"In Heaven / Everything is fine
You got your good things / And I've got mine"
Salutations, loyal Seat Struck listeners. This week we're proud to kick off our long anticipated DAVID LYNCH WATCH SERIES, starting with an introduction to the filmmaker and then chatting about his debut, avant-garde body horror: Eraserhead. Joining John and Curtis for the discussion is Dr. Simon Spiegel, a Professor and Senior Researcher at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich. Since this is our first episode on Lynch, we spent a lot of time talking about his films writ-large, but also covered our thoughts on this surreal subject matter, its biographical leanings, the fascinating production history (well documented in the Criterion release) and the various elements which would re-occur in later Lynch works.
Curtis Runstedler is a Canadian postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart. His research investigates how issues of dis/trust are negotiated in human-robot interactions in contemporary English novels. His second monograph Negotiating Dis/Trust in AI Fiction is forthcoming with Routledge’s Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series. His research interests include Canadian indigenous fiction, contemporary AI narratives, and medieval literature.
John Valley is a writer, educator, podcaster, and film buff living in Ottawa, Canada. He is a patron of his local independent cinemas and a part-time instructor at Algonquin College, currently teaching a course on Science Fiction. His collected writings can be found on his Substack: Pulp Musings (https://johnnycakes.substack.com/).
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Copyright (c) 2026 Thomas Britt
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