David Lynch and American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel traces the work of David Lynch as an exploration of and meditation on American empire. Departing from the focus on psychology and aesthetics that informs much of the existing scholarship on Lynch, we situate his work in the context of America’s fluctuating and overlapping spheres of influence from his first film, 1977’s Eraserhead, to his recent passing in January 2025.

Lynch’s exploration of military imperialism was first made explicit in his adaption of Dune (1984) and continues through his dramatization of the Trinity tests in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Even in his more insular work, the American military and security state apparatus recur frequently as both heroes and villains, complicating any easy readings of Lynch’s political aesthetics. Lynch’s career also spans the decline of America’s status as a manufacturing superpower, and his fascination with dormant or dying industrial and agricultural towns (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Straight Story) suggests an ambivalence towards U.S. economic hegemony. Finally, the global dominance of American popular culture is a primary theme of Lynch’s later work (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), even as he increasingly turned to French studios to fund his projects. These consistent preoccupations suggest that Lynch viewed the shifting valences of American empire in the late 20th- and early 21st- centuries as fertile ground for the exploration of American identity, culture, and experience.

Our panel views Lynch’s work broadly, exploring film, television, and visual art. Topics include an investigation of Asian identity and performance in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, westward expansion and cultural imperialism in Mulholland Drive, representations of suburbia in Lynch’s painting, and belated temporalities and cultural hegemony in Twin Peaks: The Return. While Lynch has at times described his own work as pure abstraction inspired by dreams and transcendental meditation, this panel highlights traces of historical and political consciousness that manifest throughout his work in surprising, ambiguous, and ambivalent ways. Our focus on American empire in the work of David Lynch creates new spaces for an examination of the intersection between the surreal and metafictional commitments of high postmodernism and the more grounded work of social realism. Lynch’s work provides a fascinating case study of the ways in which the echoes of American empire reverberate in the unlikeliest of spaces.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Asian Abstraction at the Packard Sawmill in Twin Peaks - Lilika Ioki Kukiela, Oxford College of Emory University

• Against the American Dream? American suburbia in David Lynch’s paintings and prints - Zuzanna Wagner, Adam Mickiewicz University

• “Say I'm Driving This Buggy”: The Cowboy, American Expansion and Cultural Imperialism in Mullholland Drive - Hanna Miles

• Re-Animating the Television of Exhaustion: Belated Temporality in Twin Peaks: The Return - Mark Bresnan, Colorado State University

Chair

• Mike Miley, Metairie Park Country Day

Comment

• Mike Miley, Metairie Park Country Day

Biographical Information

Dr. Mark Bresnan is senior instructor of English at Colorado State University, where he teaches American Studies, American literature, and composition. His research examines the representation of popular culture in contemporary American literature, and his publications include articles on David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Franzen. He also teaches and mentors in the Wiki Education foundation’s Wikipedia Student Program.

Lilika Ioki Kukiela is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Lilika researches comparative racialization and comparative empires between the United States and Japan. Their dissertation examines the intersection of American Orientalism and ethnic American espousal of Japanese imperial legacies in the late twentieth century. This research is informed by Asian American literary and cultural studies, the study of global Asias, and relational ethnic studies. Research from this work has been supported by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Northrop Frye Centre at the University of Toronto.

Hanna Gabriella Miles is a final year PhD candidate and Visiting Tutor in English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she teaches critical theory and literature. Her doctoral research explores the interplay between trauma and nostalgia in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, with a particular focus on temporality, memorialisation, and material objects as mediators of experience. She is currently completing her thesis, and in the process of developing her next project: an interdisciplinary theoretical re-imagining of the souvenir. Her work is primarily concerned with the ways in which vicissitudes of memory and responses to loss intersect with twentieth and twenty-first century material and consumer cultures. Hanna holds a Master of Arts degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, both from the University of Sussex. Her work has been published in the Slavonic and East European Review, with further items awaiting publication in the Modern Language Review and the Journal of American Studies.

Mike Miley is the author of David Lynch's American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film (UP Mississippi, 2019). His work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Critique, Literature/Film Quarterly, Music and the Moving Image, Orbit, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans, where he teaches literature and directs the New Orleans Scholars Program at Metairie Park Country Day School.

Zuzanna Wagner is a curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery of the National Museum in Poznań and a graduate of art history at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. As part of her doctoral research at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University, she is developing a dissertation that critically examines David Lynch’s painting and printmaking. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of painting and cinema, as reflected in her publications, including “Physiognomies According to Lynch” [“Quart” 4 (58), 2020] and “The Cinematic Nature of David Lynch’s Painterly Hybrids” [“Zeszyty Artystyczne”, 1 (45), 2024]. She curated the exhibition “Jacek Malczewski/Lech Majewski” at the National Museum in Poznań (2024–2025).