David Lynch Says Movie Trailers These Days Are ‘Really Harmful’

In the weeks before the new season of Twin Peaks premiered, none of the promotional footage we saw gave us any hints about what to expect. That was exactly how David Lynch wanted it: for a show this intricate and bizarre and tempting to try and dissect, there was to be no information that could lend itself to any early fan theorizing. Even the episode descriptions on Showtime’s website (for Episodes 1 and 2: “The stars turn and a time presents itself”) are deliberately oblique. Lynch himself thinks that all the promotional material we’re inundated with before a movie or a show premieres does more harm than good.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, in which he also said that that whole thing about him being done with movies completely was a massive misquote, Lynch explained why he doesn’t like to watch trailers.

These days, movie trailers practically tell the whole story. I think it’s really harmful. For me, personally, I don’t want to know anything when I go into a theater. I like to discover it, get into that world, try to get as good of picture and sound as possible, no interruptions – so you can have an experience. And anything that putrefies that is not good.

He has a point — I can think of a lot of movies, especially recently, whose best parts were spoiled weeks before you git a chance to sit down in the theater. Basically every scene with an alien in it is in the trailers for Alien: Covenant. In contrast, the only Twin Peaks teaser with new footage featured Lynch and a co-star eating donuts together. Our own Britt Hayes even wrote an article a few months ago about how the scant marketing for The Dark Tower was a welcome respite from the usual inundation of content. While it doesn’t look like distributors will settle down with the trailers anytime soon, at least the teasers for Twin Peaks were exactly as evasive as Lynch wanted them to be.