You might have seen the above video by now––it’s been making the rounds all weekend. Someone took a couple of clips from the Inland Empire DVD, of David Lynch railing against the watching of films on cell phones, and set it to the familiar music from Apple commercials. “It’s such a sadness, that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone!” he cries. “Get real!” Cue the iPhone logo. The End. Cute, right? Harmless.

Not exactly. Kent Nichols, co-creator of the mega-popular web series Ask a Ninja, has written a blog post in response to the clip, titled “David Lynch is a tool.” “Look David Lynch,” Nichols writes. “I respect that you’ve made a career by confusing people and by pretending to be smarter than them.” But…

…you’re getting to be a cranky old man. If someone wants to pay you to watch your weird little films on a cell phone or a DVD or a flipbook, just smile and take the money. Short of inviting every potential viewer to sit and watch it in your personal viewing chamber, there is no “ideal” viewing experience.

There’s just content and people. People want the content, we give it to them.

Though Nichols goes on to concede that “some stuff works better in the cinematic environment,” he concludes by saying that if a filmmaker wants to reach the masses, “You just need to create visuals that will play well on a 320×240 window. If you’re doing anything else, you’re being a cranky old artist.”

This would maybe be a valid argument if a) Lynch had not been speaking to his own cinephile audience and had actually intended for his comments to be an attack on people like Nichols who make media for devices like cellphones, and b) had David Lynch ever shown any interest in doing anything for the masses.

We’re talking about a filmmaker who has essentially been a cranky old man for 30 years, who has embraced prosumer video production not in a quest to move with the times, but because it allows him to be indulgent and he likes the way it looks. The irony is that a film like Inland Empire would, to the untrained eye, probably look technically “better” on an iPhone screen, but for Lynch, the visible grain of blown-up video is an essential part of the image he’s trying to achieve. That’s not about being “old”, that’s about an artist selecting the appropriate exhibition method to best highlight his aesthetic intentions.

But all that aside: Doesn’t Lynch have as much right to be an old, cranky, widescreen purist as Nichols has to be a futurist?