The one movie David Lynch swore he’d do everything to avoid: “I will never watch it”
Every director will at least land in an uncertain predicament, finding themselves struggling against the industry’s current, with the risk of sinking an increasingly real threat, somewhere David Lynch too landed there near the beginning of his career, and it’s a miracle that he found a way out.
The filmmaker first made waves on the midnight movie circuit with the shadowy black and white Eraserhead, which offered a surreal journey into the mind of a young man forced to look after his alien-like baby and communicated the anxieties of fatherhood, sexuality, and living in a stuffy industrial wasteland, with heads falling off and singing women emerging from radiators.
Critics were sharply divided, but remarkably enough, the film found a fan in the comic filmmaker Mel Brooks, who recognised Lynch’s talents and decided to produce his follow-up movie, leading to the deeply emotional The Elephant Man, which proved a turning point for the director, who could evidently make a film more palatable and commercially accessible than Eraserhead, while still retaining a bold sense of artistry and pathos.
Thus, The Elephant Man opened the floodgates for Lynch, who was subsequently offered the chance to direct a Star Wars movie. George Lucas’ 1977 film had been so huge that, for Lynch to direct a sequel, his career would’ve taken a completely different direction, but instead, he opted to sign on to an adaptation of Dune, which had been in the works for years with various directors attached to the project.
Before this, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky had tried and failed to adapt the dystopian novels, so maybe it was this avant-garde director’s interest in the story which reassured Lynch that this could be something he too could take a stab at for a worthwhile outcome, but, sadly, the movie was a disaster.
The sci-fi drama starred Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, but the campy and over-the-top tone of the film left many audiences feeling like they’d been betrayed, faced with some cheesy space opera that didn’t do Frank Herbert’s book justice. It hurriedly condensed the material into too short a run time, and it also didn’t help that the studio majorly interfered with Lynch’s vision, resulting in something he really wasn’t proud of.
Decades later, when Denis Villeneuve decided to take his own crack at the story, which resulted in the hugely successful 2021 adaptation of Dune, with Timothée Chalamet as Paul and a much more simmering, serious tone to the narrative, that won six Oscars, Lynch vowed never to watch it, for it would be too painful.
When asked about it by Cahiers du Cinéma, Lynch flatly declared, “I will never watch it, and I don’t even want you to tell me about it, ever”.
Clearly, the franchise struck a nerve for him, whose career was almost completely destroyed following the failure of his attempt. Luckily, he quickly redeemed himself with Blue Velvet, which saw MacLachlan take on a role he was much more suited to, while Lynch proved that he was a much better filmmaker when he was working with his original ideas outside studio negging.
