Against the American Dream? American suburbia in David Lynch’s paintings and prints

• In Event: David Lynch and American Empire

Abstract

The American suburbs of David Lynch’s upbringing exerted a profound influence on his art since the 1960s. This influence is particularly evident in Lynch’s landscapes, populated by uniform, single-family homes set amidst neatly manicured lawns. One could argue that, through his paintings and prints, Lynch illustrates the rapid expansion of suburban, homogeneous single-family houses that took place in the United States after 1950. As an expression of economic prosperity and political stability, this expansion was closely linked to the concept of the American Dream. Suburban life in a safe, shelter-like home was an ideal widely pursued, shaping the vision of America as a land of happy people. This vision is conveyed through distinct symbols — emblems of the American way of life — obsessively reproduced in Lynch’s paintings and prints. These emblems — understood in the spirit of Bennett M. Berger — consist of readily recognizable symbols such as patios, barbecues, and lawnmowers, which could be easily arranged into an image of the lifestyle intensively promoted in postwar America.

However, in Lynch’s art, these emblems are always accompanied by a critical perspective that exposes the superficiality of the American ideal. Much like in his lithograph American Hieroglyphs, the symbols of a “radiant America” are juxtaposed with images of an airplane, a gun, and a bomb — echoes of the Cold War that foreshadowed the end of "the American Century." In his works, Lynch appears to unequivocally compromise the idea of the American Dream, pointing to the crisis of an America that continues to feed on the mythologized images of the 1950s.

This critical tone is consistently revealed through the formal treatment of Lynch’s paintings – his paradisiacal vision of an American idyll is rendered in dark color palettes, with motifs submerged in a tactile, repellent mass of synthetic materials. The houses depicted by Lynch, rather than being shelters, are perpetually haunted by an external intruder — like a mythical phantom threatening the American paradise. A similar approach characterizes Lynch’s prints, where he submerges American emblems in a damp environment of smeared and diluted black ink. This technique serves as an act of deconstructing what aligns with Derridean notions of “being at home-shelter”.

How does the American Empire and its political-economic landscape disintegrate within Lynch’s painted landscapes? Do the violent suburban scenes reflect the artist’s anxieties about the unstable reality in which he lives as a U.S. citizen? In seeking to answer these questions, this paper will explore the ways in which Lynch demythologizes the American Dream through his representations of suburbia in painting and printmaking. While peripheral to his directorial practice, Lynch’s visual art will be interpreted as a foundational element from which his cinematic vision emerged.

Author

• Zuzanna Wagner, Adam Mickiewicz University