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Lynch on Prowl for American Dreams

Director takes time-out from surreal films to study reality

By Evann Gastaldo, Newser Staff

Posted Jul 21, 2009 11:30 AM CDT

(Newser) – All of David Lynch's work, writes Lee Siegel on the Daily Beast, seems to take as its starting point Norman Mailer's observation that the essence of America is the smell of gasoline and cheap perfume. For his latest project, the director of “bare-knuckle surrealist films” takes a 20,000 mile road trip to interview 121 Americans with hardscrabble lives in marginal places. The result, The Interview Project, is an elegiac and affecting web documentary that records the kind of lives that are “the elementary materials of his movies before they become fictions.”

"His subjects are always people with what more sophisticated types like to call ‘humble’ lives,” Siegel continues. “Some are sad and seem beaten by life.” Was Lynch reaching for a political statement, about "the futility of Red State existences?” Siegel wonders. Unlikely, since “his team’s self-effacing, even gentle camerawork and editing would belie any such plan.” More to the point, perhaps, Siegel notes, "In Lynch’s work, people are more exposed to life’s naked elements in America than they are just about any place else."

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American film director David Lynch poses for photographers after a press conference in Rio de Janeiro , Monday, Aug. 4, 2008. (AP Photo/Ricardo Moraes)

Film director David Lynch poses during a ceremony as Lynch is to be named Officer in the Legion of Honor, at the Elysee Palace in Paris in this Oct. 1, 2007, file photo. (AP Photo/Vincent Kessler, file)

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David Lynch describes his Interview Project. (kafardeur)

David Lynch interviews Jess for his Interview Project. (lynchmann777)

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For Lynch, the reality of the American dream is in marginal American places, where rough mobility and desperate sexuality collide and people have no buffers between themselves and life’s hard knocks. - Lee Siegel

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Lynch on Prowl for American Dreams