Redefining televisual apparatus A critique of the Lynchian Oeuvre

Abstract

The thesis Redefining Televisual Apparatus: A Critique of the Lynchian Oeuvre emerges from an increasing understanding of the techno-cultural evolution of the television from a broadcasting apparatus to a repository of visual culture discourses, and how an auteur like David Lynch has innovatively responded to this transformation with his aesthetic and newlineintellectual contribution. A protean artist in American cinema, Lynch has perfected his skills as a filmmaker, screenwriter, painter, installation artist, musician, photographer and actor. He has transcended the technological constraints of the mediums he explored through his innovative cinematic vision. Like great writers, he has dispersed his creative energy among different visual culture genres like film, television series, web series and short films. As Lynch has consistently experimented with new possibilities of every visual medium he has newlineadapted, the Lynchian oeuvre is ultimately a laboratory of visual culture genres. Therefore, Lynch is the most appropriate auteur to represent the transition in televisual cultures. The generic variety and the prolific creative output of his cultural productions testify to his successful confrontations with the challenges of the visual mediums. The internet has transformed the functions of the televisual apparatus as a cultural form and mass media. Television technology has mediated the conflicting demands of creativity and capital and shifted the politics of mediation from the apparatus to the discursive field. This has blurred the set boundaries between film and television or television and the web, making television transmission transgeneric or transdiscursive. The emerging processes of digital filmmaking and streaming have challenged the notions of cinema, television, theatrical experience and cinephilia. Streaming has reinvented cinema or television as web content personalized by space, time, means and ways of ccess/viewing. Streaming has also newlinedecanonized the dominance of Hollywood and other centres of cinema...