Humor as a deconstruction tool in the work of David Lynch

Abstract

The author of the work raises the question of the role of humor in the context of David Lynch's work. The author argues that the director's humor is one of the few conventional director's tools that can be categorized and studied in detail. The author explains this degree of “simplicity” of the director’s humor phenomenon by the author’s conscious strategy of introducing “known” elements into the works to establish communication with the viewer and their subsequent deconstruction to break the automatic perception and create a situation of “anxious viewing”. The author also explains the emergence of a situation of "anxiety" in Lynch's works by the fact that in the process of deconstruction the director mixes various discourses, connecting "funny" and "creepy", "known" and "unknown", "sublime" and "base". The key thesis of the work is the idea that humor, as Lynch's directorial tool, is used not only to entertain the audience or relieve them after dark scenes, but also to challenge their expectations, question classical narratives and explore taboo aspects of the human being experience. The object of the study is the cinema of David Lynch: films, series and short films of the director. The subject of the research is the phenomenon of humor in the context of David Lynch's creativity. The purpose of the work is to answer the question of how humor contributes to the processes of demythologizing a number of phenomena in American culture, deconstructing classic Hollywood narratives in the director's films and creating a sense of "anxiety" in the viewer. The novelty of the study lies in the conclusion of humor in a separate category and its separation from other strategies of the director: hyper-narratives, the process of absurdization of screen action, postmodern intertextuality.