David Lynch

Filmmaker David Lynch resists easy labels. He has been called a pop culture icon, a cult favorite, and an outsider to the film industry, and his movies draw on material from deep within his own imagination. They are built to unsettle the viewer's unconscious, fusing intense, clashing feelings into images that seem familiar yet remain impossible to pin down. His life is just as hard to categorize. He has worked as a musician, painter, photographer, and carpenter, has run businesses, and has spoken publicly for Transcendental Meditation.

Dennis Lim's David Lynch: The Man from Another Place is a sharp, compact study of this body of work. Rather than offering a single key, Lim approaches Lynch through several frameworks: the long-standing puzzles of the uncanny and the sublime, the creative currents of surrealism and postmodernism, and the questions Lynch raises about America and about good and evil. Lynch himself is wary of reading too much into his films, and Lim follows that lead. The book does not try to crack the codes of Lynch's art or document his life in detail. Instead, it offers different ways of looking at one of the most singular bodies of work in modern cinema, leaving room for interpretation and for the strangeness that makes the films what they are.