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

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