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

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Harmonics of the Tree Section I: “Read? Read What?”: Words 1. Eraserhead and “The Yellow Wallpaper” 2. “Let the Wild Rumpus Start!”: Blue Velvet and Children’s Literature 3. Lonelyhearts and Locusts in the City of Dreams: Lynch and Nathanael West Cruise Mulholland Dr. 4. The Water and the Well: Lynch and McCarthy’s Nuclear Media Hyperobjects Section II: “Let’s Rock!”: Music 5. David Lynch at the Crossroads: Deconstructing Rock, Reconstructing Wild at Heart 6. Tell Laura I Love Her: The Ballad of Laura Palmer 7. “I Put a Spell on You”: Cover Songs and Toxic Masculinity in Lost Highway 8. Lynch’s Old, Weird America: The Straight Story 9. The Mixtape Aesthetics of Inland Empire Conclusion: “This Muddy Bothness” Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Miley writes clearly and insightfully on Lynch’s 'American Dreamscape,' convincingly characterizing it as 'a place where the dark and the light, the dream and the reality coexist and resonate with each other' (p. 218). Sadly, Lynch passed away in January 2025, just before the book’s publication. Recommended. General readers through professionals. 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.