David Lynch Predicted the Future of Entertainment

A world builder with his own mythology, Lynch obtained immortality through a bespoke creative process.

Avant garde sensibilities have crept into the mainstream in everything from The Beatles to Spongebob Squarepants, but more than any other creative entity, David Lynch gave pop culture permission to be weird. The appeal of his work exists in fragments of meaning, moods, and contradictory emotional undercurrents that oscillate from dread to euphoria and back again. Lynch made film, TV, music videos, paintings, books, and YouTube missives as a singular performative statement. He was a transmedia object ahead of his time.

When I had the rare opportunity to interview him a few decades back as a college student, I missed that crucial point. The conversation was organized by the David Lynch Foundation, his non-profit dedicated to transcendental meditation, and I went into investigation journalist mode to unearth the motives at the core of his upcoming university event. I wanted to blast the organization for misleading students into thinking they would receive filmmaking wisdom from a mastery of the form, rather than proselytizing about pseudo-science. I don't recall many specifics from our conversation (and the archives may be lost to time), but I remember that in our brief phone call, he dodged questions about how TM related to his filmmaking or whether it was disingenuous to engage with fans about his spiritual practice when they expected something more.

In retrospect, it didn't matter. TM was as much a part of the Lynch Lore as the red room in Twin Peaks or the discarded ear in Blue Velvet. Every little detail added up to an elusive whole, and if you didn't get it, well, that was kind of the point. Lynch's philosophy around living "the art life" anticipated the future of creativity in the convergence of content and personality, lifestyle and form.

Lynch delved into his process on his own terms. You had to do the work to understand that his regular quest for inspiration, one that he attributed to his twice-a-day meditation sessions, provided all the answers necessary to grasp his artistry. There was payoff, too, a strange alternative to the ease of happy endings: For all its associations with nightmarish mysteries and off-screen threats, Lynch invited us in. Yes, every green lawn hides swarms of terrible insects. Let's wade through the muck together and mine the beauty beneath the surface.

That's why Twin Peaks inspired a unique form of cult hysteria. The interpretations are endless, but the fans recognize enough substance to keep the search alive. Forget about Shakespeare: There would be no Sleep No More without David Lynch. He pioneered the notion of an immersive experience by building worlds to get lost in.

Much of the talk about the future of entertainment has been relegated to technologists, emerging media practitioners, VR evangelists, and others who tend to preach to the choir while alienating just about everyone else. Lynch didn’t play that game, but he was a futurist nonetheless. His output embodied the idea that movies are part of an interconnected artistry that audiences crave now more than ever. He created a vibe, an experience, a lifestyle, imbuing all of it with personal eccentricities and mythological dimensions that connect the dots from one work to the next.

While that may have felt radical four decades ago, it's the nature of contemporary media consumption today. If Lynch came across like "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" to Mel Brooks in the early 80s, we all live on Planet Lynch now. Irony bleeds into sincerity, nonsensical lines become memes, corruption lurks behind every promising surface, and society often has a hard time getting a grasp on reality itself. Sometimes you read the headlines or look out the window and can't help but wonder what...year...is this?

There has been a lot of analysis over the years about the "Spielberg Face," that saucer-eyed look of awe at otherworldly circumstances hovering just outside the frame. More should be said about the Lynch Face: A mixture of shock, dread, and a modicum of acceptance at the weird and uncanny circumstances right in front of one's eyes. You see it with poor Harry Spencer in Lynch's first feature, the riveting dream river Eraserhead, as he processes the sudden arrival of his alien fetus offspring; and you see it with Nikki/Sue in Lynch's last feature, the haunting noir tone poem Inland Empire, as she witnesses a ghostlike ensemble shimmy to "Do the Locomotive" before vanishing out of thin air. You even see it in the poignant and comparatively traditional The Straight Story, as countless farm people pause to watch the determination of the wizened Alvin driving his tractor down the road to find his estranged brother. Someone always bears witness to the bizarre. We are not alone in the struggle.

I suspect Lynch's legacy as a filmmaker will go down as mightier than even the most famous Hollywood directors in history, as his tight body of work has such marked consistency to it (with the slight exception of Dune, though it has a unique zany appeal that differentiates it from the grim realism of the Villeneuve versions). More than that, though, Lynch will be remembered as one of America's great mythmakers, a pioneer in the age of media expansion whose aesthetic stretches across so many planes that it almost has a consciousness beyond his own.

Lynch predicted the direction that art would go by crafting atmospheric ephemera with the uncanny ability to escape the boundaries of its creation. Silencio can be a line in a movie, but also a nightclub; Twin Peaks can be serialized television, a fan culture, or a virtual reality experience; Lynch can be a director, musician, actor, and weatherman. By remaining malleable, Lynch obtained immortality, and while he anticipated the evolution of the world, the world will never catch up to him.