David Lynch is one of the most idiosyncratic and important American filmmakers. Widely recognized as an auteur with a deeply unusual and personal aesthetic, Lynch's films tend to polarize audiences between frustrated incomprehension and dedicated cult following. Love it or hate it, Lynch’s style is fascinating for its dream-like style, jarring contradictions, and compelling mysteries. Lynch presents us with a world full of secrets. It has been said that cinema represents the dreams of culture and, perhaps, no filmmaker does a better job of opening a path into the cultural unconscious. Following in the footsteps of so many of his own protagonists, this class will do the detective work of uncovering those secrets by exploring Lynch’s body of work from his early art school short films to cult classics like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, taking seriously the idea that Lynch’s work tells us something important about dreams, fantasies, and the inner workings of the unconscious. This course provides a deep dive into Lynch’s body of work where we will explore the major themes that appear repeatedly as well as those notable absences and problems in Lynch’s films; particularly around gender and sexuality, race and whiteness, violence and power. Along the way, we will take up key concepts about genre, reference, and cliché; study formal techniques in sound, image, and framing; and learn to use ideas from psychoanalysis, film studies, theories of space, sound, and the everyday, and a range of ideas about of how the unconscious influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Critical readings will include Carl Jung, Kaja Silverman, David Lynch, Todd McGowan, Slavoj Žižek, and Georges Perec, and others. [Tracks C, S]