Born: January 20th, 1946
Died: January 16th, 2025
David Lynch, who has died aged 78, was a painter turned avant-garde film-maker whose fame, influence and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen.
In 2024, Lynch announced that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking, and that as a result, any subsequent films would have to be directed remotely.
Lynch was a visionary. His florid style and unnerving perspective emerged full-blown in his first feature, the cult film Eraserhead, released at midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent through the failed blockbuster Dune (1984); his small-town erotic thriller Blue Velvet (1986) and its spiritual spin-off, the network TV series Twin Peaks, broadcast by ABC in 1991 and 1992; his widely acknowledged masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001), a poisonous valentine to Hollywood; and his enigmatic last feature, Inland Empire (2006), which he shot himself on video.
Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs and eroticised derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.
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Performative normality was evident in Lynch’s personal presentation. His trademark sartorial style was a dress shirt worn without a tie and buttoned at the top. For years, he regularly dined at and effusively praised Los Angeles fast-food restaurant Bob’s Big Boy.
Distrustful of language, viewing it as a limitation or even a hindrance to his art, he often spoke in platitudes. Like those of Andy Warhol, Lynch’s interviews, at once laconic and gee-whiz, were blandly withholding.
The first child of Donald Lynch, a research scientist for the US department of agriculture’s forest service, and Edwina (Sundholm) Lynch, David Keith Lynch was born on January 20th, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, but lived there for only a short time. The family soon moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to Spokane, Washington.
The deep timberlands of the US northwest left a profound impression on Lynch, providing the settings for Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and its 1992 movie prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Donald Lynch was transferred east; his family relocated first to Durham, North Carolina, and then Alexandria, Virginia, where David Lynch attended high school and became interested in painting. After graduation, he attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966.
In 1970, he received an American Film Institute fellowship and relocated to work on the feature project that would eventually become Eraserhead.
Remarkably crafted, Eraserhead was four years in production and required another three to consolidate an audience.
Supported by a word-of-mouth audience, Eraserhead played the Cinema Village through the summer of 1978, then opened again at midnight a few blocks away and a year later at the Waverly, where, adopted by a downtown audience, it played for two years.
By then, Lynch had been discovered by Hollywood. Mel Brooks engaged him to direct The Elephant Man, a movie based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who became a celebrity in late 19th-century London.
A commercial as well as a critical success, garnering eight Oscar nominations, The Elephant Man resulted in a more elaborate commission. Lynch was hired by producer Dino De Laurentiis to adapt Frank Herbert’s cult science fiction novel Dune after several earlier attempts fell through.
Although Dune was a commercial failure, De Laurentiis bankrolled Lynch’s next film, Blue Velvet.
Both hailed and reviled, Blue Velvet was rejected by the Venice film festival. Lynch’s scarcely less controversial follow-up, Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage as a young couple on the run in the American southwest, won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes film festival.
That same year, Lynch scored an even greater triumph when he conquered network TV with Twin Peaks, a haunting, often bewildering inquiry into the death of a high school homecoming queen.
In 2001, Lynch returned to form with the erotic thriller Mulholland Drive. Named the best film of 2001 by the New York Film Critics Circle, Mulholland Drive was even praised by Lynch’s long-time critical detractor, Roger Ebert. Widely regarded as Lynch’s masterpiece, it finished eighth on the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.
Lynch was married four times, to Peggy (Lentz) Reavy, Mary Fisk, Mary Sweeney and Emily Stofle, and had a child with each. In between his marriages to Fisk and Sweeney, he had a lengthy relationship with Isabella Rossellini. His daughter Jennifer Lynch is also a film-maker. – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
