The Philosophy Of David Lynch

From his cult classic television series Twin Peaks to his most recent film Inland Empire (2006), David Lynch is best known for his unorthodox narrative style. An award-winning director, producer, and writer, Lynch distorts and disrupts traditional storylines and offers viewers a surreal, often nightmarish perspective. His unique approach to filmmaking has made his work familiar to critics and audiences worldwide, and he earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Lynch creates a new reality for both characters and audience by focusing on the individual and embracing existentialism. In The Philosophy of David Lynch, editors William J. Devlin and Shai Biderman have compiled an impressive list of contributors to explore the philosophy at the core of the filmmaker’s work. Lynch is examined as a postmodern artist, and the themes of darkness, logic, and time are discussed in depth. Other prominent issues in Lynch’s films, such as Bad faith and freedom, ethics, politics, and religion, are also considered. Investigating myriad aspects of Lynch’s influential and innovative work, The Philosophy of David Lynch provides a fascinating look at the philosophical underpinnings of the famous cult director.

From his cult classic television series Twin Peaks to his most recent film Inland Empire (2006), David Lynch is best known for his unorthodox narrative style. An award-winning director, producer, and writer, Lynch distorts and disrupts traditional storylines and offers viewers a surreal, often nightmarish perspective. His unique approach to filmmaking has made his work familiar to critics and audiences worldwide, and he earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Lynch creates a new reality for both characters and audience by focusing on the individual and embracing existentialism. In The Philosophy of David Lynch, editors William J. Devlin and Shai Biderman have compiled an impressive list of contributors to explore the philosophy at the core of the filmmaker's work. Lynch is examined as a postmodern artist, and the themes of darkness, logic, and time are discussed in depth. Other prominent issues in Lynch's films, such as Bad faith and freedom, ethics, politics, and religion, are also considered. Investigating myriad aspects of Lynch's influential and innovative work, The Philosophy of David Lynch provides a fascinating look at the philosophical underpinnings of the famous cult director.

Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch: Philosophical Perspectives offers a sustained philosophical interpretation of the filmmaker’s work in light of classic and contemporary discussions of human agency and the complex relations between our capacity to act and our ability to imagine. With the help of the pathological characters that so often leave their unforgettable mark on Lynch’s films, this book reveals several important ways in which human beings fail to achieve fuller embodiments of agency or seek substitute satisfactions in spaces of fantasy. In keeping with Lynch’s penchant for unconventional narrative techniques, James D. Reid and Candace R. Craig explore the possibility, scope, and limits of the very idea of agency itself and what it might be like to renounce concepts of agency altogether in the interpretation and depiction of human life. In a series of interlocking readings of eight feature-length films and Twin Peaks: The Return that combine suggestive philosophical analysis with close attention to cinematic detail, Reid and Craig make a convincing case for the importance of David Lynch’s work in the philosophical examination of agency, the vagaries of the human imagination, and the relevance of film for the philosophy of human action. Scholars of film studies and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.

2017 saw the triumphant return of the weird and haunting TV show Twin Peaks, with most of the original cast, after a gap of twenty-five years. Twin Peaks and Philosophy finally answers that puzzling question: What is Twin Peaks really about? Twin Peaks is about evil in various forms, and poses the question: What’s the worst kind of evil? Can the everyday evil of humans in a small mountain town ever be as evil as the evil of alien supernatural beings? Or is the evil of non-humans actually less threatening because it’s so strange and unaccountable? And does the influence of uncanny forces somehow excuse the crimes committed by regular folks? Some Twin Peaks characters try to confine evil by sticking to their own moral code, as in the cast of Albert Rosenfeld, who refuses to disguise his feelings and upsets everyone by his forthright honesty. Twin Peaks is about responsibility, both legal and moral. Who is really responsible for the death of Laura Palmer and other murder victims? Although Leland has been revealed as Laura’s actual killer, the show suggests that no one in town was without some responsibility. And was Leland even guilty at all, if he was not in control of his own mind or body? Twin Peaks is about the quest for self-knowledge and the dangers of that quest, as Agent Cooper keeps learning something new about himself, as well as about the troubled townspeople. The Buddhist Cooper has to confront his own shadow side, culminating in the rite of passage at the Black Lodge, at the end of Season Two. Twin Peaks is about madness, sanity, the borderline between them, and the necessity of some madness to make sense of sanity. The outwardly super-normal if somewhat eccentric Agent Dale Cooper is the inspired, deranged, and dedicated shaman who seeks the truth by coming to terms with the reality of unreason, partly through his dreams and partly through his existential encounters with giants, logs, outer space, and other unexpected sources. Cooper challenges official law enforcement’s over-reliance on science. Twin Peaks is about the imagination run wild, moving from metaphysics to pataphysics—the discipline invented by Alfred Jarry, which probes the assumption that anything can happen and discovers the laws governing events which constitute exceptions to all laws.

Beginning with Lost Highway, director David Lynch “swerved” in a new direction, one in which very disorienting images of the physical world take center stage in his films. Seeking to understand this unusual emphasis in his work, noted Lynch scholar Martha Nochimson engaged Lynch in a long conversation of unprecedented openness, during which he shared his vision of the physical world as an uncertain place that masks important universal realities. He described how he derives this vision from the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion, as well as from his layman’s fascination with modern physics. With this deep insight, Nochimson forges a startlingly original template for analyzing Lynch’s later films—the seemingly unlikely combination of the spiritual landscape envisioned in the Holy Vedas and the material landscape evoked by quantum mechanics and relativity. In David Lynch Swerves, Nochimson navigates the complexities of Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire with uncanny skill, shedding light on the beauty of their organic compositions; their thematic critiques of the immense dangers of modern materialism; and their hopeful conceptions of human potential. She concludes with excerpts from the wide-ranging interview in which Lynch discussed his vision with her, as well as an interview with Columbia University physicist David Albert, who was one of Nochimson’s principal tutors in the discipline of quantum physics.

A concise but comprehensive student guide to studying Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights. It covers adaptations such as film and TV versions of the novel and student-friendly features include discussion points and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

A revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time Every frame of David Lynch's work, from the '70s midnight movie Eraserhead to the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, to the digital-video DIY feat Inland Empire, bears his unmistakable imprint. But the paradox of the Lynchian is that it's easy to recognize and hard to define. Lynch is a master of the inscrutable gesture, the opaque symbol. His career evades the usual categories: pop culture icon and subject of academic study, cult figure and industry outsider. He's a Renaissance man—musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur—and a vocal proponent or transcendental meditation. Dennis Lim, the newly minted director of Cinematheque programming at Lincoln Center, is a skilled cinephile wary of over-interpretation.David Lynch preserves the strangeness of the Lynch's universe and offers a personal meditation on the most distinctive filmmaker in modern American culture. It leaves what Lynch likes to call "room to dream," honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.

Film and philosophy have much in common, and books have been written on film and philosophy. But can films be, or do, philosophy? Can they “think”? Film as Philosophy is the first book to explore this fascinating question historically, thematically, and methodically. Bringing together leading scholars from universities across the globe, Film as Philosophy presents major new research that leads film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue. It provides a uniquely sweeping, historical overview of the confluence of film and philosophy for more than a century, considering films from Jean Renoir, Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, and others; the written works of filmmakers who also theorized on the medium, including Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein; and others who have written on cinema, including Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and many more. Representing a major step toward establishing a media philosophy that puts the status, role, and function of film into a new perspective, Film as Philosophy removes representational techniques from the center of inquiry, replacing these with the medium’s ability to “think.” Hence it accords film with “agency,” and the dialogue between it and philosophy (and even neuroscience) is negotiated anew. Contributors: Nicole Brenez, U of Paris 3–Sorbonne; Elisabeth Bronfen, U of Zurich; Noël Carroll, CUNY; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology; Gregory Flaxman, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Alex Ling, Western Sydney U; Adrian Martin, Monash U; John Ó Maoilearca, Kingston U, London; Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie U, Sydney; Murray Smith, U of Kent, Canterbury; Julia Vassilieva, Monash U, Melbourne; Christophe Wall-Romana, U of Minnesota; and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College.