David Lynch- Auteur Research

 

David Lynch is known for his surreal imagery, dark and disturbing themes and confusing yet complex and layered plots, which he refuses to explain and spoon-fed to the audience. His creative signature is very distinct and instantly recognisable to anyone that has seen one of his films before. A lot of his style also involves typical images of "Americana", the fictionalised, fantasised idea of America in the 1950s, such as traditionally American diners and tightly-knit neighbourly communities, however, this also involves tearing these ideas of a perfect society down and showing a much darker, more sinister reality beneath it all. His works that are most known for this are Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and his TV series, Twin Peaks. One of the ways he achieves this feeling is through the performances within his film, often by actors Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Jack Nance among others who he frequently casts. These performances, especially in scenes that we view as happy, are often over-dramatised. This is to show that in certain scenes maybe the emotion is being faked, as if we, as well as the characters within the film are ignoring the true nature of what is happening in the central plot. A famous example of this is the audition scene in Mulholland Drive, especially given the context of a scene just a few minutes earlier. In the scene where Betty and Rita are rehearsing the script, it is made clear within seconds they are reading from script, and towards the end of the script-reading, they burst out laughing, mocking the "soap opera quality" of the scene. However, soon after Betty goes into the audition, where the emotion behind the scene within the film soon overtakes the context of the actual film, and we forget it is being read off of a script until the end of the scene where it is abruptly broken by the director clapping. This is an example of how Lynch manipulates the audience's emotions to fit where Betty is seen to be safe or unsafe, activating our fight or flight.

The surreality of Lynch's films is also a large part of his signature style. There are multiple images within his films are well-known just for the strangeness of them. The best example of surreality in his career is his debut, Eraserhead, which has images such as the lady in the radiator, the "baby", and the man-made chickens which continue to stay with people long after watching the film due to how distinct they are.. These images also work subconsciously on the audience, a lot of films do this, however a film as strange and sometimes disturbing as one by Lynch, these are very particular images which you won't see elsewhere, giving Lynch films such a distinct tone, creating the term "Lynchian." To give them their full effect, the moments of surreality also often follow-up mundanity. Lynch achieves these images through various uses of film form. He is famous for using sound particularly, a famous example of this is a scene in Lost Highway where the "strange man" gives Fred his phone, and he begins talking to the strange man on the phone, who says he is at his house, despite him being in front of Fred, without talking on a phone or even his mouth moving, this becomes even more uncomfortable when he starts to laugh at Fred's confusion, with it echoing both directly from him and the phone. He also does this through mise-en-scene, for example in Inland Empire there is a scene where a family of anthropomorphic rabbits are in a living room, the reason this feels unsettling and disturbing is because everything else about the scene seems normal, it is in a normal living room, with a nuclear family that is also dressed normally, which feels off-putting considering they are rabbits acting human, which is a perfect example of Lynch breaking mundanity with surreality.