The New Yorker:

The filmmaker, who died in January, showed us what our world was becoming, and how we should respond.

By Jessica Winter

In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he’s sworn to serve. But Lynch’s public statements about A.I., like his public statements about lots of things, mixed earnest, generalized optimism with dread. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, “the good side” of A.I. could be “important for moving forward in a beautiful way,” and, on the other, “if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror.” He added, “I’m hoping better times are coming.”

They were not. In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema. Days later, on what would have been Lynch’s seventy-ninth birthday, Trump was inaugurated into his second term. This coincidence of timing meant that, in the outpouring of public grief following Lynch’s death, viewers were discovering or returning to his life’s work at the same time that they were sustaining the first avalanches of cruelty and engineered disaster which have characterized much of the second Trump Administration. As the ghastly year dragged on, these streams of art and life kept converging.

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