The Passion of David Lynch

Wild at Heart in Hollywood

Martha P. Nochimson

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780292755666
• eBook ISBN: 9780292748996
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

"This is the best book on David Lynch that has yet been published. Nochimson's book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary cinema." —Brian Henderson, former chair of the Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo
 
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.
 
"Nochimson deftly deploys a mixture of feminist criticism, the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, and an intriguing blend of Jungian and Freudian concepts to make one of our most complex filmmakers seem quite accessible after all." —J. P. Telotte, Film Quarterly

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: David Lynch at a (Feminine) Glance, or Her Eyes Were Moving, but She Didn’t Know It
• 1. Portrait of the Director as a Surfer in the Waves of the Collective Unconscious
• 2. “I Just Met the Good Witch”: Wild at Heart
• 3. “The Magician Longs to See”: Twin Peaks
• 4. “Seeing Something That Was Always Hidden”: Blue Velvet
• 5. “The Stream Flows, the Wind Blows”: Dune, The Elephant Man
• 6. “Please Remember, You Are Dealing with a Human Form”: Six Men Getting Sick, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, and The Alphabet
• 7. “If You Are Falling in Space”: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• Coda: The Passion of David Lynch: The Lady or the Highway
• Appendix: Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Credits for Illustrations