David Lynch

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 Lynchs work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynchs plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynchs films and signature mise-en-scne, Justus Nieland argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynchs films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to Lynchs art, and the prime matter of Lynchs strange picture of the human organism. Nielands study offers striking new readings of Lynchs major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing Lynchs 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 Lynchs plastic concept of life--supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world--is more alive today than ever.