In his wildly varied career, David Lynch has experienced cult adulation, mainstream success, virtual rejection by the film industry, and a renaissance in which he created a style that can only be called Weird Americana. Weirdsville U.S.A. charts Lynch s work from his experimental art school years and the midnight movie hit Eraserhead, the mainstream success of The Elephant Man and the commercial failure of Dune, the birth of Weird Americana with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks and the neo-noir mystery Lost Highway, to the present day and the film The Straight Story and TV series Mulholland Drive."

Director David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on the role of creating the sounds himself. This concise study explores what makes Lynch’s sonic imprint distinct, breaking down three different sound styles that create Lynch’s sound aesthetic across his films. Showing how sound offers new insights into the aesthetic and narrative work of Lynch’s filmmaking, this book highlights new dimensions in the work of a key American auteur and deconstructs the process of building a unique sound world.

This important new contribution to studies on authorship and film explores the ways in which shared and disputed opinions on aesthetic quality, originality and authorial essence have shaped receptions of Lynch's films. It is also the first book to approach David Lynch as a figure composed through language, history and text. Tracing the development of Lynch's career from cult obscurity with Eraserhead, to star auteur through the release of Blue Velvet, and TV phenomenon Twin Peaks, Antony Todd examines how his idiosyncratic style introduced the term 'Lynchian' to the colloquial speech of new Hollywood and helped establish Lynch as the leading light among contemporary American auteurs. Todd explores contemporary manners and attitudes for artistic reputation building, and the standards by which Lynch's reputation was dismantled following the release of Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, only to be reassembled once more through films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE. In its account of the experiences at play in the encounter between ephemera, text and reader, this book reveals how authors function for pleasure in the modern filmgoer's everyday consumption of films.

David Lynch’s prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has received renewed appreciation with the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. Lindsay Hallam argues that what Lynch created was not a parody of soap opera and detective television but a horror movie. She examines initial reaction to and subsequent reevaluation of the film.

This book is a major new study - dealing with notions of film music as a device that desires to control its audience, using a most powerful thing: emotion. The author emphasises the manipulative and ephemeral character of film music dealing not only with traditional orchestral film music, but also looks at film music's colonisation of television, and discusses pop music in relation to films, and the historical dimensions to ability to possess audiences that have so many important cultural and aesthetic effects. It challenges the dominant but limited conception of film music as restricted to film by looking at its use in television and influence in the world of pop music and the traditional restriction of analysis to 'valued' film music, either from 'name' composers' or from the 'golden era' of Classical Hollywood. Focusing on areas as diverse as horror, pop music in film, ethnic signposting, television drama and the soundtrack without a film- this is an original study which expands the range of writing on the subject.

The first book to focus on the soundtrack of Twin Peaks, with publication timed alongside the series return.