The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions announces itself, even before the first sentence of its introduction, as a volume intent on mirroring the director’s own “double exposure” of American optimism and subterranean dread. In the editors’ opening pages, Buck Wolf’s anecdote about Lynch’s mutilated fibreglass cow—refused a place in New York’s civic art parade yet triumphantly installed in a downtown gallery—furnishes the governing allegory: the artist who works inside the system only in order to make its surfaces bleed, and the spectator who is invited, with sardonic hospitality, to “eat my fear.” From this point forward Erica Sheen and Annette Davison insist that Lynch’s oeuvre be read less as a secret code to be cracked than as a volatile site where mainstream production practices, new media technologies and avant-garde intensities clash in real time, producing what they aptly call “dreams of America” and “nightmare visions of cinema.”
Across twelve essays, the book forms a centrifugal atlas of those collisions. It situates Lynch historically at the threshold where the late-1970s arrival of home video, the 1980s spread of the multiplex and the 1990s rise of regional independents re-wired Hollywood economics while enlarging the imaginative bandwidth for precisely the mix of grotesque intimacy and ethereal innocence that marks his films. Schneider’s anatomy of Eraserhead opens the collection by refusing all redemptive readings: the film’s power, he argues, lies not in transcendence but in its cold demonstration that horror springs from category violations—living/dead, inside/outside, human/machine—that no amount of auteurist romanticism can finally domesticate. That pronouncement reverberates through the volume, resurfacing whenever contributors describe Lynch’s blurred media textures, his spasmodic bodies or his “mutant” soundtracks as breaches in the symbolic membrane rather than puzzles awaiting narrative closure.
Philosophically the anthology refuses a single idiom. Deleuzean becomings, Zizekian loops, Baudrillardian simulacra and Freudian revenants jostle one another with the same manic energy that populates Lynch’s screen worlds. Yet the friction among frameworks is purposeful: it dramatises the very instability of viewing positions that Sheen and Davison identify as Lynch’s hallmark, and it models the “pleasure of finding new ways of thinking” that the editors hold out as the book’s polemical wager.
Because theory here is never detached from tactility, the essays revel in close phenomenological description. When Jerslev tracks the “boundlessness and ambiguity” of Lost Highway, she lingers over the film’s opening ultra-close-ups—wavering curtains, painted ceilings, grainy video snow—until the viewer’s sense of spatial logic collapses into sheer haptic bewilderment, an effect she links to Francis Bacon’s smeared flesh-scapes and to the road-movie’s dispersal of place into pure duration. Rombes, by contrast, zeros in on Blue Velvet’s queasy sincerity, diagnosing its eerie suburban tableaux as the cinematic analogue of post-punk’s refusal to anchor meaning in either parody or nostalgia; the robin that closes the film is therefore “mechanical” not because the moment is ironic, he argues, but because the boundaries between mass-produced fantasy and authentic affect have already imploded.
Sound becomes an epistemological problem in its own right. Davison analyses the “up-in-flames” score of Wild at Heart and Badalamenti’s delicately dissonant aura in Twin Peaks to show how music in Lynch is never mere accompaniment but a second plot that exposes the failure of characters to synchronise with their own desires. Richardson extends the argument by reading the series’ jazz-noir motifs as a reconstructive act: Laura Palmer’s absence can only be staged musically, so that every lush chord progression simultaneously memorialises and dismembers the phantom femme fatale.
Elsewhere, bodies themselves become acoustic chambers. Hainge likens Lost Highway’s “loopiness” to a feedback circuit in which image, noise and flesh dissolve each other, while Braziel finds in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart a Deleuzean “spilling over” where gender ceases to be a category and becomes instead a liquid state of becoming. Even Kember’s apparently gentler meditation on facial expressivity in The Elephant Man and The Straight Story ends up framing the human visage as a mug-shot: a corrupted index that both pleads for empathy and exposes the libidinal violence of looking.
What binds these divergent lines of analysis is a shared conviction that Lynch’s cinema is less a private dreamworld than a relay station where industrial practice, technological mutation and philosophical speculation intersect. The essays repeatedly return to the director’s obsessive attention to collaboration—his alliances with sound-designer Alan Splet, composer Angelo Badalamenti, cinematographer Freddie Francis—as proof that the hermetic “visionary” is equally a shrewd artisan of the studio machine, exploiting its resources even as he sabotages its comforting transparencies. Mulholland Drive, read by Nochimson as Lynch’s own Sunset Boulevard, becomes in this light the ultimate meta-parable: a luminous requiem for the dream-factory whose fragile hope resides not in resolution but in the persistence of creative labor after every system fails.
By the book’s end the reader has travelled from industrial slums to plastic cityscapes, from screeching radiator stages to the corn-gold serenity of Midwestern highways. Yet the guiding thesis remains constant: Lynch’s artistry is a method for uncovering the visceral work—psychic, corporeal, technological—through which American culture manufactures its bright surfaces and its abject remainders. American Dreams, Nightmare Visions therefore functions simultaneously as critical excavation, philosophical map and aesthetic manifesto. It asks its audience, as Lynch asks his, to keep watching even when the picture disintegrates, to keep listening even when meaning devolves into hiss, and to discover in that very act of attention a new, disturbing, exhilarating space for thought.
Simon Gros 
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