A film-maker as unique as David Lynch would struggle to emerge in present-day Hollywood because of audiences’ shorter attention spans and the influence of social media on their ability to concentrate, according to collaborators of the director.
Lynch, who died in January 2025 and would have been 80 on Tuesday, was celebrated for his complex, funny and unnerving films and TV work, including Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, all made in his distinctive “Lynchian” style.
Mary Sweeney, who worked with Lynch as an editor, was briefly married to the director and has a son with him, said he would struggle if starting out now.
“He had his own logic and his own way of telling stories: it was very funny, very scary and deeply connective in terms of psychology and emotion with the audiences,” she said.
“I think that the dissipation of our concentration and the way the digital world has permeated people’s lives whether educationally, emotionally, socially, or sexually – that is really functionally different in terms of our cognition and I don’t know if David, who was so firmly planted in his own imagination, would succeed.”
Sweeney said that for people to embrace film-makers such as Lynch, it was important for them to be more in touch with their “analogue life and their sensory life”, rather than digital.
Lynch started out with his surreal first feature Eraserhead, and then created more award-winning and otherworldly films including Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, the latter winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1990.
He received three best director Oscar nominations (for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive), and was given an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2019.
Not everyone liked his work; the critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave 1997’s Lost Highway their disastrous two thumbs down rating, which Lynch then used on promotional posters around Los Angeles.
Arguably, his most popular work was the landmark TV show Twin Peaks, which first aired in 1990 before Lynch brought the show back for Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017.
He was an advocate of transcendental meditation, setting up the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005.
Often the meaning of Lynch’s work was opaque, which led many fans to obsess over “solving” his puzzles. Sabrina Sutherland, who worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks and Inland Empire, said the mysteries at the heart of the films were meant to be open to interpretation.
“David left it open to the viewer to come up and formulate their own ideas, and whatever it means to you is the meaning of the piece,” she said. “Nobody has the answer.”
Lynch, a lifelong smoker, died after being diagnosed with emphysema. Sweeney, who wrote The Straight Story and is a professor at the University of Southern California, said she and their son, Riley, tried many times to encourage him to stop smoking.
“Just a couple weeks before he died and we were Zooming with David and he out of the blue said: ‘You know, you tried to make me stop and I wouldn’t listen to you.’ It was heartbreaking.”
Lynch’s films are being celebrated in a new season at the British Film Institute, which is called David Lynch: The Dreamer and includes screenings of Lost Highway, Inland Empire and Eraserhead.
Earlier this week, Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, encouraged directors to make shorter films in order to create better experiences for audiences.
Recent critically acclaimed films have gone of the three-hour mark, such as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes) and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (215 minutes).
“I talk to producers about this and say: ‘Tell the director you’re making the film for an audience, not the directors,’” she said.
