ENG 498: Senior Seminar: David Lynch's Eraserhead

Filmmaker David Lynch asserts that when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn't know what he is doing. To understand Lynch's films, Martha Nochimson believes, requires a similar method of being open to the subconscious, of resisting the logical reductiveness of language. In this innovative book, she draws on these strategies to offer close readings of Lynch's films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with Lynch himself. Nochimson begins with a look at Lynch's visual influences--Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and Edward Hopper--and his links to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, then moves into the heart of her study, in-depth analyses of Lynch's films and television productions. These include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Lynch's most recent, Lost Highway. Nochimson's interpretations explode previous misconceptions of Lynch as a deviant filmmaker and misogynist. Instead, she shows how he subverts traditional Hollywood gender roles to offer an optimistic view that love and human connection are really possible.

For nearly 40 years, David Lynch's works have enthralled, mystified, and provoked viewers. Lynch's films delve into the subjective consciousness of his characters to reveal both the depraved darkness and luminous spirituality of human nature. From his experimental shorts of the 1960s to feature films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch has pushed the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. In David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, author Greg Olson explores the surreal intricacies of the director's unique visual and visceral style not only in his full-length films but also his early forays into painting and short films, as well as his television landmark, Twin Peaks. This in-depth exploration is the first full-length work to analyze the intimate symbiosis between Lynch's life experience and artistic expressions: from the small-town child to the teenage painter to the 60-year-old Internet and digital media experimenter. To fully delineate the director's life and art, Olson received unprecedented participation from Lynch, his parents, siblings, old school friends, romantic partners, children, and decades of professional colleagues, as well as on-set access to the director during the production of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Throughout this study, Olson provides thorough analyses of the filmmaker's works as Lynch conceived, crafted, and completed them. Consequently, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark is the definitive study of one of the most influential and idiosyncratic directors of the last four decades.

This fresh contribution to studies on authorship and film explores the ways in which shared and disputed opinions on aesthetic quality, originality and authorial essence have shaped receptions of David Lynch's films. It is also the first book to approach Lynch as a figure composed through language, history and text.Antony Todd traces the development of Lynch's career from cult obscurity with Eraserhead to star auteur through the release of Blue Velvet, as well as the television event of the early 1990s, Twin Peaks. He investigates how Lynch's idiosyncratic style introduced the term 'Lynchian' to the colloquial speech of new Hollywood and helped establish Lynch as the leading light among contemporary American auteurs. Through the evidence of critical and promotional ephemera and the texts carrying Lynch's name, Todd explores contemporary manners and attitudes for artistic reputation building. He also reviews the standards by which Lynch's reputation was dismantled following the release of Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, only to be reassembled once more through films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE.This book also ventures beyond its empirical findings by addressing authorship concerns pertaining to the ways in which, and to whom, the contemporary auteur has meaning. In its account of the experiences at play in the encounter between ephemera, text and reader, Authorship and the Films of David Lynch explores how authors function for pleasure in the modern filmgoer's everyday consumption of films.

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch's work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynch's plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynch's films and signature mise-en-sc#65533;ne, Justus Nieland argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynch's films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to Lynch's art, and the prime matter of Lynch's strange picture of the human organism.   Nieland's study offers striking new readings of Lynch's major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing Lynch's experimentalism within the aesthetic traditions of modernism and the avant-garde; the genres of melodrama, film noir, and art cinema; architecture and design history; and contemporary debates about cinematic ontology in the wake of the digital. This inventive study argues that Lynch's plastic concept of life--supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world--is more alive today than ever.

A fascinating guide to the faces behind the camera. Hailed for their personal and distinctive approaches to moviemaking