Auteur Study: David Lynch and The Americ

The course explores the work of David Lynch, one of American cinema’s most singular figures. We will consider Lynch’s narrative features, experimental shorts, and TV series, as well as his painting, photography, and music. One of our aims is to situate Lynch within (and alongside, and against) Hollywood and other cinematic and artistic traditions, while also suggesting connections, overt and otherwise, to a range of filmmakers and artists who have come after him.

At the heart of our investigation is Lynch’s distinctive sensibility, which is at once easy to recognize and hard to define. By looking closely at his use of cinematic language, we will ask how Lynch’s films achieve their particular effects, and how they might give form to the desires and fears of their times. Drawing on multiple frameworks — including politics, place, gender, race, surrealism, spirituality, trauma, psychoanalysis, narratology, language, and architecture — we will examine the contradictions at the heart of the Lynchian aesthetic and its relationship to the myths, icons, and taboos of postwar America.