The Thousands

Has David Lynch just become a friendly caricature of American oddness? I mean, once you turn 60, start evangelising about meditation, and release your own brand of coffee – how strange can you really be?

A new five-disc DVD collection gives a before-and-after glimpse of Lynch’s career. You can start with the industrial nightmare of fatherhood that is ERASERHEAD, and then wash your mind clean afterwards with his early short films like the adorable THE FRENCHMAN AND THE COWBOY. New work includes all the episodes of the awful, abrasive, and strangely addictive DUMBLAND: crudely drawn cartoons of a suburban hell that feel like you’re mainlining Lynch’s pure id.**This is all wrapped around a new feature-length documentary, filmed during the gestation of INLAND EMPIRE. It’s like a virtual reality tour of his creative process, fascinating and irritating in equal parts. It doesn’t give away many mysteries; how could it? Lynch himself doesn’t know what the hell will result when he improvises these cinematic experiments – but he deserves full points for his determination to find new techniques and technologies to keep his alternating current flowing.