David Lynch will face difficulties making films in social media landscape, collaborators say | David Lynch

A film director as unique as David Lynch would have a hard time breaking out in today’s Hollywood due to audiences’ short attention spans and the impact of social media on their ability to focus, according to the director’s collaborators.

Lynch, who died in January 2025 and would have turned 80 on Tuesday, was celebrated for his complex, funny and unnerving films and television works, including Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, all made in his distinctive “Lynchian” style.

Mary Sweeney, who worked with Lynch as an editor and was briefly married to the director and has a son, said he would have a difficult time starting work now.

“He had his own logic and his own way of telling stories: it was very funny, very scary, and deeply connected in terms of psychology and emotion with audiences,” she said.

“I think the dissipation of our focus and the way the digital world has permeated people’s lives whether educationally, emotionally, socially, sexually — that’s really functionally different in terms of our perception and I don’t know if David, who was so entrenched in his imagination, would have succeeded.”

For people to embrace filmmakers like Lynch, Sweeney said, it’s important for them to be more in touch with their “analogue lives and their sensory lives,” rather than digital.

Beginning with his surrealist debut film Eraserhead, Lynch went on to create more award-winning films and other films including Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, the latter of which won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

He has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director (for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and Mulholland Drive), and received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.

Not everyone liked his work. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave 1997’s Lost Highway their disastrous two-point rating, which Lynch then used on promotional posters around Los Angeles.

Arguably his most famous 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 a proponent of Transcendental Meditation, and established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005.

The meaning of Lynch’s work has often been ambiguous, leading many fans to become obsessed with “solving” his mysteries. 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 for the viewer to come out and formulate their own ideas, and all that matters to you is the meaning of the piece. No one has the answer,” she said.

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 her son, Riley, tried several times to encourage him to stop smoking.

He added: “Just two weeks before he died, we were doing a Zoom with David and he suddenly said, ‘You know, you tried to get me to stop and I didn’t listen to you.’ It was heartbreaking.”

Lynch’s films are celebrated in a new season at the BFI, David Lynch: The Dreamer, which includes screenings of Lost Highway, Inland Empire and Eraserhead.

Earlier this week, Claire Baines, creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, encouraged directors to make shorter films in order to create better experiences for audiences.

Recent critically acclaimed films have surpassed the three-hour mark, such as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes) and Brady Corbett’s The Brutalist (215 minutes).

“I talk to producers about this and say, ‘Tell the director that you’re making the movie for the audience, not the directors,’” she said.