer Frederick Elmes on films like John Cassavetes’ The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977) and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), and served as first assistant camera on Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
Yet Coulson was also a highly accomplished stage actress, part of the Bay Area’s experimental Circus Theater in the Sixties, and of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland for decades up to her death. Her determination to conceal her condition and keep performing to the very end shows her immense commitment to her art, while the range of friends and colleagues who line up here to sing her praises attests to how much she was and is loved. Yet when Annie Lundgren, a producer at Joma Films who was present during Coulson’s last filmed performance, says that Lynch, in what he knew would be his final conversation with his old friend, “gave her tips about dying, knowing that she would find out what it was like first, before him,” it is plain that this is a film not just about Coulson’s life and death, but the fate that comes to everyone. Faced with this inevitability, we could all do a lot worse than imitate Coulson’s example of living life not only to the fullest, but with immense poise and kindness.
strap: Richard Green’s documentary traces the life and death of a kind, committed actress, camera operator and mother
© Anton Bitel
