David Lynch on AI
Eraserhead is almost a silent movie but is no less terrifying because of it. I found every David Lynch movie terrifying. Twin Peaks is terrifying. But all in very subtle ways.
We lose a great mind tonight. It's difficult to choose a few words or a single image to summarise the life of David Lynch, the man behind Twin Peaks. He won multiple Oscar nominations for 1980's The Elephant Man, a film so terrifying I can still remember a short clip we were shown at primary school.Eraserhead, his first film, also shot in black and white, featured the improbably named Lady in the Radiator. It is this image that Maria McKee just chose to pay tribute to Lynch, and I cannot improve on the choice.
Eraserhead is almost a silent movie but is no less terrifying because of it. I found every David Lynch movie terrifying. Twin Peaks is terrifying. But all in very subtle ways.
David the man was softly spoken, painfully shy and quiet, and one of the most influential film directors of the twentieth century. Himself a fan of Fellini (whom he met in 1993) and the European arthouse movement, he was a firm believer in less is more and transcendental meditation.
There's a course on Masterclass and a documentary about Lynch's notion of something he called the Art Life, a life lived in and around the act of creation and damn the torpedoes, whatever the monetary cost. He could have been more famous, more rich, and more widely remembered had he steered towards more commercial stories.
Lynch came within moments of directing Return of the Jedi for George Lucas. This quote from Den of Geek describes the man: "Lynch has said that he 'always admired George' because Lucas 'is a guy who does what he loves.' Lynch identified with that approach because he too does what he loves, although he noted that 'the difference is, what George loves makes hundreds of billions of dollars.'”
No, David Lynch never did anything he didn't want to do. Actors were queueing up and begging for a role in the Twin Peaks revival of 2017, a series so confusing and mysterious that even this Twin Peaks fan was struck dumb for several days. Everyone loved working with Lynch. He never raised his voice, one presumes, in his whole life.
Anyone wondering how to keep their feet on the ground, keep plugging away, to ignore the crowd and live on your instincts could do no better than to study the life and work of David Lynch.
You might wonder what David Lynch would have made of AI and I can tell you from a position of certainty that he would have embraced it wholeheartedly, because he already got that chance.
