In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-size-fits-all absolutist authoritarianism and, worryingly, the moral outrage induced by the riots means a large proportion of the British public might not oppose such measures.

When such a mindset is on the verge of becoming pandemic, where do we turn? This book suggests that the work of another David, born 20 years before and 3,000 miles away from Cameron, might engender a mode of thinking which does not apprehend the world in terms of such easy distinctions. In David Lynch, we find a director whose films – by utilising the tropes of the Hollywood movie, but subverting their accepted meanings - profoundly destablise spectators, and lead them to consider things not in terms of prescribed binaries, but as complex and multi-faceted.

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