Early this year when I stumbled across a
YouTube trailer for an upcoming book titled
David Lynch's American Dreamscape, full of clips that exhibited Lynch's keen eye for postwar American iconography and landscapes, I was intrigued. I already had my own plans to tackle Lynchian Americana in a
Journey Through Twin Peaks video essay (which I will begin exploring in depth behind the scenes this month, having already outlined my ideas for this chapter), so this seemed right up my alley - and as soon as I discovered more about the book being promoted, the project felt even more resonant. Mike Miley, a New Orleans teacher who has previously analyzed game shows, developed this book from an initial series of essays comparing individual Lynch works to various novels and musical movements; intrigued by the ways this film director linked up with other forms of media, he subtitled the resultant study
Music, Literature, Cinema. I'm always keen on drawing connections and Mike's efforts are some of the more imaginative I've encountered:
Eraserhead and
Fire Walk With Me with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
The Yellow Wallpaper and Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar;
Blue Velvet with Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are; Mulholland Drive with
The Day of the Locust and other Nathaniel West fiction; the third season of
Twin Peaks, particularly Part 8, with Cormac McCarthy's
The Crossing;
Wild at Heart with the rise of rock 'n' roll as theorized by Greil Marcus; all of
Twin Peaks with the teen tragedy ballad;
Lost Highway with cover songs;
The Straight Story with
The Anthology of American Folk Music and Bob Dylan's
The Basement Tapes; and
Inland Empire with mixtapes. Drawing together the three threads, a coda parallels Lynch with David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey.
I had a great time juxtaposing images of these different works for the intro to the (otherwise mostly audio-only) video that resulted. It turns out that there are often visual as well as thematic rhymes between the works - or at least between their promotional materials, or the related images I found online to illustrate an idea. You can scroll down for screenshots of these as well as links to Mike's, my, and other's work which we ended up discussing alongside David Lynch's American Dreamscape. The first, public part of our discussion takes a broad view of Mike and his analysis: his first acquaintance with Lynch's filmography, his development of this project, and what he sees as its purpose. In the longer back section for the $5/month tier on Patreon, we dive into each of these sections in turn - with particular emphasis on those involving Fire Walk With Me - and I pose particular questions that occurred to me while reading. I was a great conversation and a fascinating book.
PART 1 on YouTube premieres at 8pm EST
Listen to...
(also premieres at 8pm EST)
