What Is Cinema Without David Lynch?
There is no shortage of “ending explained” videos in 2025. In fact, it often appears that this is the main way those who post videos about film get traction. Similarly, a quick poke around the Internet’s other corners — Reddit, Facebook, even Medium to a degree — shows that this phenomenon is not limited to video content.
This rise in “ending explained” content could just be a natural expansion of questions that were previously limited to forums and in person discussions. There have always been conversations about ambiguous movie endings, whether we’re talking about the spinning top at the end of Inception or Oh Dae-su’s expression at the end of Oldboy.
But the sudden rise and popularity of this content implies something about the state of cinema. If I was feeling spicy and/or had missed my morning coffee, I’d call it an incuriosity about cinema. A laziness. A larger example of the modern moviegoer’s need for answers, to be shown the film’s themes and meanings like a child being shown animals at the zoo.
And to an extent that’s true. Last year, some tweets went around with hundreds of thousands of likes decrying horror authors who write horrific things, implying their story’s darkness must be indicative of a personal evil, hidden beneath the surface. This is a ridiculous supposition and seems to misunderstand both the occupation and capability of a creative mind, but it’s an opinion that is not lacking in popularity.
In a similar vein, the rise in cinematic puritanism — this idea that film must exclude any and all sexuality, or that sexuality never serves a storytelling purpose — also points toward this incuriosity, this desire for the film to assuage its viewer above everything else.
Okay, I confess, I didn’t have enough coffee this morning. But if I seem spiteful or slight here, it’s not that I think the general moviegoer is dumb. Far from that, in fact. I think the average moviegoer is supremely intelligent. There is an aspect of the “ending explained” phenomenon that points toward a desire to learn, a desire to understand, even if the method is notably blunt (I’d liken engaging with cinema through “ending explained” videos to drinking instant coffee).
But through a combination of factors — some the moviegoers’ fault, some the industry’s — this muscle we all have, that we all use to engage with art, has become floppy and formless.
I bring all this up because we lost a titan of cinema last Wednesday. David Lynch, the creative genius behind classics like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Eraserhead (not to mention underrated, misunderstood masterpieces like Lost Highway, Fire Walk with Me, and Inland Empire), passed away after a battle with emphysema. And if there was one thing this man despised when he was alive, it was explaining his films.
It’s Not the Answer; It’s the Question
It was with a beautiful and, yes, Lynchian irony that his films seemed to beg for explanations. They were dark dreams, all of them, from the parasitic vision of parenthood in Eraserhead to the writhing beetles just below the viridescent, suburban grass in Blue Velvet. It is only natural that a moviegoer used to the three act structure and defined narrative conventions would scratch their head and go searching for an answer, any answer, after Lynch has finished his story.
But Lynch didn’t see cinema that way. During a BAFTA interview about David Lean, Lynch mentioned that he considered Eraserhead his most spiritual film. Interviewer Jason Barlow attempted to follow up on this, asking Lynch to elaborate, to which Lynch politely but firmly said, “No.” And to my knowledge, the only film’s meaning he’s hinted at is Mulholland Drive, what with the 10 clues included with the original DVD. But that was the exception, not the rule.
That doesn’t mean there is any shortage of “ending explained” style videos for Lynch, of course. There’s a famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) four-and-a-half hour video that purports to explain Twin Peaks once and for all. But, even with its depth and leveraging of Lynch’s own words and quotes, it’s still a guess. An educated one, a long one, but a long, educated guess is still just that: a guess.
But the beauty of David Lynch’s style is that you don’t need to understand the story to enjoy the film. In fact, the experience becomes eminently more enjoyable when you give in to the film, when you push away from shore and let yourself drift into Lynch’s subconscious.
“You know, people don’t have to say it; they can feel it.”
Yes, I’m quoting Tommy Wiseau in an article about David Lynch. But this quote, interestingly enough, is the one that comes to mind when I think about Lynch’s art.
Lynch challenged movie lovers in a way no other filmmaker has — or likely will again. Save a couple of specific examples (The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story are probably the best examples of this) he operated outside the traditional storytelling oeuvre.
“It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.” — David Lynch
Consider the reveal of Renee Madison’s death in Lost Highway. A more narrative film might definitively display the protagonist’s innocence, even if her death were to remain a mystery. You could say the same thing about most “wrong man” thrillers, from Hitchcock to the Richard Price & Steven Zaillian’s HBO miniseries, The Night Of. It’s a staple of the subgenre: our leading man or woman is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even if they’re holding the murder weapon, they’re not the one who used it.
But for Lynch, the reveal is presented via a grainy videotape. We’re swarmed with white fuzz until suddenly Fred Madison, our protagonist, gets punched in the face. And then, in the span of maybe two minutes, we learn he’s already been tried and convicted for Renee’s murder. There is no clarity as to his innocence; there is no hint as to her true killer. It’s simply like that: one scene, Fred Madison is watching a grainy videotape, the next he’s in jail.
But you don’t need to know what happened to Renee to feel the shock of that transition. And that emotional power is what Lynch is aiming for — in Lost Highway and in all of his films. It’s why they can feel so strange and dreamlike.
Take my favorite sequence Lynch ever put together: Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. The scene opens with a man telling Betty and Rita (and, in effect, the viewer) that everything they see is fake. A magic trick. All the sound is ported in through speakers. And then, Rebekah Del Rio walks out and begins to sing a Spanish version of Roy Orbinson’s “Crying.” The result is an intensely emotional scene, and the performance is so genuine that you lose yourself in it. It’s not until Rebekah Del Rio faints and is dragged out by stage hands, all while the song continues to play over the speakers, that you remember the entire situation was crafted. Artificial. But, in an odd way, it doesn’t feel artificial because it seemed so real when you were experiencing it.
Lynch, unlike any other director, working or dead, understood the emotional power of cinema. He understood the way images and sound cut together could tug at our heartstrings or make our gut queasy. He understood that, in many ways, words fail us while images endure.
In his article about the late director, Kyle MacLachlan shared,“David didn’t fully trust words because they pinned the idea in place. They were a one-way channel that didn’t allow for the receiver. And he was all about the receiver. This is a key insight into what made Lynch’s work so special and so unique. But it’s also a key element of what cinema will be missing now that he’s gone.
The Arthouse is Dead
Lynch once said during an interview about Twin Peaks: The Return, “The arthouse is dead.” And when the interviewer mistakenly followed up with, “Knowing that, as you said, the arthouse is dying” Lynch interjected with, “Not dying. Dead.”
It’s a dark statement, perhaps a cynical one, but it shows, I think, that Lynch understood the change cinema was undergoing, even pre-pandemic, and that it was not one for the better. It’s a cinema where films spoon feed themes and plot points to its audience with little airplane sounds.
And to be clear, I don’t think Lynch meant that arthouse films were dead. While not as surreal as Lynch, Jonathan Glazer is a good example of someone who is trying to stretch the fabric of cinema and create something new with the language, as he did with The Zone of Interest, in particular the sequence that ends that film.
But arthouse as an approach to cinema, as a celebrated part of the medium — in some ways, cinema as an art form and not just an entertainment vehicle — is dead by whatever metric you want to cut it.
Not a single original film broke the Box Office Top 15 list. The Golden Globes and the Oscars now have a “Box Office” award to appease the growing contingent of moviegoers angry the latest Marvel movie didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. Studios aren’t greenlighting original films anymore, and even when they do they’re more likely to force them to direct-to-streaming deals or to erase their existence from the Earth for a tax write off before anyone can see them (if that doesn’t sound familiar, look up the sad history of Coyote vs Acme).
The question often asked of this change is who’s to blame? And to quote a manic Gary Oldman from Leon: The Professional, “Everyone!”
Audiences’ ability to support the movies they love has become severely limited. Gone are Blockbuster, VideoWorld, and other Mom-and-Pops movie rental stores. Even that weird Redbox you occasionally see by your local Dollar Store is waning in power. They’ve all been replaced by an explosion of streaming services. Matt Damon explained perfectly why this has led to the death of the mid-budget film on an episode of Hot Ones.
So, the streamers are to blame because they disrupted the renting ecosystem that allowed smaller films to earn back their budget without having to make all that money at the box office.
But the moviegoer is also to blame. How many times have you said, “Oh, I’ll watch that when it comes out on streaming?” And how many times have you followed through on that? No judgment — I’ve done the same thing. But the amount of options available through streaming, and the lack of marketing that exists on these platforms, inevitably means that we forget films we sometimes want to see but don’t want to fork over theater money for.
As a result of moviegoers no longer heading to the theater for smaller and mid-budget films, those types of movies have essentially been shut out of theaters. If they do run, it’s for a weekend or two before getting shouldered out of the way by whatever giant tentpole film will live at the cineplex for the next three months. And studios see this and decide to greenlight more of those massive tentpole movies. It’s why Robert Downey Jr. will make 7x the budget of Everything Everwhere All at Once just to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Dr. Doom.
For my money, I’d rather greenlight 7 original films from exciting, diverse directors than spend it all on one actor playing one role in a film that most likely will follow the same narrative formula of the 25+ that preceded it.
Even A24, which is seen as the “modern arthouse” by a lot of younger audiences, is leaving that approach behind as it grows in popularity, with reports coming that their acquisition executive is looking for “action and big IP projects.” The company is also trying to get the rights to the Halloween franchise.
Even directors whose names are bandied about GOAT lists, whose films everyone knows, whose styles have helped shape visual language itself, can’t get funding for their films. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon both had to go with streaming options as no studio would give him money for a traditional theatrical release (Killers did have a theatrical release, but it was short-lived and the film currently has no physical release outside of Italy). Francis Ford Coppola had to self-fund his passion project Megalopolis, and even when he successfully did that, US distributors refused to market it, deeming it “too weird.”
David Lynch was not immune to that, either. Inland Empire, his last feature film, was released in 2006. That’s not because he didn’t want to make any new films; it’s because nobody would fund the films he wanted to make (mainly Snootworld, an animated film he co-wrote with Addams Family and Edward Scissorhands writer, Caroline Thompson).
Some might say, “Oh, that’s always been the way it’s been. The movie business is a business.” But that’s not actually true. Scorsese famously coined the term “one for them, one for me” in explaining his strategy to filmmaking. It’s how he went from making something completely out of left field, like the Paul Newman vehicle, The Color of Money, to a passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ.
Yes, the film business is a business, but there used to be an appreciation and reverence for the artistic side of it. Yes, Lynch needed to raise $3 million to fund Inland Empire, but there were investors willing to help Lynch realize that vision while knowing it wouldn’t make millions at the box office. It’s that side of the medium that’s been lost. While I hope that loss isn’t permanent, there is nothing in the industry today that points toward support for a resurgence of bold, original filmmaking — either from the studio or the moviegoer.
Goodbye, Maestro
David Lynch represented more than quote unquote “arty” cinema. His films were an experience. His are the only films I know that people wanted to see because they were odd, distorted, and confusing. He managed to make cinema as an art exciting and fresh and unique. And nobody could do it like him.
What is cinema without David Lynch? It’s a less curious, less mysterious, less strange medium. One that’s become less comfortable with questions and more in tune with bite-sized answers. And in that way, I think we lost more than an artist last Wednesday. I think we lost a piece of the medium’s soul.
“In my mind it’s so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious — something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon fed to you. That’s the beauty of cinema, and it’s hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people’s minds stop working.” — David Lynch
