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David Lynch Destabilises The Spectator

This book argues that the films of David Lynch pose a radical challenge to conservative and absolutist ideologies.

In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-size-fits-all absolutist authoritarianism and, worryingly, the moral outrage induced by the riots means a large proportion of the British public might not oppose such measures.

When such a mindset is on the verge of becoming pandemic, where do we turn? This book suggests that the work of another David, born 20 years before and 3,000 miles away from Cameron, might engender a mode of thinking which does not apprehend the world in terms of such easy distinctions. In David Lynch, we find a director whose films  – by utilising the tropes of the Hollywood movie, but subverting their accepted meanings - profoundly destablise spectators, and lead them to consider things not in terms of prescribed binaries, but as complex and multi-faceted.
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  • Neofetou on Lynch is an original on an original. This book is a learned and lucid work in which Neofetou demonstrates how Lynch’s deeply entrancing filmmaking greatly destabilises the viewer into seeing and feeling outside the norm. ~ Jose Arroyo, Lecturer, University of Warwick Department of Film & Television Studies
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