Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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Freud Behind David Lynch’s Red Curtain Finding Sigmund Freud Behind David Lynch’s Red Curtain

Throughout Wild at Heart, David Lynch finds ways to repeat and expose feminine trauma, often bookedended with jokes and throwaway gags. Filled with sickly rooms, dark corridors and oppressive small towns, David Lynch’s work often generates feelings of claustrophobia and confinement. With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. In the intervening 35 years I have produced and/or directed over 80 arts documentaries for television and contributed to over a dozen documentary series. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one.

Having become bored with painting, horrified by teaching, but completely obsessed with the movies, I began programming independent cinemas in 1977, and was Co-Director of Cinema at the ICA in London from 1979 – 1984. In the cinema’s main auditorium hangs grand red velvet curtains on the stage where the speakers presented their papers. Rather than presuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity to the mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work. Approaching this mutual territory from contending directions, an important unification is achieved through the essays in this spirited collection: what appear to be opposing modes of uncovering the most obscured patches of human consciousness are revealed to not just share complementary features.

Freud/Lynch book launch: A Twin Peaks Day event SOLD OUT Freud/Lynch book launch: A Twin Peaks Day event

Mulholland Drive proves surprisingly amenable to the dream logic explored by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, so let’s see where it takes us. Join us at the Freud Museum for an evening of Lynchian quirks in the former home of Sigmund Freud as we mark the launch of the new book: Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain (2022). Lynch, who once told an interviewer, "I love dream logic," would surely agree with Sigmund Freud's famous claim that "before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms. His most recent books are Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (Karnac 2014) and Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film (Routledge 2014). I shall here focus in particular on the theme of voyeurism, which also implicates us as spectators, and on the symbolic significance of the cut-off ear, the film’s iconic and emblematic MacGuffin.Her interests include cinematic representations of identity, femininity, the unconscious, love and mental illness. David Lynch is known for creating luxurious cinematic dreamscapes – infuriatingly beautiful mind puzzles in his signature surrealistic style. I hope to draw out some Lynchian lessons about the structure of desire and the function of the law, and to offer some psychoanalytic reflections on some of Lost Highway‘s many enigmas.

Freud and Lynch: An unlikely match, a shared enterprise Freud and Lynch: An unlikely match, a shared enterprise

Jamie Ruers is an art historian specialising in art and culture from Vienna 1900 and Surrealist art and film. The curtains were the perfect motif that connected our two subjects: David Lynch uses red – and blue – velvet curtains that line otherworldly settings in Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990–1991), and Mulholland Drive (2001).It was an exciting event held at the Rio Cinema, an independent movie theatre in Dalston, East London.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain, ed. by Jamie Ruers and

Lynch’s unwillingness – or inability – to openly discuss the meaning of his work has enticed and frustrated audiences and critical establishments alike since the emergence of ‘Eraserhead’ in 1977. Here, they discuss the Freud Museum London conference which inspired their debut book, Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain , an edited collection which explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud.She has published six books including Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic.