Episode 184: On David Lynch

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2025

⏱️ 102 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project. To enroll in JF's new Weirdosphere course, It's All Real: An Inquiry Into the Reality of the Supernatural, please visit www.weirdosphere.org. The course starts on Thursday, Feb 6, at 8 pm Eastern. A video for the piece For David Lynch is available on Pierre-Yves Martel's YouTube channel. REFERENCES David Lynch, Eraserhead David Lynch: The Art Life Victorian Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets Norman Mailer, An American Dream Laura Adams, "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer” George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal Carl Jung, The Red Book Jack Arnold (dir.), The Creature from the Black Lagoon Noel Caroll, The Philosophy of Horror Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps his Head” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again Arthur Machen, The White People William Shakespeare, Macbeth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. This is Phil.
0:53.8	David Lynch died on January 15th, 2025, and his death has weighed on our minds, because how could it not?
1:02.7	Without Lynch, there could be no weird studies.
1:06.1	In what follows, J.F. and I make a start at unpacking all the ways he has shaped our respective
1:11.6	imaginations over the past four decades. In our conversation, we range widely over his body
1:18.1	of work, though we keep coming back to his first film, Eraserhead. Eraserhead was essentially
1:24.6	a student film, but it presented Lynch's aesthetic vision in an astonishingly
1:29.6	complete form right out of the gate. And so it's a ready point of departure for an understanding
1:35.4	of Lynch's entire euvre. We talk about all this on the show, though, and this is one episode. I don't
1:42.8	really have to explain much at the front end.
1:45.6	Anyway, my mood today is more elegiac than didactic. I don't really want to explain David
1:51.9	Lynch to you in this introduction. I just want to express my feelings about why and how he is
1:57.1	important to me. I do that in this episode, too, but here I'm going to read something
2:02.7	from an essay you'll hear me quoting later. David Foster Wallace's David Lynch keeps his head.
2:09.6	Wallace encountered Lynch's blue velvet at about the same time I did, and it had a similar
2:14.8	effect on him that it did on me, though for different reasons.
2:19.7	In 1986, I was an aspiring classical pianist finishing high school,
2:24.9	while Wallace was doing an MFA in creative writing and trying to find his voice as a writer.
2:31.0	He was despondent because, while so-called literary realism offered no path forward for him
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -51 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Ford and J. F. Martel, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Phil Ford and J. F. Martel and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.