David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, an annual event benefitting the Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director’s quasi-New Age David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (specifically, it encourages the practice of transcendental meditation, which Lynch believes is essential to creativity and psychological healing) took place in New York earlier this week. And among the lessons imparted to a crowd of faithful fans by the pompadoured film guru himself was a reminder to think through your tweets before pressing “send.” Or, as Lynch puts it, “Unless you’re a poet, words will fail you.”
Lynch is famously suspicious of the intersection of films and smartphones. (Remember the famous YouTube video where he says, “It’s such a sadness, thinking that you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real”?) And, as it turns out, his distaste for instant-gratification cinema culture also extends to jumping onto your phone to give a 280-character review of a movie immediately after you’ve seen it. There’s no video of the hour-long talk Lynch gave at the festival, appropriately enough. But IndieWire was there: “You finish a film these days and right away you have this pressure to write about it in words,” Lynch reportedly said, adding that it’s important to sit with a film and process your thoughts and feelings about it before writing—or tweeting!—about it. Sometimes, he added, it’s better not to say anything about a film on social media at all. Imagine that.