“A shameful, shameful thing”: the modern cinema trend David Lynch truly despised
Cinema has changed a lot since David Lynch started making movies. It took him five years to make his debut feature, Eraserhead, which experienced significant financial issues, but once it was released in 1977, there was no doubt that he would become a seminal talent.
Sure, some critics were divided, finding the film to be just too surreal and experimental, too nonsensical and, to some, too boring. But Eraserhead saw Lynch take a bold approach to exploring alienation and fatherhood that many people recognised the skill of, like Mel Brooks, funnily enough. He offered to produce his next film, The Elephant Man, which would be a turning point for the filmmaker.
The movie retained Lynch’s unique surreal style while also harnessing a level of accessibility that led it to become a commercial success. With its beautiful visuals, the filmmaker presented audiences with a story of human cruelty which was truly heartbreaking. This is something that would come to define his oeuvre, but Lynch always knew how to find a brighter, more hopeful side. Despite the terror and the pain that informed much of his art, he always found beauty, which manifested in some pretty sublime imagery.
Even when Lynch was exploring some of the darkest facets of humanity, he did so with some incredible visuals which demanded to be seen on the big screen. Who can forget the striking red curtains and chevron floorings in Twin Peaks, the haunting chiaroscuro lighting in Eraserhead? Truly, the experience of watching Mulholland Drive, the image of the Hollywood skyline lit up in the distance, is unparalleled on a huge cinema screen; watching it on a laptop or a phone screen just isn’t the same.
That was one of Lynch’s biggest gripes with modern cinema’s development, the way that people started to watch movies on small screens, subsequently depriving themselves of a proper cinematic experience.
“If you have a chance to enter another world, then you need a big picture in a dark room with great sound,” he told The Independent, “It’s a spiritual, magic experience. If you have the same movie on a little computer screen with bad sound, and this is the way people are seeing films now, it’s such a shame. It’s a shameful, shameful thing. It’s so pathetic.”
This new landscape made Lynch uneasy, with the filmmaker adding, “I don’t know what’s happening to cinema. It hasn’t settled into what it’s going to be next”. The director couldn’t help but feel hopeless at the fact that any movie that wasn’t a huge blockbuster had limited chances of getting a good theatrical run, if at all.
“With alternative cinema, any sort of cinema that isn’t mainstream, you’re fresh out of luck in terms of getting theatre space and having people come to see it. Even if I had a big idea, the world is different now. Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you’d call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days,” he said.
So, the next time you try and watch a Lynch movie on a computer, or worse, your phone, just think about what he’d say. He’d call it “pathetic”.
