10 Theories That Help Explain The Works Of David Lynch

7. Cinema Of Attractions

One analysis of Lynch's work that has dominated much academic discussion is that he is obsessed with the idea of film as being a purely experiential medium. In other words, he is more interested in making his audience "feel" something than actually creating a story that can be easily followed. This ties Lynch in with the notion of a "cinema of attractions", a term most frequently applied to the early days of cinema (late 1800s-early 1900s). During film's infancy, the most exciting aspect of seeing a piece of film wasn't the notion of a great piece of storytelling. Rather, it was the thought of this new and incredible medium itself. Pictures that move! Images from distant worlds! Think about the famous anecdote about the first screening of the Lumière brothers' "Arrival Of A Train At A Station", when audiences were so shocked by the moving images that they supposedly fled from the oncoming locomotive. Before film became preoccupied with narrative and storytelling, it was a format entirely dedicated to its visual power.

Lynch has often been quoted stating that he loves this idea of a "pure" cinema, divorced from the pressures of a story and instead playing with the beauty of the image itself. Although his films certainly have more narrative than those from cinema's infancy, he has openly explained that he deliberately creates sequences entirely for their emotional and aesthetic impact, rather than their importance to the story:

It's so magical to go into a theatre... You go into a world. Cinema is a language... It's so beautiful to something that can be done only through cinema... When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it... A film should stand on its own.

The director knows that he isn't creating a novel. Stories are exciting, and he enjoys the storytelling aspect of his films, but he much prefers the sounds and images that can be evoked in a wondrous piece of cinematic art. The ubiquitous red drapes in his films, which usually appear in scenes that are revealing something to the audience, represent that moment when "the lights go down, it's very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they're red". Lynch wants to show something to his audience beyond a simple story - he wants them to experience the same emotional attachment to film as a medium that he maintains.