This book is a guide into the world of the cinematic unconscious, the hidden, the secret, the terrifying. The starting point for this exploration is David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE—a rich intertext that never fully reveals its secrets.
In an effort to unravel, understand, and organize the director's chaotic and veiled messages, the author inevitably places the film within a broader artistic context and discovers both obvious and hidden parallels with the imagery of other 20th- and 21st-century artists: Franz Kafka, Francis Bacon, Lars von Trier, Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dalí, Edward Hopper, Alfred Hitchcock, and others.
David Lynch is a unique director who needs no introduction. Yet, what do we know about the machinery that shapes and functions his films? What are these strange, absurd, and disturbing images woven from? In the sacred territories of what works of cinema, painting, and literature do Lynch's films grow and thrive? All this and much more is part of the subject matter of this book, which lifts the curtain on the artist's art, passion, and madness.
Dmitry Pozdnyakov is a researcher of the history and theory of cinema and visual art, and a cultural scholar.