Kto ubil Loru Palmer?: David Lynch and Perestroika Cinema

• In Event: A Farewell to Communism: Audio and Visual Culture of Perestroika

Abstract

In Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (2014), an overview of the legendary American television series by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the journalist Brad Dukes recounted how Mikhail Gorbachev—a reported fan of the show—supposedly tried to leverage his connections with President George H. W. Bush in 1991 to uncover the show’s central mystery: Who killed Laura Palmer? Though likely apocryphal, this anecdote nevertheless alludes to the perhaps unexpected popularity of Lynch’s surrealist masterpiece—a postmodern blend of the horror, soap opera, and sci-fi genres—in the final years of Soviet culture. This presentation, indeed, argues that Lynch’s early filmography, namely Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Blue Velvet (1986), in addition to Twin Peaks, pioneered a dark, ironic, and grotesque cinematic style that was adopted by perestroika-era filmmakers, such as Kira Muratova, Aleksei Balabanov, and Tengiz Abuladze, among others. Like Lynch, whose phantasmagoric films unsettled the foundational myths of American society, these perestroika-era filmmakers employed nightmarishly melodramatic plots and visuals to undermine communism’s sedimented systems of thought. This presentation will establish a fruitful and altogether underappreciated connection between what Lynch aimed to accomplish in the United States during the 1980s with the politics and aesthetics of the last generation of Soviet directors. The presentation will also explore how Lynch’s films may have entered and circulated in late Soviet culture more generally.

Author

• Raymond Scott DeLuca, Emory U