Take a sufficiently long road trip across America, and you’re bound to encounter something or someone Lynchian. Whether or not that idea lay behind Interview Project, the undertaking had the endorsement of David Lynch himself. Not coincidentally, it was conceived by his son Austin, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
Profiling David Lynch in the nineties, David Foster Wallace observed that “a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures — grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.”
Interview Project sticks to small-town or rural settings — Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Tuba City, Arizona — but still encounters people who may at first glance strike viewers as disturbing, menacing, saddening, forbidding, or some combination thereof. But they all have compelling stories to tell, and can do so within five minutes.
Being the subject of an Interview Project video requires a degree of forthright openness that those who’ve spent their lives in the U.S. may not recognize as characteristically American. Though often beset by a host of crises, ailments, and grievances (imposed from without or within), they don’t hesitate to assert themselves and their worldviews. Though there’s obvious curiosity value in all these eccentric convictions, regional twangs, and sometimes harrowing misfortunes, what emerges above all from these interviews is an impressive resilience. Young or old, coherent or otherwise, with or without a place to live, these people all come off as survivors.
When Interview Project first went online in 2009, it wasn’t viewable on Youtube. Now, for its fifteenth anniversary, all of its videos have been uploaded to that platform, and in high definition at that. Seen in this new context, Interview Project looks like an antecedent to certain Youtube channels that have risen to popularity in the decade and a half since: Soft White Underbelly, for instance, which devotes itself to interviewees at the extreme margins of society. Extremity isn’t the signal characteristic of Interview Project’s subjects, depart dramatically though their experiences may from the modern middle-class template. One could pity how short their lives fall of the “American Dream” — or one could consider the possibility that they’re all living that dream in their own way.
Related Content:
A Brief History of the Great American Road Trip
Real Interviews with People Who Lived in the 1800s
What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay
David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
