Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-254) and index.

Includes filmography: pages 255-256.

Beginning with Lost Highway, director David Lynch "swerved" in a new direction, one in which very disorienting images of the physical world take center stage in his films. Seeking to understand this unusual emphasis in his work, noted Lynch scholar Martha Nochimson engaged Lynch in a long conversation of unprecedented openness, during which he shared his vision of the physical world as an uncertain place that masks important universal realities. He described how he derives this vision from the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion, as well as from his layman's fascination with modern physics. According to Nochimson, Lynch's films are not about a complex internal/cosmic life lived on an easy-to-fathom, stable, solid physical plane. Rather, his films place the complications of the consciousness in a spatial/temporal terrain that is also strange and mysterious by logical standards, and also connected in amazing ways to the cosmos. With this deep insight, Nochimson forges a startlingly original template for analyzing Lynch's later films-the seemingly unlikely combination of the spiritual landscape envisioned in the Holy Vedas and the material landscape evoked by quantum mechanics and relativity. In David Lynch Swerves, Nochimson navigates the complexities of Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire with uncanny skill, shedding light on the beauty of their organic compositions; their thematic critiques of the immense dangers of modern materialism; and their hopeful conceptions of human potential. She concludes with excerpts from the wide-ranging interview in which Lynch discussed his vision with her, as well as an interview with physicist David Albert, Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M.A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University, who was one of Nochimson's principal tutors in the discipline of quantum physics. Book jacket.