Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Receptions in Contemporary Hollywood

by Antony Todd

This important new contribution to studies on authorship and film explores the ways in which shared and disputed opinions on aesthetic quality, originality, and authorial essence have shaped receptions of Lynch's films. It is also the first book to approach David Lynch as a figure composed through language, history, and text.

Tracing the development of Lynch's career from cult obscurity with Eraserhead , to star auteur through the release of Blue Velvet , and TV phenomenon Twin Peaks , Antony Todd examines how his idiosyncratic style introduced the term ""Lynchian"" to the colloquial speech of new Hollywood and helped establish Lynch as the leading light among contemporary American auteurs. Todd explores contemporary manners and attitudes for artistic reputation building, and the standards by which Lynch's reputation was dismantled following the release of Wild at Heart and Twin Fire Walk with Me , only to be reassembled once more through films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive , and Inland Empire . In its account of the experiences at play in the encounter between ephemera, text, and reader, this book reveals how authors function for pleasure in the modern filmgoer's everyday consumption of films.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 8, 2012

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pompous and shallow, with less intellectual content than the Rotten Tomato summaries of the films, let alone the films. (“Chapter One: Towards a Textual Historicity.”) Wields critical-theory Freudian shite to justify writing a book without any real discussion of the films, or the films' themes, or even any real biographical aspersion of Lynch-as-seen-in-his-films. Instead there is second-hand gossip dressed up as historical context and post-structuralist intertextuality (“Jaussian reception theory”: the discussion of reviews, ad campaigns, corporate manoeuvring). Materialism (in critical theory) is the position that both artwork and authors are irrelevant to the study of the artwork.

Let us, then, register modern auteurism in a reception practice whereby the authored film can compete for the reader’s attention in a coming together of inter- and extra-textual determinations through which the modern film spectator composes the aesthetic text for herself or himself...

I’m not suggesting Todd is dishonest, or intentionally vague: instead, I think film studies has convinced him that shuffling these words around is intellectual work.

Note for your calibration of my opinion: I was very much looking forward to this book (because I find Lynch watchable but confusing), and so I fell far. Also it’s been a while since I read any academic Arts work that didn’t strike me as hollow and fatally decoupled from the work at hand. Let alone its coupling to the world. I will strive to cherry-pick in future.