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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.
