Kirjahaku

In this book, Dennis Lim tells the enthralling story of the legendary film director David Lynch, who has a huge cult audience. Lynch has directed some of the most noteworthy films of the last 30 years, including Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man, and Mulholland Drive. He also produced and directed Twin Peaks, the hit cult TV series from the early 1990s. The author recounts all the juicy back stories about most of his productions that have involved fights with studios, actors, and networks. Lynch is, according to Lim, a world-class eccentric with a colorful personal life: He used to date Isabella Rosselini, is a 30-year practitioner of transcendental meditation, and this past year alone, divorced his longtime companion (and producer) Mary Sweeney after only one month of marriage, introduced his own line of coffee, and conducted an Oscar campaign for Laura Dern that involved camping out on Sunset Boulevard with a live cow. He was the first major filmmaker to start his own Web site (davidlynch.com, which has content for subscribers only). Lynch's reputation and fan base have grown over the years. His new Inland Empire, a three-hour experimental film shot on murky video, broke opening weekend records at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Thousands showed up for his Barnes and Noble signing in New York two weeks ago for his new book mostly about his meditation practice, Catching the Big Fish.Lim has a hip, knowing writing style that will work well for this biography and its market demographic. Lim has access to Lynch and his inner circle and we think Lim can do a very good job of exploring the many facets of this fascinating and eccentric genius.

At once a pop culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch’s work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch’s life also evades simple categorization, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur, and vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation. David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Dennis Lim’s remarkably smart and concise book, proposes several lenses through which to view Lynch and his work: through the age-old mysteries of the uncanny and the sublime, through the creative energies of surrealism and postmodernism, through ideas of America and theories of good and evil. Lynch himself often warns against overinterpretation. And accordingly, this is not a book that seeks to decode his art or annotate his life—to dispel the strangeness of the Lynchian—so much as one that offers complementary ways of seeing and understanding one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Its spirit is true to its subject, in remaining suggestive rather than definitive, in allowing what Lynch likes to call “room to dream,” and in honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.