Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The other day I came across the clip above on Gawker, which is taken I guess from David Lynch’s introduction to his film Inland Empire, but here it has been Youtubed into a parody of an iPhone ad. Needless to say, Lynch is not too happy with the idea of you watching Eraserhead on your cell phone. In the clip, Lynch says that “You will never in a trillion years experience the film…you’ll be cheated.” He then goes on to call the situation, “Such a sadness.”

First of all, a trillion years is a really long time. Second of all, it’s not really up to him anymore, is it? I mean, is it better to see the movie in a crowded theater when the film is preceded by twenty minutes of previews and commercials, only to have people sitting all around you talking and chomping on popcorn the entire time (not to mention getting, and actually answering, calls on their cell phone?). This versus maybe watching it on an iPhone at home, in a comfy chair, curled up and cocoon-like. Which is the more intimate experience?

Yes, a big screen is great, but to think that true cinema can only be experienced inside a theater is going to lead people like Lynch locking us immobile into seats a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, forcing us to watch movies with our eyes pried open (heaven forbid we blink and miss something). Instead, Lynch needs to realize that, as a filmmaker, he has lots of control behind the camera, and none anywhere else. Where and how people watch his films is not up to him. Like when a Woody Allen character years ago joked about reading Finnegans Wake on rollercoaster; hey, it’s our choice to do so. And if Lynch, or other directors (Spielberg has been similarly dim and caustic when it comes to things like this), think that it’s not, then they’re going to limit their audience wildly, and this is going to only hurt, and not help, their careers.

In the end, a big screen is not going to make a bad movie good, nor will a small screen make a good movie bad. True, it might add up to a different experience, but so do a dozen other factors (all of which are out of the control of the filmmakers). Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction from directors since they get pushed around so much by the film companies (even boy-genius Orson Welles saw pretty much every post-Kane movie recut to some extent by his studio bosses). But the truth is that the control, in a digital age, is in the hands of the consumers. And if Lynch or anyone else doesn’t like that, they’d better stop making films all together. If not, they can face the alternative: their film playing in a theater, but the theater is empty.