The “ridiculous dinosaur” David Lynch thought cinema was better off without
One mistake people often make is assuming that David Lynch was a purist.
As one of the most respected and revered names in cinema, and especially a name that cinephiles worship, Lynch is frequently misunderstood to be the type of person who wanted to keep everything old and original – it’s not the truth.
Why do we do that, though? Especially in art, people always seem to fall into a false assumption that the greats must put tradition above all else. From film photography to recording albums on original tape machines, there’s become a kind of elitist pride in keeping things as they were and refusing to modernise.
In some ways, it makes sense. Modern artists interacting with AI are rightfully mocked and criticised. There can be a step too far when it comes to embracing the future, especially when new technology is quite literally removing human hands from artistic projects, making the very role of an artist potentially futile if people keep interacting with the evil new advances.
But in less extreme cases, new technology isn’t the devil, but can be a total saviour. If the art world refused to let anything evolve, we’d still be stuck with black and white silent movies. They’re great and all, and there’s worth there, but wouldn’t you much rather be able to engage in a technicolour world?
David Lynch wanted to, but mostly, he liked to make things easier so it could be his creativity leading the way, not being held back by irritations and annoyances that came from outdated equipment. In particular, he came to hate one old bit of kit that he was glad to see the end of, while purists might mourn the loss.
In his philosophy of letting the idea lead the way and gearing everything towards following it, Lynch celebrated new tech that made that easier. “What ProTools did for sound is just huge,” he said as an example, “It’s unbelievable the amount of control you have. It’s a beautiful world.”
With more tools at your fingertips and a far easier way of working with them, it’s a world away from how things used to be as he said, “It happened in sound first – tape, analog, is so gone. You can’t even get a roll of tape, hardly. And everything’s digital, same thing with image.”
He wasn’t mad at it, though. After working on the DVD of Eraserhead, seeing how his original film was compressed for a new format, Lynch said that watching it simply off a digital projector after digitally working on it was “the best i’d ever seen Eraserhead.”
Many would gasp at the statement as Lynch put a DVD of his own movie ahead of the analogue original, but when he paired the ease with the new quality, it won by a mile, praising the “huge sound, beautiful blacks and whites, no dirt.”
You can’t, and couldn’t, get that with analogue, and Lynch was ready to admit that and let it go. “Even though I love film, it’s a dinosaur. And everything about it is a dinosaur,” he said. Despite the love so many have for proper film, the famed director was honest enough to discuss the major issues with it, stating, “It scratches, it breaks, it’s dirty – nothing but dirt on it. And no two prints are the same. It’s a nightmare; you can hear the projectors chattering. It’s a nightmare.”
It was dead and gone to him, as in that 2006 interview, he was more than ready to embrace modernity and let go of what he called “A dinosaur. Dead. Completely ridiculous”.
