Discussing the major films of this iconic director, Justus Nieland explores the range of modern design idioms that inform David Lynch's famously cinematic interiors, his work's acute attention to the shaping of affect in particular media environments, and its insistence on the strangeness of biology lived through media._x000B_Nieland resituates Lynch's experimentalism in three ways: first, by taking seriously Lynch's status as a surrealist, and by extension, exploring the status of surrealism in contemporary media culture; second, by placing Lynch's cultural production in a broader tradition of modern Romanticism; and third, by offering a sustained treatment of Lynch's aesthetics in the context of a specifically modernist and avant-garde tradition. By examining major works Nieland provocatively argues that the romantic transcendental impulse in Lynch is an historical function of modernity which produces a longing for a host of transcendental "outsides.".