gogogo
Syndetics cover image
Image from Syndetics

The impossible David Lynch / Todd McGowan.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Publication details: New York : Columbia University Press, c2007.Description: x, 265 p. ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 0231139551 (pbk. : alk. paper)
  • 9780231139557 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 791.43 LYN
Contents:
The bizarre nature of normality -- Sacrificing one\'s head for an eraser -- The integration of the impossible object in The elephant man -- Dune and the path to salvation -- Fantasizing the father in Blue velvet -- The absence of desire in Wild at heart -- Twin peaks: Fire walk with me and identification with the object -- Finding ourselves on a Lost highway -- The ethics of fantasizing in The straight story -- Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch\'s panegyric to Hollywood -- The ethics of fantasy.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
Standard Loan LSAD Library Main Collection 791.43 LYN (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 39002100452391

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Todd McGowan launches a provocative exploration of weirdness and fantasy in David Lynch's groundbreaking oeuvre. He studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself. Hollywood is often criticized for distorting reality and providing escapist fantasies, but in Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.

Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man ; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive ; the cult favorite Eraserhead ; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-257) and index.

The bizarre nature of normality -- Sacrificing one\'s head for an eraser -- The integration of the impossible object in The elephant man -- Dune and the path to salvation -- Fantasizing the father in Blue velvet -- The absence of desire in Wild at heart -- Twin peaks: Fire walk with me and identification with the object -- Finding ourselves on a Lost highway -- The ethics of fantasizing in The straight story -- Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch\'s panegyric to Hollywood -- The ethics of fantasy.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Acknowledgments (p. ix)
  • Introduction: The Bizarre Nature of Normality (p. 1)
  • 1 Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser (p. 26)
  • 2 The Integration of the Impossible Object in The Elephant Man (p. 49)
  • 3 Dune and the Path to Salvation (p. 68)
  • 4 Fantasizing the Father in Blue Velvet (p. 90)
  • 5 The Absence of Desire in Wild at Heart (p. 110)
  • 6 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Identification with the Object (p. 129)
  • 7 Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway (p. 154)
  • 8 The Ethics of Fantasizing in The Straight Story (p. 177)
  • 9 Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood (p. 194)
  • Conclusion: The Ethics of Fantasy (p. 220)
  • Notes (p. 225)
  • Index (p. 259)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

View this excerpt in PDF format | Copyright information EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION The Proximity of David Lynch David Lynch began making films at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he initially went to become a painter. His first film, Six Figures Getting Sick (1967), which he made there, lasts one minute and repeats on a continuous loop. After directing a four-minute follow-up film, The Alphabet (1968), he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended the American Film Institute and made a 34-minute film entitled The Grandmother (1970). Each of these early shorts evinced Lynch's interest in using film as a fantasmatic medium, but it is The Grandmother that inaugurated the fundamental aesthetic structure that would dominate Lynch's feature films. In 1972, Lynch received $10,000 from AFI to make Eraserhead (1977), which he proposed as another short. After five years of preproduction, shooting, and postproduction, it became Lynch's first feature, beginning a career in the cinema that stands out like no other. Lynch's distinctiveness stems from his ability to exist within mainstream cinema and independent cinema simultaneously. His films often show at the local multiplex, and he has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director (for The Elephant Man [1980], Blue Velvet [1986], and Mulholland Drive [2001]). He is not simply a director celebrated at Cannes and ignored in Los Angeles. But his films also challenge viewers in ways that few other widely distributed films do. They contain disturbing images (like the sexual assault of Lula [Laura Dern] in Wild at Heart [1990] ), narrative confusion (like the transformation of the main character into someone else in the middle of Lost Highway [1997]), and unusual shot sequences (like the opening montage in Blue Velvet ). Lynch's films do not always receive a welcome reception among critics or the public, but the bare fact that films such as his gain widespread attention at all is startling. This book is an attempt to come to terms with the incongruity of Lynch's position within contemporary cinema and to link this incongruity with the aesthetic that Lynch develops in his films. Lynch's work has occasioned some important works of criticism, including Michel Chion's David Lynch (BFI, 1995) and Slavoj Zizek's The Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (University of Washington Press, 2000), but only one book-length study dealing with Lynch's films from a sustained theoretical perspective -- Martha Nochimson's The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 1997). For Nochimson, Lynch is the poet of the creative power of the subconscious. His films encourage us to let go of our fantasies of controlling others and access, via our empathy, the real connections between people. According to this theory, Lynch is a realist, antifantasmatic filmmaker, a filmmaker opposed to standard Hollywood practice. His films don't strike us as realistic because we are so enmeshed in an ideologically driven fantasy underwritten by Hollywood. As Nochimson puts it, "Lynch seeks to avoid the Hollywood trap of creating substitutes for life." What Nochimson's thesis leaves unexplained is the predominance of "substitutes for life" -- Hollywood fantasies -- within Lynch's films. As a filmmaker who privileges fantasy and what it can accomplish, David Lynch turns Godard's program on its head. Though both share the aim of altering the spectator's relationship to the given social reality, they go about accomplishing this in opposite ways. Whereas Godard (like many alternative filmmakers) works to alienate spectators and force them to recognize their distance from the images on the screen, Lynch tries to close this distance to an even greater extent than typical Hollywood films. If Godard is a filmmaker of distance, Lynch is a filmmaker of proximity. But Lynch does not create proximity in the way we might expect -- by deconstructing the binary opposition between fantasy and daily reality, between the outside world and the cinema. Unlike traditional alternative filmmakers, Lynch has no interest in deconstruction because deconstruction involves sustaining oneself at a distance from the opposition that one is deconstructing. Rather than complicate or even undo binary oppositions, Lynch revels in them. Not only that: he pushes binary oppositions to an extreme. In his films we see stark oppositions in character, in mise-en-scène, in editing style, and in narrative structure. This is apparent, for instance, in the opposition between the two worlds of John Merrick (John Hurt) in The Elephant Man : the propriety of Merrick's daytime existence at the hospital contrasts absolutely with the perversity and ugliness of his nights there. During the day, Treves (Anthony Hopkins) and Merrick's visitors treat Merrick with kindness and respect, whereas at night, the night porter (Michael Elphick) and the visitors he brings to see Merrick treat him as a freak, returning Merrick emotionally to his days in the carnival under the vicious control of Bytes (Freddie Jones). Some such opposition structures all of Lynch's films, and in each case Lynch sustains the opposition throughout the film, contributing to the bizarre quality of his work. Ironically, the films seem bizarre to us precisely because of the excessiveness of their normality -- another twist in the separation between a filmmaker such as Jean-Luc Godard and Lynch. Whereas Godard aims at offering an alternative to bourgeois cinema and bourgeois life, Lynch wants to embody it fully. He is, in a word, bizarrely normal. This is what separates Lynch from so many of the other filmmakers existing on the outskirts and outside of Hollywood. By taking up mainstream filmmaking wholeheartedly, he reveals the radicality and perversity of the mainstream itself. He is too mainstream for the mainstream. Through the act of taking normality to its logical extreme, Lynch reveals how the bizarre is not opposed to the normal but inherent within it. To this end, his personal idiosyncrasies function as an extension of this fundamental idea informing his films. Through the way that Lynch engages in them, behaviors central to American mythology take on an alien appearance. This leads Paul Woods to label Lynch "an All-American Martian Boy." Lynch's childhood in small-town Missoula, Montana, his success in the Boy Scouts (becoming an Eagle Scout), his daily trips to the local Big Boy restaurant, and his delivering the Wall Street Journal to finance Eraserhead all evince his embodiment of the norm in a way that causes it to seem irregular or strange. But it is Lynch's mode of dress that best reveals his relation to normality. During the 1970s, fashion dictated that the shirts of stylish men should be unbuttoned enough to reveal their chest. This style, popularized by, among others, John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) signified rebelliousness against the office dress code that demanded a coat and tie. One opened one's shirt and felt one's radicality. The more buttons unbuttoned, the more radical. The conservative option involved leaving just the top button undone. Lynch took -- and still takes -- this conservative position one step further and buttoned his shirt all the way. Without an accompanying tie, the shirt fully buttoned takes on an odd appearance, especially at a time when fashion dictates an unbuttoned look. One looks at Lynch with the fully buttoned shirt, and one sees something strange -- perhaps even radical -- but not something outside the mainstream. His attire brings to light the oddity of the mainstream itself. Lynch's style of dress is important only insofar as it follows from and illuminates his filmic project. His films are excessively normal in precisely the same way. They create a division between the realm of desire and the realm of fantasy, between the exigencies of social reality and our psychic respite from those exigencies. This near-absolute division in Lynch's films plays a major part in the quality of the bizarre that we find in them, and yet this type of separation between social reality and fantasy represents the very definition of normality. We tend to think of normality as culturally relative and thus as bereft of theoretical significance: the norm in one culture is abnormal in another; gay partners holding hands in public is normal in New York City and unacceptable in rural Kansas. But by tracing how the desiring subject comes into being, a more theoretically significant conception of normality can become visible. The desiring subject emerges when an individual encounters social demands -- demands for socially acceptable behavior -- from parents or some other social authority. In Lacan's idiom, this figure who embodies the social order and its regulations is the Other. The subject enters the social order confronted with the Other's articulated demand, but this demand conceals unarticulateable desire. We hear a demand from an authority figure -- "Clean up your room!" or "Do as you're told!" -- but we don't know exactly what the authority really desires from us. On one level, of course, the authority just wants us to obey, but no authority wants strict obedience. The unimaginative child or student who follows every rule to the letter inevitably disappoints the parent or teacher even more than the rebel. Following every rule to the letter indicates that one has not seen the desire beneath the demand. The subject receives demands from the Other, but no words can tell the subject what the Other desires. When we confront a demand, we can ask the Other what she/he really wants from us, but the Other can only answer in words, which will produce another question as to what desire those words are hiding. When, in Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) confronts the demand of Detective Williams (George Dickerson) that he put an end to any interest in the case surrounding the detached ear that he found, it is not at all clear what Detective Williams really desires. His demand is unambiguous, but one can also surmise that he appreciates Jeffrey's interest in the intricacies of police investigation. When Jeffrey defies Detective Williams' explicit demand and pursues his own investigation, he is following -- or believes that he is following -- the desire that lies beneath this demand. The point is not that Detective Williams makes a hypocritical demand but that all demands conceal some desire. The depthlessness of signifi ers -- as Joan Copjec insists, "signifiers are not transparent" -- inevitably creates a sense of mystery concerning the desire that might lie beneath. The subject's desire arises out of the encounter with the indecipherable desire of the Other, and in this sense, as Lacan often repeats, one's desire is the desire of the Other. The problem of this desire is that it is always elsewhere; we can never pin it down, just like we can never pin down the moment that is "now." For the subject within language (for every subject), it is an impossible object. As desiring subjects, we live in a world of antagonism. Desire offers us two antagonistic possibilities -- having the object as it ceases to be the object, or not having the object -- and neither of these possibilities are satisfying. But antagonism is not simply a negative category. It constitutes our sense of reality: the external world appears real to us because of the absence of the desire of the Other, the absence of the object that would offer the subject the ultimate enjoyment. But this also means that this social reality leaves us never fully satisfied as subjects. Fantasy provides a way for the subject to bear the dissatisfaction of the social reality. In this sense, it supplements the functioning of ideology and keeps subjects relatively content with an imaginary satisfaction. Through fantasy, we do the impossible, accessing the impossible desire of the Other and glimpsing the enjoyment that it promises. The Other's desire becomes a secret that one might uncover, not a constitutively impossible object that exists only in its absence. We don't necessarily fantasize obtaining this impossible object and enjoying the possession of it. Instead, fantasy constructs a narrative that explains the loss of the object and/or points toward its recovery. This narrative gives meaning to the loss of the object and transforms the impossible object into a possible one. For instance, the fantasy of humanity's expulsion from the Garden of Eden allows us to believe that paradise is a possibility, even though it is lost. Such an idea offers us a feeling of hope amidst the generalized dissatisfaction that characterizes our experience of the object as an impossibility. But fantasy is not just a private compensation for public dissatisfaction. It silently informs our everyday experience of the social reality itself and has the effect of taking some of its dissatisfaction away. Fantasy's transformation of the Other's desire allows the subject to experience a reality where the ultimate enjoyment is a possibility residing just beneath the surface of things. Fantasy bleeds into our experience of the external world and gives us our sense of the fullness of reality. But the normal subject, in psychoanalytic terms, maintains an absolute divide between social reality and fantasy -- what Freud calls the external and the internal -- and knows how to distinguish them. For the normal subject, as Freud puts it, "what is unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal; what is real is also there outside." Normal thus means no confusion of external and internal, social reality and fantasy. This idea of normality is not just a Freudian one: most psychologists -- and even most of the population at large -- accept the idea that normal subjects are those with the ability to distinguish what really happens in the world from what they fantasize. Such normality, however, is impossible a priori: no one experiences reality without some fantasmatic investment. Which is to say that what we fantasize that we will see informs what we do see. Nonetheless, according to the strict psychoanalytic definition, normality allows no such confusion, which is why psychoanalysis also recognizes that we never encounter a normal subject. There is always some slippage between normality on the one hand and neurosis and psychosis on the other. Unlike the "normal" subject, neurotics and psychotics don't experience things so clearly. The psychotic confuses reality and fantasy and experiences them as equivalent, while the neurotic seeks in fantasy a substitute satisfaction for what she or he did not find in reality. Hence, for the psychotic every experience, even a fantasmatic one, seems real, and for the neurotic every experience, even a real one, has at least a hint of fantasy. There is, in both cases, a blurring of the lines. This blurring of the lines occurs in most films as well. Narrative films typically revolve around the intermixing and interaction of desire and fantasy. Desire fuels the movement of narrative because it is the search for answers, a process of questioning, an opening to possibility. Fantasy, in contrast, provides an answer to this questioning, a solution to the enigma of desire (albeit an imaginary one), a resolution of uncertainties. In our experience of most fi lms -- films that have an evident narrative coherence -- the relationship between desire and fantasy appears seamless: we can't readily delineate the precise moment at which we pass from desire to fantasy, nor do they appear as separate realms. Instead, fantasy is constantly there, clearing up desire's ambiguities. We don't know exactly what will happen next, but we do feel secure in a reality replete with meaning -- a reality in which events fundamentally make sense. It is the task of fantasy to provide us with this sense of inhabiting a truly meaningful reality, a reality in which meaning itself is not up for grabs. The relation between desire and fantasy in film may become clearer in light of a film that offers little fantasmatic resolution -- Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000). Though one quickly adjusts to the (generally) backwards movement of the film's narration, one cannot construct an unambiguous account of the events that the film suggests have happened. No matter how many times a spectator views the film, she/he could not discover the truth of the film's central event: how the wife of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) died, and who was responsible for her death. This event motivates the action in the film, and the narrative moves in the direction of this mystery. But it remains completely enigmatic. The film prompts spectator desire for a solution but does not provide the fantasmatic scenario that would allow the solution to appear. The impossible object remains impossible even at the end of the film. Rather than providing a (fantasmatic) solution to the crime, the ending shows us only Leonard's willful self-deception that puts him on the track of someone he doesn't think is responsible. Memento sticks out because it provides a world of desire in a relatively pure form, not blending it with fantasy. In the very common films that blur the line between desire and fantasy, we never have an initial experience of desire in its purity prior to the onset of fantasy, just as we don't initially experience a question apart from some idea of an answer, or doubt without some kind of certainty. Fantasy, in other words, exists alongside desire from the beginning, structuring its very path; it isn't something added on to desire after the fact. In this sense, films that blur the line between desire and fantasy best approximate our quotidian experience of the world, in which fantasy saves us from having to endure the inherently traumatic desire of the Other unprepared. Fantasy is the set of blinders that obscures the traumatic (unanswerable) question that this desire asks of us. We can see this clearly in the case of film noir. In the figure of the femme fatale, desire and fantasy operate simultaneously: on the one hand, she is a traumatic figure for the spectator and the noir hero -- we confront her traumatic desire and are thereby reduced to the position of the desiring subject -- but on the other, she fits neatly into our fantasy frame precisely insofar as she is a femme fatale, a representative of transgressive pleasure. For instance, when Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) makes her famous appearance at the top of the stairs wearing only a towel in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and the spectator see her through the lens of fantasy -- as the licentious femme fatale. When we see her as femme fatale, we have an initial fantasmatic frame through which to make sense of her and her desire. In other words, from the beginning we know that she means trouble. All the indiscernibility of her desire that follows in the film -- up to her inability to shoot Walter near the film's end -- emerge against the background of this initial fantasmatic frame. Our relationship to Phyllis and her desire doesn't exist apart from the fantasmatic image of her as femme fatale. In Double Indemnity -- as in most films and as in our everyday experience -- the worlds of desire and fantasy overlap and commingle. Lynch's films, however, attempt to hold these worlds separate. This separation marks the beginning of Lynch's impossible cinema. The idea of a pure desire, a desire unmediated by fantasy, is itself the ultimate fantasy; desire does not exist prior to fantasy but emerges out of it. Fantasy does not simply provide an answer for the question posed by desire; instead, desire poses the question for the answer that fantasy provides. Or, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, "It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire." Hence, Lynch's depiction of the world of desire prior to fantasy would be unthinkable outside the fantasmatic medium of film itself. He uses filmic fantasy to present desire in its immediacy and thereby allows us to see precisely how desire and fantasy interrelate. Lynch's films present the distinct worlds of desire and fantasy through radical differences in form within each film. The model for his films is The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), which creates a division between the social reality of Kansas and the dream world of Oz. Fleming uses black-and-white photography to depict the dissatisfaction Dorothy (Judy Garland) feels in Kansas and color to indicate the enjoyment that the Oz fantasy brings. The first part of the film follows the logic of desire insofar as Dorothy seeks a satisfaction that seems constitutively denied to her. No one pays attention to her on the family ranch, and her only friend, her dog Toto, faces execution for his unruly behavior. In Kansas, she can long for an impossible object that exists "somewhere over the rainbow," but it is clear that she cannot attain it. The turn to the world of Oz changes Dorothy's fortune completely. She becomes the center of attention, the source of hope for others, and a hero for having killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Even the difficulties that she encounters bring an excitement and enjoyment that were impossible in Kansas. The fantasmatic land of Oz solves the dilemmas that the Kansas section of the film, the world of desire, presents as insoluble. The emergence of color photography is at once the emergence of new possibility. Though Lynch never uses this precise way of creating an opposition between social reality and fantasy, the idea of the separation itself informs each of his films. In a film like Mulholland Drive (2001), the differences between the drab social reality in which Diane (Naomi Watts) exists and the colorful fantasmatic alternative where she becomes Betty (also Naomi Watts) become almost as conspicuous as Fleming's splitting through the use of different film stock. Lynch claims that The Wizard of Oz "must've got inside me when I first saw it, like it did a million other people." He learns from it an aesthetic structure that allows him to separate two filmic worlds and then link together what has been separated, though he ultimately uses this structure to far different ends than Fleming, whose film uses the dream of Oz to reconcile spectators to the monotony of their Kansas. Taking The Wizard of Oz as his point of departure, Lynch depicts worlds of desire by emphasizing the absence of the object. These worlds are typically sparse and bland, if not bleak and desolate. The dark lighting, stilted acting, minimal décor, and an absence of movement within shots in the first part of Lost Highway , for example, contribute to the mise-en-scène that is meant to spur spectator desire. In Eraserhead , we see characters constitutively deprived of any enjoyment -- that is, stuck in the dissatisfaction and lack that is desire -- but even more, we as spectators experience our own sense of lack when confronted with an image that is largely dark and empty. These worlds of desire bombard the spectator with displays of absence. The worlds of fantasy in Lynch's films mark a defi nitive contrast. Here, the excess and heightened presence of the filmic image that we associate with cinema as such bursts forth. Rather than enduring the absence of the impossible object-cause of desire, the spectator finds indications of this object everywhere, either in specific characters like Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) populating the underworld in Blue Velvet or in the bright and colorful setting we see when Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) first appears in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Through their excessiveness, the fantasy worlds unleash enjoyment on both the characters within them and the spectator watching. As a result, they are as difficult to experience as the worlds of desire, though for the opposite reason. While watching the worlds of fantasy unfold in a Lynch film, one sees too much of the object and enjoys too much. But this alternating experience of absence and excessive presence is normality itself. By separating the realms of desire and fantasy, Lynch's films provide an unsettling insight into normality that everyday life militates against. One effect of this separation is to make clear the way in which fantasy acts as a compensation for what the social reality -- the world in which we can only desire -- doesn't provide. Unlike the social reality, fantasy provides the illusion of delivering the goods; it offers a form of enjoyment for subjects that social reality cannot -- like, for instance, the enjoyment that comes from watching a filmic narrative unfold. This becomes clearly visible in Lynch's films, however, only because Lynch maintains a separation between the world of social reality and that of fantasy, a separation as disconcerting as it is revealing. The separation between the world of desire and the world of fantasy becomes increasingly pronounced as Lynch's career develops. It is far more visible in later films such as Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive than earlier films like Eraserhead and The Elephant Man . Looking at the films chronologically, we can see Lynch constantly changing the way he creates opposing worlds, adding nuance as his career develops, but the opposition itself remains constant. Each interpretation that follows will stress how each film extends and qualifies the insights of the earlier films. We will not see a straight line of progress but a path of aesthetic exploration and increasing complexity. Furthermore, in order to examine how Lynch operates differently within the same medium (which always provides similar possibilities), I will restrict the focus in this book to his nine feature films, leaving aside his short films and his television work (including Twin Peaks ). The difficulty of the films themselves suffices without the further complications introduced by the questions of medium specificity and collaboration. The difficulty of Lynch's films does not lie so much in how subversive or radical they are, but in the fact that they offer a far more normal perspective than mainstream Hollywood film. They create an absolute division between social reality and fantasy, and this is a normality that we aren't used to seeing, either in Hollywood or in our everyday lives. As Freud points out, even the most normal subject we encounter is to some degree a neurotic; that is, she or he allows fantasy to shape her or his experience of reality. Lynch's films disconcert us precisely because they confront us with normality -- and normality seems completely foreign. But in the divide between desire and fantasy Lynch allows us to experience the cinema in a way that challenges its typical relationship with ideology. COPYRIGHT NOTICE : Published by Columbia University Press and copyrighted © 2007 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail or visit the permissions page on our website. Excerpted from The Impossible David Lynch by Todd McGowan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Todd McGowan is associate professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Powered by Koha