David Lynch and the shrinking value of imagination

When David Lynch passed away in January, social media was awash with tributes, quotes, and resurfaced lore about his approach to creativity. The director took regimental care of his imagination, cultivating a life defined by routine and reflection. By filling your daily life with predictability, he argued, you had more time to play in the depths of your subconscious. Lynch meditated twice a day for five decades, wore the same outfit, and ate chicken and mayonnaise on toast (or a chocolate milkshake) for each meal. It was a strange, spartan life. Writer Liza Campbell remembered visiting the director at his home in the late 80s, sharing her encounter on Instagram in the days after his death. “His fridge was completely empty apart from a dead hummingbird on a small saucer,” she wrote. “There was no furniture in his sitting room apart from a huge blue velvet sofa and two enormous speakers.” After the interview, Lynch asked if she wanted to listen to some music. He played her “deafening industrial clanking, sub-linguistic groans and static hissing” until her taxi arrived.

This unique approach is one of the many reasons Lynch is so loved. I’ve recently been rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return, his 2017 follow-up to the cult 90s series, and there’s one episode in particular – the eighth, titled “Gotta light”– where we see the full, dizzying scope of his vision. Hailed by critics as one of the most “artistically daring episodes in the history of American television”, it is a 50-minute musing on the origins of evil, with barely any dialogue. In it, we see an atom bomb detonate in the New Mexico desert, a faceless humanoid vomit out a head, a demonic ‘frog moth’ scurry into a girl’s mouth. We see the giddy joy of a first kiss, followed by a man getting his skull crushed with one hand. (Lynch never elaborated on what any of this meant, naturally). It was unsettling when it was first broadcast eight years ago, but watching it now feels even more so, if only for how rapidly times have changed. Would this kind of show be commissioned by streamers today? Could a young, oddball director release a debut as fucked up as Eraserhead now? Would it get enough traction, even if they could? Given the fact that Netflix turned down Lynch’s “wackadoo” animated feature Snootworld shortly before his death, it seems unlikely. “Animation today is more about surface jokes,” Lynch told Deadline last April. “It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

As viewers, our tastes are changing – as are our watching habits. “Most people don’t have the time and space to go looking outside the mainstream channels for the art that will resonate with them,” says writer and media critic Thomas Flight. We’re more distracted than we’ve ever been, and increasingly reliant on algorithms to make our decisions for us. “People have busy lives and they don’t want their media consumption to feel like a chore. So they go for what’s right at their fingertips, and it‘s boardrooms and algorithms that decide what that will be.”

In a recent article for n+1, writer Will Tavlin wrote about the noxious effects of Netflix’s business model, and the company’s growing penchant for serving “mind-numbing anti-cinema” designed for second-screen viewing. These easy-to-follow films and shows – packed with one-dimensional characters, dumbed-down exposition and a “preponderance of drone shots” – are made specifically for background viewing while you scroll on your phone or laptop. Selling Sunset and Love Is Blind are obvious examples, but even ‘critically acclaimed’ shows like Nobody Wants This and 3 Body Problem have clunky markers of the same formula (Industry writer Konrad Kay admitted the series “enables” second-screen watching). This shift makes sense: our ability to focus may have shrunk by 66 per cent since 2004, and second screening is how over half of us now watch TV. Speaking during the Writers Stikes in 2023, filmmaker Justine Bateman sounded the alarm. “The streamers want ‘visual muzak,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.’”

Tavlin writes that Netflix, and in turn its competitors, have chosen to commission “safer, more uniform” filmmaking, prioritising formulaic, plot-driven genre movies. This predictability has reportedly helped retain users, who find comfort in familiarity: in an uncertain world, there’s a desire for stability and complete, satisfying narratives. Our fixation on productivity might be influencing these tastes, too. “I think that streaming has somehow made people even more invested in plot,” says Dolores McElroy, host of the Filmsuck podcast and lecturer at UC Berkeley’s film and media department. “My students have told me that they sometimes watch films on double speed – the idea is that they want to know ‘what happens’ in the most efficient way possible.” This implies that the plot is now “by far” the most important element of the viewing experience, as opposed to, say, complex psychological character development, or “the spectacle of setting and performance”.

“There’s MCU fatigue, there’s Star Wars fatigue. People are tired of it because what’s being done with what were once imaginative worlds isn’t new anymore; it lacks imagination” – Thomas Flight

But this change isn’t exclusively down to the streamers. There have long been concerns about Hollywood’s lack of originality and its inexhaustible obsession with sequels, remakes, reboots and biopics. While original filmmaking is by no means dead, the audience for arthouse cinema is dwindling, with many “high brow” Oscar-bait features struggling to break even at the box office (The Brutalist director Brady Corbert recently admitted that he had made “zero dollars” from the film, despite its success at this weekend’s Baftas). This isn’t a new problem: in 2018, Taxi Driver director Paul Schrader lamented the changing tastes of modern audiences, saying they no longer had an appetite for “serious” films that addressed pressing social issues. But if the studios are feeding us slop, is it any wonder we’ve got hooked on the formula? “The industry sells people on seeing more of what they’ve already seen, and it works for a while because people remember how they felt watching the original material,” says Flight. But this misses why the original works were appealing in the first place. “I think this is where we are now. There’s MCU fatigue, there’s Star Wars fatigue. People are tired of it because what’s being done with what were once imaginative worlds isn’t new anymore; it lacks imagination.”

But how do we even define imaginative work? On a basic level, “imagining” has been described by psychologists as the act of forming “novel, mental images” that relate to something “never actually experienced by the subject”. But there’s also a deeper, more enveloping kind of imagination: one that rejects mainstream doctrines and dares to draw new templates for the future. This kind of originality can open us up to new possibilities of what it means to be human. “I would define a truly imaginative work as something that implicitly redefines or reimagines our ideas about life or existence, something that gives me new vocabulary for being,” posits McElroy. In an industry that is increasingly defined by its banality, this is rare. “Most cinema, certainly all mainstream cinema, shows us slightly altered versions of patterns we already know. Life, as Hollywood tells it, can only look like a handful of examples.”

Great imagination could be born from a heightened consciousness of the human condition, and also – as Lynch was keenly aware – from contemplation. But how do you do that in a world that increasingly demands, and monetises, our attention? “Our attention spans are being radically shortened,” adds McElroy. “I am concerned because we need that capacity to read, and to think deeply over a sustained period of time about any given issue or concern. We are deprived of time to contemplate in our lives when contemplation is what we need the most to even begin to understand our rapidly changing world.” She stresses that there is a difference, too, between contemplative and narratively complex films. “In many ways I think our overinvestment in narrative is a way of avoiding contemplation: I’m looking at you, Christopher Nolan.”

Lynch spoke often about the nature of consciousness, and there were flirtations in his work with psychoanalysis and Jungian theory. But while a lot of contemporary Western therapy can encourage individualism, helping us construct narratives that bolster our sense of self, Lynch had the most fun when he was tearing the ego apart. His work was confronting because it exposed both the personal and collective shadow: the parts of ourselves we suppress, shroud in shame, and project onto others. For Lynch, humans were a tangled mess of emotions, desires and contradictions – our light could not exist without our dark. “You can’t begin to see the beauty of the world until you have examined the full scale of its rot,” wrote Emma Garland in her tribute to the director. “The best art is stationed on the frontlines of the soul, pocket full of love letters and a full panorama of the war.” Lynch’s work, born from a lifetime of contemplation, helped to expose the cracks in our veneer, the absurd illusions we comfort ourselves with while the flickers of hell tickle our heels.

“When profit becomes the only motive for culture, originality ceases to be. The algorithm only knows what is – it cannot invent what has not yet been” – Dolores McElroy

This lack of contemplation is much bigger than TV and cinema. In 2025, many arts industries have been decimated by a rampant obsession with growth and profit: if a creative decision cannot be justified economically, if it is deemed to be impractical, then it cannot exist. But the imagination has never been about practicality. It is under further threat by the rise of generative AI, which – when used for profiteering – is a cheap shortcut to obvious, mediocre content: we already see its traces in the writer’s rooms, in gaming studios, and in the ghost artists that haunt the playlists of music streaming services. “When profit becomes the only motive for culture, originality ceases to be,” adds McElroy. “The algorithm only knows what is – it cannot invent what has not yet been.”

Even academia, where world-changing ideas are supposed to be born, has lost its imagination. In his prescient 2012 essay, Of Flying Cars And The Declining Rate Of Profit, late theorist David Graeber examined why there had been no major new works of social theory in the last few decades. He pointed to a larger cultural shift away from thinkers who were “eccentric, brilliant and impractical”. Academia, like everything else, had become a “domain of professional self-marketers”. Collaboration had been replaced with competition and self-interest, contemplation with bureaucracy. We need “to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs,” Graeber wrote, “to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.”

There are now far fewer artists and thinkers who have the space to imagine, and who might be able to help us create new, humanistic visions of our future. But they are out there. And while it can feel like the only major ‘visionary’ that mainstream Western society seems to lionise is Elon Musk – a man who was described as having “total and complete pathological sociopathy” by former colleagues, whose imagination can only stretch to some freight tunnels and a future of indebted servitude on Mars – this does not need to be the only thinking we platform and reward. “It’s not that the human race has no imagination anymore, it’s that the imagination is not allowed to flourish,” says McElroy. “There is no place for it because not only does our contemporary system of ‘efficiency’ not allow it. There is barely any way to be ‘outside’ this system anymore – and survive. For instance, if you refuse to join the online world of ‘hustle’ and self-promotion and LinkedIn, in a sense you don’t exist.” Lynch was always someone who refused to conform to these rules. If his legacy stands for anything, it should be for rejecting this lacklustre simulation of modern living: to log off the streamers, embrace stillness, and find humility and comfort in the unknown. It may not feel possible right now – but isn’t that what the imagination is for?