In his 1995 essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace has trouble finding a place for the filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch’s films straddle genres; as Wallace notes, their appeal extends to the Hollywood crowd, and curiously retracts from it. Perhaps the only thing one can say about a Lynch film with any certainty is that it’s inherently Lynchian – but what exactly does that mean? Wallace seeks an answer. Lynchian might refer “to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter,” he writes in a mock academic tone. ”But like postmodern or pornographic,” Wallace continues, “Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively – i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread was thoroughgoingly Lynchian.”  … Read More