Lynch follows themes found throughout American fiction, especially that with a Puritanical background:<\/p>\n
\nHe follows an intrinsically American moralistic obsession with the ideas of innate depravity (13).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nLynch’s villains… are drawn from the same archetypes that populate American fiction (13).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n… effigies of anomie, incubi of chaos, are particularly American demons (14).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAmerican national identity: that of the individual battling not only the wilderness — nature itself — but the sundry demonic and heathen creatures as well (14).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Two American dream myths:<\/p>\n
\n
- Old Testament: paradise lost<\/li>\n
- New Testament: new American paradise<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\nIn other words, American writers and critics seem inherently preoccupied with guilt, sin, and redemption (15).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Is it Americans or Western (i.e. Christian) writers\/critics?<\/p>\n
… All of these themes place Lynch into the American Gothic lineage of artists. Johnson notes that John Alexander, in The Films of David Lynch<\/i>, makes the same conclusion.<\/p>\n
Regarding the ideas of cynicism and irony in Lynch’s films:<\/p>\n
\nnostalgia is never ironic for Lynch (15).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThe trouble is, Lynch believes in the clich\u00c3\u00a9. His irony, in practice, seems more like self-defense (17).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Puritanism:<\/p>\n
\nequated the growth of the nation with the realization of a virtuous national character (16).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\na view to improving the moral character of the individual, and to reflecting thereby a virtuous nation protected, if not by God, then by sound moral reasoning and self-righteousness (16).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nestablishing a normative value against which a convenient “other” could be constructed (17).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nidentifying “good” as “not that” (17).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
On religion and the good\/evil split:<\/p>\n
\nevil was not a feature of reality, but a lack of goodness. The more good a thing has, the more real it is. God being all good, was most real (18).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nJohn Calvin, whose concept of Christianity relied on the inherent depravity of man (18).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nCalvin also taught that worldly success was a sign of God’s approval, poverty a sign of God’s disfavor (18).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
On the American Romantics (aka American Gothics)<\/p>\n
\nembrace a darker vision of man’s relationship with himself and the world (18).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n[The authors are] men seeking truth in the dark crevices between the material world and the imagination (19).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In Lynch’s movies:<\/p>\n
\n[Lynch’s characters] are forced to rely on their intuition more than their reason, frequently surrendering themselves to inexplicable forces beyond their conscious control (19).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nguilt results from their imagination acting to remove them from the immediacy of perception (20).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nLynch deliberately blurs the binary distinction between dreams and reality, hesitating to separate too distinctly the conscious and unconscious minds (21).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nHe subverts expectations, allowing dream logic to leak seamlessly into the surface story. Narrative information — the string of events and images that shape the storyline — often ends up performing the theme instead of representing it. His films, in this sense, do not stand for another meaning but become the meaning: the narrative sequence does not transcend itself (21).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lynch follows themes found throughout American fiction, especially that with a Puritanical background: He follows an intrinsically American moralistic obsession with the ideas of innate depravity (13). Lynch’s villains… are drawn from the same archetypes that populate American fiction (13). … effigies of anomie, incubi of chaos, are particularly American demons (14). American national identity: … Continue reading The Po-Mo Puritan<\/span>