"I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with Lost Highway"
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Admiration paired with a blunt side-eye is a very scientist way to praise: celebrate the signal, then flag the noise. Greg Egan’s line lands because it refuses the fan posture. It’s not “Lynch is a genius, full stop.” It’s “Lynch is a genius, and genius still makes choices worth interrogating.” That conjunction - “and” - is the whole thesis. It frames criticism not as betrayal but as a form of serious engagement, the kind you apply to any system you respect: you stress-test it.
The context matters. Lynch’s Lost Highway is often defended as dream-logic cinema, immune to ordinary standards of coherence. Egan, a writer with a scientist’s intolerance for hand-waving (and a reputation for rigorous speculative architecture), gently punctures that protective bubble. “Bad decisions” is carefully chosen: not “bad taste,” not “fraud,” not “misread by audiences.” Decisions implies agency and craft. The film isn’t a mystical artifact that happened; it’s a constructed object that could have been constructed differently.
The subtext is a cultural argument about how we talk about art made by auteurs. Lynch fandom can drift into reverence, where ambiguity becomes a blank check. Egan’s sentence pushes back on that. It makes room for a third position between snark and worship: you can admire the ambition, the atmosphere, the audacity - and still hold the work accountable for its own internal commitments. In a media ecosystem that treats critique as either “hate” or “stan,” that’s a quietly radical stance.
The context matters. Lynch’s Lost Highway is often defended as dream-logic cinema, immune to ordinary standards of coherence. Egan, a writer with a scientist’s intolerance for hand-waving (and a reputation for rigorous speculative architecture), gently punctures that protective bubble. “Bad decisions” is carefully chosen: not “bad taste,” not “fraud,” not “misread by audiences.” Decisions implies agency and craft. The film isn’t a mystical artifact that happened; it’s a constructed object that could have been constructed differently.
The subtext is a cultural argument about how we talk about art made by auteurs. Lynch fandom can drift into reverence, where ambiguity becomes a blank check. Egan’s sentence pushes back on that. It makes room for a third position between snark and worship: you can admire the ambition, the atmosphere, the audacity - and still hold the work accountable for its own internal commitments. In a media ecosystem that treats critique as either “hate” or “stan,” that’s a quietly radical stance.
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| Topic | Movie |
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