Director
David Lynch
American · Film Director · 1946
In Earth-277, David Lynch made Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Blue Velvet (1986) exactly as he did in our world. The divergence came in 1989, when Warner Bros — reading his critical rehabilitation as commercial viability — offered him Sentinel with complete creative control. Lynch said later that he accepted because he had been thinking for years about a particular kind of American man: the man who believes completely in his own goodness, who has organised his entire life around the project of being good, and who is therefore the last person to recognise what lives on the other side of that belief. The superhero genre, he said, gave him the costume for that man. Everything else he provided himself. Warner Bros received the first cut in November 1991 and requested forty-seven changes. Lynch declined to make any of them. The film was released in February 1992 with an R rating, a runtime of 138 minutes, and no action sequences in the conventional sense. It earned $4.2 million in its opening weekend against a budget of $34 million. It has since been seen by a great many more people than saw it in 1992, and is now, in Earth-277, considered the definitive American film about the violence of self-belief.
