I am a huge David Lynch fan, and one of my very favorite videos on the internet is this clip taken from the limited edition DVD extras of Inland Empire, where the legendary director expresses his thoughts on the at-the-time new idea of watching movies on mobile phones.
“Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film,” Lynch calmly but forcefully intones into a studio mic. “You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.” (Emphasis mine and his.)
“It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone.”
I sympathize with his point; Lynch is responsible for some of the most beautiful and beguiling works in the history of cinema, and it’s understandable that he of all directors would want audiences to experience his movies on the big screen as intended. And especially when taken in the context of the time, it’s hard to disagree with him. He was speaking over a decade ago, after all. But I’m not sure I’d agree with him today.
I remember the first time I watched a movie on a phone, because it was a big selling point for the phone in question. Released in early 2007, the Motorola RIZR Z8 was my first ever smartphone, if you accept a liberal definition of the term, and for some reason it came with a microSD card containing a full version of The Bourne Identity for viewing on the phone’s 2.2-inch 240 x 160 display.
As you can imagine, this was not a great experience. But months later came the first iPhone, with Steve Jobs touting the new device as a great way to watch Pirates of the Caribbean on the go. Jobs, of course, had famously said he was “not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen” years before introducing video-capable iPods. And although the first iPhone was notably larger than those iPods, it has to have been the device Lynch was thinking of when he derided the idea of watching movies on phones.