David Lynch, Pervert or Priest?

What a delightful title for a book this is and quite an apt one, given the subject! I haven't read the book but some excerpts from the book are available on Google Print. Here is what the author says in the preface:

When I began viewing his features, I found each film the same: one long Manichaean screed delivered by a wacky evangelical. Lynch's zealotry was so pervasive that after my view-a-thon I could not look at any of his work--randomly in fragments, or through entire films--without identifying his moralistic slant toward mythological ideals of goodness, charity and benevolence threatened by forces of evil, calamity and violence. I was convinced that the moral frame in Lynch's work, so archetypically judgmental, condemnatory and culturally monological, would surely cause commentators to qualify Lynch's status (as a cult film hero of the bizarre) with his "calling" as a puritanical preacher, albeit one with a penchant for pornography

I had never thought of this before, and it is strange because it is so obvious! I always thought Lynch was a progressive liberal showing how hypocritical and total sham our lives of bourgeois normalcy are. How false and deceptive the appearances are and how they hide and imprison our real selves (specially our sexual selves, which almost always results in violence and perversion), more in the tradition of Luis Bunuel, only more in tune with the pop-culture and counterculture hipsterism. Like Bunuel, he shows us the possibilities of the anarchic freedom but what is important is that, unlike his predecessor, Lynch is a stern moralizer too. He doesn't just shows, he also condemns and passes judgments at what he shows. He is a voyeur and a pervert but he is also genuinely horrified at what he sees. None of this is of course a negative criticism against his work, which is without doubt the greatest among those of contemporary filmmakers.

I also found out that one of the leading lights of the lit-crit and theory brigade Slavoj Zizek (who writes obscure books on Lenin and Lacan) has written a short tract on Lynch's Lost Highway. One of the users has this insightful comment on Amazon:

[Zizek]finally hails Lost Highway as an example of what movies can become in the future, a sort of hypertexed jungle of possibilities and superimposed realities, where the viewer can control (or believe they can control) the outcome of the film.