Filmmaker David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946.

The director of films including Mulholland Drive (2001) and Dune (1984) and the tv series Twin Peaks (1990) is one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema.

Inspired by the Twin Peaks-inspired fanzine Wrapped in Plastic, Justus Nieland author of the UIP book David Lynch, examines what he terms Lynch’s “plastic concept” of life.  In the Contemporary Film Directors series examination of Lynch’s work Nieland writes:

David Lynch’s corpus has undergone its own plastic embalming. The evolution of his filmmaking career—from the midnight-movie success of Eraserhead (1977), his astonishing first feature, to critical darlings like Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990)—dovetailed with the academic consolidation of postmodernism, a cultural logic Lynch’s films came to embody for the likes of Fredrick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, both of whom have written brilliants about Lynch.  The postmodern Lynch came prepackaged with its own theory of plastic, the ur-material in Lynch’s aesthetic of of depthlessness and superficiality, semiotic excess and cliche.  Plastic named Lynch’s detached emotional orientation—cold, ironic, and insincere. Plastic materialized Lynch’s relationship to history and the political, at once nostalgic for a past that never was and shrink-wrapped against the realities of the present.

Watch David Lynch make quinoa: