American Dreams ft. David Lynch

We’re like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?

—Twin Peaks: The Return (created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, 2017, U.S.)

“Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Suzy. Suzy is Daniela’s aunt. Enjoy the interview.” Or: “Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Darryl. Darryl is waiting to buy a ranch in Montana. Enjoy the interview.” We’re tuned into Interview Project, a web-based series of 121 video portraits directed by Austin Lynch and Jason S. The videos are about four minutes each and they were posted online every three days between June 2009 and

Figure 1.

David Lynch presents:

Figure 2.

The image scrambles while tuning in on Lynch.

Figure 3.

Welcome to Interview Project.

May 2010. Together they document the road trip Lynch, Jason S., and their team made across a small-town United States that remains unseen by the interstate traveler. It is a portrait of a nation reminiscent of John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charley) as well as Walter Evans’s American Photographs of the Great Depression, and it is in the vein of those Great-American works that Interview Project captures the dilapidated state of the American dream.

TUNING INTO AMERICA

Interview Project was produced by Absurda, the production company of David Lynch, Austin’s father, and the project is also hosted on David Lynch’s website: interviewproject.davidlynch.com. Although Lynch—David, that is—did not go along on the trip, he does introduce each of the videos, in his own Lynchian way, and above all in the same way each time. We press “play” and the scrambling image makes it seem like we’ve just powered on one of those old-school color televisions from the time color television was still a new medium. Once the image has stabilized on a close-up of his face, Lynch welcomes the viewer: “Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Spira” (Figures 1–3). As always, Lynch’s spirits are high. He is seated in front of a concrete wall and a yellow chest of drawers, while he’s wearing a blue suit and a white, tieless shirt that is completely buttoned up. His silver hair is combed yet messy and contrasts nicely with the wall. Cut to a medium-long, awkwardly high-angled shot that shows him sitting at a giant desk in a space that Lynch followers will recognize as his Los Angeles studio, from where for a while he also broadcast his odd daily weather reports, and which also forms the setting for the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (d. Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, U.S./Denmark). Like so many others in this online era, Lynch has been working a lot from home lately. On his desk—messy-arranged as Lynch himself—there is an ashtray, a box of drawing utensils, a red shiny ball the size of an apple, a steaming cup of coffee (brewed, we assume, from his own signature blend), while a ray of sunlight casts all of this in a homely glow. “Spira used to dance to The Doors at the Whisky-a-Go-Go.” Cut to the original camera position. Lynch smiles: “Enjoy the interview,” upon which the intro dissolves into a disclaimer that “the views expressed in these interviews are those of the participants alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Interview Project or its sponsors.”

The portraits themselves are utterly sincere slices of American life. Take episode 3, which shows Kee, whom the team met in a Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona (Figure 4). “Hello, my name is K, K.J., I go by K.J., but my name is Kee Jackson.” Kee is framed in close-up against the backdrop of the red rocks of the Arizona desert. His mouth twitches, he seems a little nervous...