The Decline of the Working Musician

 

You used to be able to make a living playing in a band. A new book, “Band People,” charts how that changed.

By Hua Hsu

Before the gig economy consumed a third of the workforce, it was mostly musicians who worried about gigs. There are debates about the origins of the word—some believe it derives from an eighteenth-century term for horse-drawn carriages that may have doubled as stages for performers, while others contend that it was adapted from a Baroque dance called the gigue. But the “gig,” as shorthand for a casual, one-off paid performance, entered the popular lexicon during the Jazz Age of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. There was a mystique to the gigging musician wandering the big city in search of work, because this work was creative, improvisational, at times transcendent.

Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century, Franz Nicolay argues in a new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” could be forgiven for assuming that working one’s way up from gigs to a steady job in music was a plausible career path. You might not make it as a chart-topping star, but there were still opportunities for “band people”—the “hired guns” or “side-of-the-stagers” who offered structure and support. Music was everywhere, and there had to be people to play it. Nicolay’s book details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. Not that the spotlight in question shines all that brightly to begin with; most of the dozens of artists Nicolay spoke to work in commercially tenuous realms, such as indie rock or punk, in which a band like Sonic Youth represents the imagination’s zenith.

But anyone who has streamed a song on their phone for free can sense that something has changed. “Musicians,” Nicolay argues, “were the canaries in the coal mine of the precariat”—the original freelancers making do. “Band People” might be one of the least bacchanalian books ever published about the rock-and-roll life style, but also one of the most honest. It’s a collection of stories about how musicians who have made contributions to songs beloved by millions, and who have played alongside David Bowie or Madonna, simply get by.

Nicolay understands the industry’s highs and lows, having been a member of the Hold Steady, a rock band known for its elaborate storytelling, and of the carnivalesque punk band the World/Inferno Friendship Society. In 2016, he published “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control,” a funny and sharply observed account of touring in Eastern Europe. He is particularly lively when discussing the alchemy of bands in his own terms. “Every band is a foreign country,” he writes, “with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang.”

Nicolay makes these gangs sound like a lot of fun, while also demystifying them. Some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy. Some envy the star; others feel sorry for him. Jon Rauhouse, a musician who tours with the singer Neko Case, is glad not to be the one that interviewers want to speak with—he’s free to “go to the zoo and pet kangaroos.” Band people are often asked to interpret cryptic directives in the studio. The multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns recalls one singer who, in lieu of instructions, would tell him stories about the music—he might be told to imagine a song they were working on as “a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”

Many musicians prefer the “emotional life” of the band to be familial, rather than seeing their bandmates as “a handful of co-workers.” And despite the collective dream that brings artists together, the critic and theorist Simon Frith argues, “the rock profession is based on a highly individualistic, competitive approach to music, an approach rooted in ambition and free enterprise,” which feeds perfectly into a quintessentially American zero-to-hero dream. This, Nicolay suggests, is what makes the prospect of, say, “a hypothetical union,” which might negotiate fees with a club on behalf of musicians, unimaginable.

“The idea that openly discussing money is coded as ‘uncool’ is one of the tells of economic privilege,” he writes, “especially in indie rock.” (He leaves open the possibility that these dynamics may differ in spheres outside his expertise, including hip-hop.) But some of the musicians Nicolay interviewed seem hopeful that they might defer the discussion altogether. “I was afraid of maybe not enjoying drumming or music as much if I monetized it,” Ara Babajian, who has played with Leftöver Crack and the Slackers, admits. But there’s a deeper issue around how songs function as commodities. “The original sin of song copyright in America is that it wasn’t set up for a context of collective creativity,” Nicolay writes. Songwriting credits are often split between lyrics and music. Drummers, for example, traditionally have a much harder time getting credit for their contributions, because the cultural and legal framework for pop music values melody and harmony over rhythm. Nicolay notes, “Credits on a song that remains popular even as an act breaks up or retires is as close to a 401(k) as a band person is likely to get.”

The book is unusual for the music genre in that it doesn’t compel you to seek out the songs of all the people Nicolay spoke to. But you come away wishing that they could all succeed, at least on their own terms. Some of the musicians have mixed feelings about their chosen careers. “It depends on the day,” Babajian tells Nicolay. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman with entitlement issues.”

Except for a few afternoons in my late teens and twenties, hunched over guitars and samplers, I’ve never really played in a band. This makes me precisely the type of person who has glamorous assumptions about what it must be like to be in one. Working as a journalist, with occasional glimpses into life on the road, in the studio, or backstage, has done little to disabuse me of my fascination. Even the boring parts—watching people kill time, waiting around to play or for inspiration to strike—seem freighted with possibility. The fact that people make music together has always appeared to be proof that community is possible. Reading “Band People,” I was struck by the amount of work required simply to stay collegial with one another—the division of labor, the sheathing of ego, the grace.

Nicolay, who is in his late forties, acknowledges that these are all rather “bloodless and unromantic” approaches to thinking about rock—an art form that remains synonymous with a kind of excess even though it has surrendered its status as the lingua franca of youthful rebellion. He identifies what he sees as the “apparent prudishness of younger musicians.” Where rock music once rationalized devilish behavior, he writes, “a generation raised on new language about sexual propriety and fearful of online public shaming for off-the-clock behavior” is more cautious than debauched. There’s a hint of judgment there. But the pragmatism of young artists could be, in part, the product of growing up in uncertain times, with a hollowed-out and faddish music industry, which forces them to shoulder more responsibility for their careers, from the logistics of booking their own shows to the consequences of their bad behavior.

Many of Nicolay’s interviews took place in the mid-twenty-tens, and, although the musicians he spoke to are honest about the particularities of their situations, they seem to have had little sense of the changes still to come: the complete domination of Spotify and the shrinking of streaming royalties, the pressures of social media and its near-constant demands for engagement. There’s still money in music today, at least at the very top. Spotify reported its most profitable quarter ever this summer, Taylor Swift is winding down the highest-grossing concert tour in history, and, in the past few years, superstar artists have found new revenue by selling the rights to their music. Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a company based in the U.K., made news for paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the back catalogues of Justin Bieber and Shakira, among others.

But, for those just starting out, the opportunities for a sustainable career—for joining Nicolay’s “musical middle class”—appear to be vanishing. There’s probably never been a better time to share a song you’ve made, and yet it’s harder than ever to get paid for it. A stream on Spotify nets a performer about a fraction of a penny—and those royalties accrue only if a song meets a minimum threshold of a thousand streams in the previous twelve months. Last year, it was estimated that about two-thirds of the songs on Spotify would not reach that threshold. For some, access to the world’s listeners is a worthwhile trade-off. Music can remain a cherished hobby; you can’t sully a passion with money when there is none to be made.

And yet the dream of leaving gig work behind for long-term work still appeals to many. One of my favorite albums of the year so far is “Mucho Mistrust,” by Fake Fruit, an Oakland band that always seems to be hurrying through its twitchy, shambolic songs. Its singer, Hannah D’Amato, has spoken of managing her band during breaks from her day job as a nanny. One moment, in the band’s songs, she is brash and unfazed, stridently commanding the punk chaos; seconds later, she surrenders to the harsh swells around her, angling her voice into a scream or a yodel. She sounds as though she’s been conditioned to prepare for anything. “My well of patience has run dry / Don’t even try to ask me why,” she sings coolly, the sources of her distress too numerous to name. Instead, she turns the blame inward, a common response to losing at a game that’s rigged. “The fault is no one else’s but mine / Don’t think I haven’t tried,” she continues, repeating the last word seventeen more times, until it sounds futile. ♦

Comfort TV Is Overrated

 

Illustration by Zeloot

by: SHIRLEY LI

The Bear didn’t wait long to stress out its viewers. “Review,” the seventh episode of the dramedy’s first season, is one of the most anxiety-inducing viewing experiences in recent TV history. In it, the employees at the sandwich shop in which the show originally takes place lose their cool after a food critic’s praise directs a deluge of customers their way. But the crew’s panic quickly permeates off-screen too. “Review” seems designed to elevate a viewer’s blood pressure in tandem with that of its characters: Over the course of 20 minutes unfolding in real time, arguments arise, accidents happen, and several chefs quit their job. The episode exemplifies The Bear’s ethos as a whole; four seasons in, the show remains defined by ticking clocks and barely controlled chaos. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote, it’s “horrifically stressful” to watch.

Yet that unrelenting feeling of stress has resonated with viewers, enough for The Bear to break streaming records over the course of its run. And lately, it’s not the only series channeling the pressures audiences may be feeling in real life: The Pitt, a word-of-mouth hit that uses each hour-long installment to follow the minute-to-minute events of one shift inside an emergency room, operates like a close cousin of The Bear when it comes to drumming up unease. The Pitt scored a bevy of Emmy nominations earlier this month, as did The Bear and shows such as Severance and Adolescence, which also use single-take, unbroken sequences to nerve-wracking effect. Even this year’s most-nominated comedy series, The Studio, in which each scene is meant to look like one continuous shot, encourages more nail-biting than laughing as it tracks the trials of a harried Hollywood executive. These programs go beyond merely dialing up the intensity of what’s happening on-screen; they submerge viewers in visceral, in-the-moment tension. The experience of watching them may be stressful as a result—but it is also apparently satisfying at the same time. They seem to be scratching an itch: for realism, and for an acknowledgment that day-to-day concerns can feel extraordinarily high-stakes.

Waning, it seems, are the days of the Emmys being dominated by television predicated on escapism and spectacle: Comfort shows such as Ted Lasso and historical epics such as Shōgun are currently off the air; sumptuous dramas such as The Crown have ended. Meanwhile, there seems to be less appetite for excessive violence. (Yellowjackets and Squid Game, former nominees known for their high body counts, were completely shut out of the Emmys this year.) Instead, a slate of series concerned with more mundane types of stress has emerged, using hyperrealistic filmmaking techniques to capture anxiety in a way that feels intimate.

The human brain—more specifically, the way it’s wired to enjoy jitters—is partly responsible for how well these shows have been received by viewers. “Our body doesn’t always know the difference between a heart-rate increase associated with watching The Bear versus going for a walk,” Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychology professor at Yale, told me. People have always sought excitement by being spectators; doing so causes, as Mendes put it, “vicarious stress”—a fight-or-flight response that feels good because it involves zero risk. Watching a horror movie can produce the effect, though Mendes pointed out in an email that horror tends to unfold at a more extreme pace, causing reactions infrequently experienced by audiences. (Think of how jump scares can dramatically startle viewers.) The intense shows holding viewers’ attention these days, meanwhile, can conjure a sense of ongoing anxiety. “Certainly, that unremitting pressure” in The Bear, Mendes wrote, “is something more common than running from a zombie.”

Research has also shown that witnessing a loved one overcome a tough task is more stressful than seeing a stranger do so. Television shows that unfold in real time can feel like they collapse the fourth wall; combined with techniques such as extreme close-ups, it’s possible they can produce a strong level of empathy for some viewers. “Our minds create what is real and what isn’t real to our stress systems,” Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, told me. When a viewer engages intimately with the material, he added, “they could be having essentially a stress response when they’re not actually doing anything stressful.”

This form of immersive storytelling is nothing new. Take 24, a regular presence at the Emmys in the 2000s that, each season and across 24 hour-long episodes, chronicled the events of a single day in the life of an improbably skilled government agent. The scenarios were likely unimaginable to viewers, and their over-the-top—if anxiety-inducing—nature made them compelling. More mundane trials are faced by average-Joe protagonists such as The Pitt’s Robby (played by Noah Wyle), a senior attending physician, and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), the executive chef on The Bear. Their arcs are prosaic compared with the high-stakes journey of 24’s Jack Bauer: Robby just wants to get through a tough shift in the ER, and Carmy is chasing a dream of turning his brother’s failing sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment. “They’re sincere characters, grounded in caring about what they’re doing and caring about the people around them,” Nicholas Natalicchio, a professor of cinema and television studies at Drexel University, told me. Even Matt (Seth Rogen), The Studio’s protagonist, is defined more by his struggle to stop people-pleasing than by his noteworthy occupation as the head of a major company.

The emphasis on emotional responses rather than pulse-quickening plot twists also enhances how much these ensembles resemble actual people. As Robby, Carmy, and their co-workers encounter problems on the job—running out of money to purchase equipment, trying and failing to manage a supervisor’s ego—they begin to seem like a viewer’s own colleagues. (Although The Bear doesn’t always track its story in real time like The Pitt does, it continues to place its characters under the threat of deadlines, frequently showing a countdown clock sitting in the kitchen.) Such recognizable stress helps their stories resonate further. “We all aspire to have that kind of excellence in our work lives,” Yvonne Leach, a professor of cinema and television studies at Drexel, told me. It can be cathartic, as a result, to see hardworking characters struggle realistically—to, as she put it, “see the toll that it takes.”

Besides, Leach added, the recent need for escapist television—the popularity of which grew during the coronavirus pandemic—may be abating. Her students in a class on TV storytelling have recently been voicing how much they want to “see things that are real,” she told me. Natalicchio agreed, adding over email that undergraduate students today have grown up with anxiety as a constant in their life, especially when it comes to entering the workforce. They’ve come of age amid economic turmoil and near-constant disruption to many industries, which may contribute to their interest in shows about challenging workplaces. “That’s not to say there wasn’t stress before, but I think never before has it been a steady hum in the background like it is now,” Natalicchio said. “I think, for many viewers, seeing shows like The Studio or The Bear is cathartic. They can, to a certain extent, relate to it and process their own stress.”

The characters on these shows may fall apart emotionally, but they do make it past their hardest times one way or another. In the case of The Pitt and The Bear, even the worst days yield victories: Robby and his team save plenty of patients, and the employees at Carmy’s restaurant always make it through dinner service. In characters like them, Jamieson said, “you have a role model for resilience.” Such characters are both flawed and capable; they’re who we want to root for and maybe even who we hope to emulate. “We tend to be drawn to people who are competent and warm,” Mendes explained. When both of those qualities are present, it creates, she said, “magic”—the kind that offers a reassurance that other anxiety-inducing shows don’t. The realism of shows like The Pitt and The Bear may remind viewers that simply making it through the day can be an uphill battle. But these shows also embrace the idea that such days don’t last forever.

Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson

"When you're writing a story, it often feels less like you're doing architecture and more like you're doing excavation–we're just unearthing it." Wes Anderson had made 12 films over 29 years, making his name widely known for his distinctive visual style of symmetrical compositions, vivid color palettes and unique camera movements. From his very first film 'Bottle Rocket' to his great hits like 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and 'The Royal Tenenbaums,'' Wes Anderson takes a look at all of his films and discusses in detail how they came to life.

Director: Claire Buss Director of Photography: Nicolas Demousseau Editor: Matthew Colby Talent: Wes Anderson Producer: Amaury Delcambre, Madison Coffey Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors Associate Producer: Zayna Allen Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes Talent Booker: Maxine Poirier, Meredith Judkins Camera Operator: Plume Fabre Audio Engineer: Hubert Rey Grange Production Assistant: Melina Fructus Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Additional Editor: Rachel Kim Assistant Editor: Billy Ward

Wes Anderson's new film, The Phoenician Scheme, is in theaters now.

Toys at 30: “We’re going to fight fire with marshmallows!”

Barry Levinson's notorious passion project is a feast for the eyes that never quite figures out its tone.

By: Peter Sobczynski

A project that director/co-writer Barry Levinson had been working on for over a decade before it emerged in theaters in 1992—at one point, it had been planned as his directorial debut before he turned to Diner (1982) instead—Toys offered viewers a mélange of holiday sentiment, strident anti-war satire and the sometimes-unholy combination of schmaltz and schtick that marked the typical Robin Williams performance of the time, all produced on a budget high enough to outstrip the GNP of actual countries. There’s no reason on Earth to think that such a bizarre combination would have worked, and Toys’ eventual critical and commercial failure would seemingly confirm that it didn’t. And yet, while I concede that the film as a whole is a mess—it is an undeniably intriguing mess with just enough moments of genuine brilliance to help get through the rougher and clumsier passages, of which there are more than a few. 

As the film opens, the staff of Zevo Toys, an elaborate toy factory that suggests what Willy Wonka’s workplace might have looked like before he decided to simplify, are staging their end-of-the-year Christmas pageant. At the same time, the benevolent owner Kenneth Zevo (Donald O’Connor), summons his estranged brother, Lt. Gen. Leland Zevo (Michael Gambon), for a talk. Kenneth is dying and fearing that neither his son, Leslie (Williams), nor daughter Alsatia (Joan Cusack), have what it takes to successfully run the company despite their evident love of toy making. Instead, Kenneth wants Leland to take over, assuming that by the time he chooses to retire, Leslie will finally be ready to take over. Before Leland can muster any objections, Kenneth’s heart gives out—and we learn that he had attached his pacemaker to the beanie hat that he wears. Why? “It’s whimsical,” Kenneth remarks before dropping dead, a moment many took to be unexpectedly prophetic, considering Toys’ eventual fate.  

The Zevo Toy Factory and its various colorful machines in Barry Levinson’s Toys from 20th Century Pictures.

A military man, Leland has zero interest in running a toy factory and essentially cedes control of the day-to-day operations to Leslie and Alsatia; however, when he gets a load of the video games and war toys manufactured by other companies (though not by Zevo), he begins to contemplate the idea of creating toy-sized military armaments that could be produced far more cheaply than human-scale gear and which could be controlled remotely through video game-like interfaces. When military leaders dismiss his ideas as nonsense, Leland, aided by his son Patrick (L.L. Cool J), himself a soldier specializing in security and covert affairs, decides to do it on his own, first asking Leslie for a small area of the factory in which to work on his own thing and then expanding it wildly, displacing other departments and their workers as a result. 

At first, the trusting Leslie is happy to let his uncle do his thing. But as Leland seizes more and more space and resources for his top-secret project and a sense of paranoia begins to hover over the once-happy factory, Leslie begins to suspect something is wrong. When he finally realizes what Leland is up to, he, Alsatia, Patrick, and Gwen (Robin Wright), a Zevo worker that Leslie is sweet on, decide that enough is enough. They sneak into the factory one night and end Leland’s takeover—leading to an over-the-top final battle in which Leland sets his array of hi-tech creations against Leslie’s army of gentler Zevo toys pressed into service to save the day. 

After a while, the film feels like an inspired sketch idea stretched well beyond its breaking point.  

After years of struggling to get the film made, Levinson finally found himself in the position where he could more or less get anything he wanted following a string of critical and commercial hits, including Tin Men (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), the Oscar-winning Rain Man (1988) and Avalon (1990) and elected to bring Toys to life at last. However, the elements that probably gave studio executives pause would seem to be there. Toys’ chief flaw is that Levinson never quite figures out the tone he wants, seesawing between sentiment and dark comedy without ever figuring out how to balance them. This is especially evident during the climactic battle—in which Leslie and Leland lead their troops into action, and viewers are presumably meant to first laugh at the mayhem and then be subsequently touched and horrified as the mechanized horror unfolds. Unfortunately, since Levinson and Valerie Curtin’s screenplay largely fails to establish any real dramatic or emotional stakes, we are left with a seemingly endless sequence of expensive doo-dads smashing into each other. After a while, the film feels like an inspired sketch idea stretched well beyond its breaking point.  

Toys’ unfocused nature extends to its performances. As one of the many manic man-children that he would play throughout his career, Leslie allows Williams to indulge in his usual bag of tricks: riffing and scatting to his heart’s content, pausing only to deliver the occasional sentimental moment with the subtlety of a telethon host who wants to get serious for a moment. In his first significant role since his breakthrough in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Gambon is a little better but never quite finds the right tone, at times too blustery and others too silly. As Leslie’s love interest, Wright is stuck with an ill-defined role that offers her little to do other than warmly beam at Leslie’s antics. Except for the delightful cameo from O’Connor (in what would be his final film), the best performance comes from Cusack, though one has to watch the entirety of Toys to understand why this is. 

The elaborate Zevo Toys factory floor in Barry Levinson’s Toys from 20th Century Pictures.

Despite these and other flaws, I still have a stubborn fondness for Toys’ goofball glory. For starters, it is a stunner visually—with an evidently unlimited budget and a style that pays homage throughout to the art of Rene Magritte, Modernism, and Dadaism, legendary production designer Fernando Scarfotti creates a look so striking and memorable that one could turn off the soundtrack and just revel in the eye-popping treats. While big set pieces like the climactic battle don’t quite land, several smaller jokes throughout earn some nice laughs—I’m especially fond of a bit where Leslie demonstrates an all-too-literal smoking jacket. The offbeat opening sequence juxtaposing the meeting of the brothers with the incredibly elaborate holiday pageant—especially its deployment of “The Closing of the Year,” a song featuring the vocals of former Revolution members Wendy & Lisa that is lovely enough that it might have gone on to be a holiday perennial if the film had not bombed so badly—is similarly striking. 

For all of Toys’ messiness and clumsiness, it has a weirdo charm that one rarely sees in films of this magnitude. It’s a charm that has endured over the three decades since its original release. Toys‘ may ultimately be only a movie of moments but the best of those moments are so glorious to behold that they will stick in the minds of those who see them for a long time afterward.

Toys Trailer:

David Lynch, Visionary Director of ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Blue Velvet,’ Dies at 78

NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Chris Morris

Director-writer David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and network television with “Twin Peaks,” has died. He was 78.

Lynch revealed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, and would likely not be able to leave his house to direct any longer. His family announced his death in a Facebook post, writing, “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'”

The “Twin Peaks” TV show and films such as “Blue Velvet,” “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive” melded elements of horror, film noir, the whodunit and classical European surrealism. Lynch wove tales, not unlike those of his Spanish predecessor Luis Bunuel, which proceeded with their own impenetrable logic.

A four-time Oscar nominee, Lynch received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2020.

After years spent as a painter and a maker of short animated and live action films, Lynch burst onto the scene with his 1977 feature debut “Eraserhead,” a horrific, black-humored work that became a disturbing fixture on the midnight movie circuit. His outré and uncompromising style quickly won the attention of the Hollywood and international movie-making establishment.

He was hired by Mel Brooks’ production company to write and direct “The Elephant Man,” a deeply affecting drama about a horrifically deformed sideshow freak in Victorian England who became a national celebrity. The feature captured eight Academy Award nominations, including Lynch’s first for best director.

He found less success with his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling science fiction novel “Dune.” The production, made on a budget of $40 million during an arduous three-year shoot, was a colossal box office flop.

However, Lynch rebounded from the disaster with two films that defined his mature style: “Blue Velvet” (1986), a frightening hellride through the psychosexual underbelly of a small American town, and the sexed-up, violent road movie “Wild at Heart” (1990), which was honored with the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or.

In 1990, he revolutionized American episodic TV with “Twin Peaks,” a series he created with writer Mark Frost. With action springing from the investigation of a high school girl’s mysterious murder in a Washington lumber mill town, the weekly ABC show plumbed disquieting, theretofore taboo subject matter and made the inexplicable a fixture of modern narrative television.

A major hit in its first season, “Twin Peaks” lost its momentum and ultimately its audience in year two. However, it spawned a feature-length prequel, 1992’s over-the-top “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”; 25 years later, the ongoing affection of a loyal cult of viewers sparked a limited-run third season for Showtime that picked up where the second season left off.

Later in his career, in such features as “Lost Highway” (1997), “Mulholland Drive” (which won him the best director award at Cannes in 2001) and “Inland Empire” (2006), Lynch flexed a super-heated style that pivoted on plots emphasizing doubled personalities, unexplained transformations and shocking acts of violence. The quiet yet quirky “The Straight Story” (1999) harkened back to the more reserved emotional pull of “The Elephant Man.”

The director himself was consistently reticent about sorting the meaning of his work for his viewers. In the book-length collection of interviews “Lynch On Lynch” (2005), he addressed the enigmatic core of his work with writer Chris Rodley.

“Well,” Lynch said, “imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated. Mysteries would become apparent and thrill you. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do.”

In addition to his honorary Oscar, Lynch’s one-of-a-kind career was acknowledged by a special award (shared with his frequent star Laura Dern) at the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards and a Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival.

He was born Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. His father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, and his peripatetic family lived in the plains states, the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast before settling in Alexandria, Virginia, where Lynch attended high school.

An indifferent student, Lynch focused on painting. A one-year stay at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and an abortive trip to Europe with his friend Jack Fisk (later a noted Hollywood production designer) were succeeded by his enrollment at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1965.

Living in a forbidding Philly neighborhood with his first wife and infant daughter Jennifer (later a director herself), Lynch began to dabble in film, directing the animated shorts “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)” and “The Alphabet” (1968).

“The Grandmother” (1970), a combination of animation and live action, was filmed with money obtained from a grant by the newly founded American Film Institute. In 1971, Lynch moved to Los Angeles to study filmmaking at the AFI’s Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies, headquartered in the former Doheny mansion in Beverly Hills.

Beginning in 1972, Lynch began work on a feature at the AFI. Inspired by his bleak years as a print engraver and struggling artist in Philadelphia, a 21-page initial script began to take shape; Lynch would later say he had no memory of writing it. Over the course of the next five years, he made the film with several collaborators who would remain constants in his career, including sound designer Alan Splet, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and actor Jack Nance.

Shot laboriously, cheaply and on the fly for five years, “Eraserhead” was released by indie distributor Libra Films International in 1977. The disquieting black-and-white film followed the psychological descent of its maladroit hero Henry Spencer (Nance) after the birth of his monstrously malformed baby.

Critics were decidedly alarmed by the picture when it premiered at L.A.’s Filmex in 1977, but it took on a commercial life of its own when Libra opened the picture at midnight screenings in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Lynch would frequently appear at L.A. screenings, admonishing his mystified audiences, “Don’t ask about the baby.”

One enthusiastic viewer at a midnight show at L.A.’s Nuart Theatre was Stuart Cornfeld, a producer at Mel Brooks’ Brooksfilms. He urged Brooks to employ Lynch, and, after viewing “Eraserhead,” Brooks offered the director a job.

For his project, Lynch took on the story of John Merrick, whose sensational life story had already inspired Bernard Pomerance’s hit 1977 play. The film version of “The Elephant Man” was an entirely new enterprise, co-written by Lynch and starring a heavily made-up John Hurt as the sensitive Merrick, Anthony Hopkins as the London Hospital surgeon who became his guardian, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft as a sympathetic West End stage star.

“The Elephant Man” had a powerful emotional impact, and became a box office and critical hit; Lynch received Oscar nods as best director and for best adapted screenplay, with the film also taking a nomination for best picture. The triumph led to a multiple-picture deal with Dino Di Laurentiis.

The sprawling space opera “Dune,” about galactic family dynasties warring over possession of a space-travel “spice” mined on a desert planet, had already defeated projected adaptations by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott when Lynch took on the material.

Filmed laboriously on Mexican soundstages with an enormous international cast, “Dune” sported an unusual Flash Gordon-meets-Antonio Gaudi production design, a memorable gallery of demented Lynchian villains and the director’s trademark amniotic visuals.

The picture satisfied no one: Both audiences attuned to the boisterous heroics of “Star Wars” and impatient critics rejected Lynch’s contorted, confusing and harshly digested reading of Herbert’s novel, and the film tanked on arrival. Lynch later told Chris Rodley that at the conclusion of the ordeal, “I was almost dead. Almost dead!”

However, Lynch’s second film for De Laurentiis defined the contours of his mature style. “Blue Velvet” starred Kyle McLachlan, who had played the messianic hero of “Dune,” as a small-town boy who is plunged into a whirlpool of sexual violence, murder and sadomasochism.

Featuring a potent cast that included Isabella Rossellini (with whom Lynch became involved romantically), Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell and, most notably, Dennis Hopper as its deranged, out-of-control villain, “Blue Velvet” polarized critics, but it cemented Lynch’s reputation as a fearless and daring film author. The film was the start of his collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Four years later, the Lynch style was brought to the small screen with “Twin Peaks.” Starring McLachlan as eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper, the series used the investigation of the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer as a springboard into a swirling narrative vortex involving sexual intrigue, drug addiction, prostitution, madness and demonic possession. TV audiences tuned in to track the mystery and remained for the series’ complexly interwoven characters and perverse, at times supernatural plot twists.

The show’s first season scored 14 Emmy nominations, including nods for Lynch for writing and directing the pilot, but declining ratings after the drawn-out revelation of Palmer’s killer and Lynch’s diminishing participation due to production of a new feature led to a cliffhanging wrap-up at the end of season two.

However, the “Twin Peaks” saga had legs. Actress Sheryl Lee was brought back from the dead to play Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” which tracked the fateful last week of Palmer’s life in lurid, screaming detail. And Showtime cable audiences were baffled anew by 2017’s much-belated third season, which reunited McLachlan and several members of the original cast.

The truest legacy of “Twin Peaks” may have been its impact on the development of unusual long-form episodic series. Successors ranging from “Wild Palms” to “True Detective” all bore Lynch’s distinctive stylistic fingerprints.

Lynch’s first feature after “Twin Peaks,” 1990’s “Wild at Heart,” was an oddball exodus, based on a novel by Barry Gifford, in which an Elvis-fixated ex-con (Nicolas Cage) and his hot-to-trot girlfriend (Laura Dern) are pursued by the murderous minions of the girl’s jealous mother (Dern’s own mother Diane Ladd). Domestic reaction was mixed to the gory, sexually frank mix of “Detour” and “The Wizard of Oz,” but the Cannes jury was wowed.

Lynch’s association with Gifford continued with “Lost Highway,” for which the two collaborated on an original screenplay. A doppelganger murder mystery that foreshadowed “Mulholland Drive,” the disquieting, brutally effective thriller starred Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty and Patricia Arquette as the players in a homicidal foursome.

After spending most of the decade on the far side of narrative coherence, Lynch came back down to earth with “The Straight Story,” the first feature in which he took no hand in writing. In the incongruously Disney-distributed picture, based on a true story, Richard Farnsworth starred as an Iowa man who drives from Iowa to Wisconsin on a power mower to visit his seriously ill brother.

Though not a major hit, the film was critically well received, and proved to Lynch’s naysayers that he was capable of bringing life to material that was not extravagantly outrageous. Farnsworth received an Oscar nomination for his performance; the veteran actor and stunt man, who was suffering from terminal prostate cancer during the production of the film, died by suicide in 2000.

An enlarged version of a prospective pilot for a new TV series became what may have been Lynch’s most widely acclaimed film, and a defining summation of the filmmaker’s themes and narrative obsessions.

“Mulholland Drive” served a darkly satirical comment on the ways of Hollywood in the story of a young actress (Naomi Watts) whose relationship with an amnesiac stranger (Laura Elena Harring) becomes a hall-of-mirrors story of manipulation, betrayal and suicide. Lynch was nominated for a 2002 best director Oscar.

Some of the same themes came to the fore in “Inland Empire,” Lynch’s first film to be shot entirely on digital video, with Laura Dern starring as an on-the-skids actress involved in typical Lynchian psychic disorder. Owing to its format, still a relative rarity theatrically in 2007, the three-hour feature was little seen after its 2007 premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

In 2022, he appeared as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fablemans,” and also provided the voice of the mad scientist in “Robot Chicken.”

Beyond his work in film and TV, Lynch exhibited his paintings internationally and issued many solo and collaborative albums of music. He contributed a weekly comic strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World,” to the alternative weekly the Los Angeles Reader for eight years. His wry, deadpan weather reports were aired daily on the L.A. rock station Indie 103.1 for several years and continued on social media.

A devotee of transcendental meditation from the 1970s on, he established his David Lynch Foundation to promote the Eastern practice, and enlisted such stars as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Donovan for fund-raising concerts.

Despite persistent rumors of new feature and TV projects after “Twin Peaks” came to an end in 2017, Lynch focused on making music videos and composing music with collaborators including Christabell. He offered his name to the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts at Maharishi University and a line of coffee beans and designed Silencio nightclubs in Paris and New York. 

Lynch was married four times. He is survived by two daughters and two sons.