David Lynch’s American Dreamscape

Music, Literature, Cinema

Mike Miley (Loyola University New Orleans, USA)

$180

Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Publishing USA
06 March 2025

Film theory & criticism; Individual film directors, film-makers; Easy listening, MOR music; Literary studies: general

How are David Lynch’s films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones?

By interrogating this question, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch’s filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch’s films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch’s work engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. As much as Lynch stands as a singular artistic voice, his work arises from and taps into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that illuminates not only his approach to creativity but also the way works interact with each other in an age of mass media. From children’s literature to teen tragedy ballads, Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy to folk music and mixtapes, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape investigates the cultural frequencies Lynch’s films tune into and positions Lynch’s work as a conduit for American popular culture, a medium or channel through which the subconscious of American life finds its way into full view. The book expands upon this approach by discussing how artists such as David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey graft Lynch’s affiliative, cinematic sensibility onto their own projects. Reading their work as intertextual engagements with Lynch’s films further illustrates the versatile interactions among creators and audiences to generate more works, readers, and readings.

By: Mike Miley (Loyola University New Orleans USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9798765102930
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 06 March 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Mike Miley is the author of Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film (2019) and co-editor of Conversations with Steve Erickson (2021). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic.com, Arizona Quarterly, Critique, Literature/Film Quarterly, Music and the Moving Image, The New Orleans Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans.

Reviews for David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema

In David Lynch’s American Dreamscape, Mike Miley presents a fascinating new approach to Lynch’s films, treating their intertextuality in a way that expands rather than restricts our understanding of them. Miley adroitly connects literary, filmic, and musicological perspectives in an analytical approach that will prove invaluable and accessible to scholars from many fields in their study of Lynch, one of our most idiosyncratic American filmmakers. Following Lynch himself, Miley’s book gives us more ‘room to dream’ around the filmmaker’s work. * Katherine M. Reed, Associate Professor of Musicology, California State University, Fullerton, USA, and co-editor of Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (2021) *