David Lynch, visionary filmmaker behind 'Twin Peaks' and 'Mulholland
Drive,' dies at 78
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 [January 17, 2025]
By JAKE COYLE
David Lynch, the filmmaker celebrated for his uniquely dark and
dreamlike vision in such movies as “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive”
and the TV series “Twin Peaks,” has died just days before his 79th
birthday.
His family announced the death in a Facebook post on Thursday.
"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
family's post read. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue
skies all the way.”
The cause of death and location was not immediately available. Last
summer, Lynch had revealed to Sight and Sound that he was diagnosed with
emphysema and would not be leaving his home because of fears of
contracting the coronavirus or “even a cold.”
“I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound
whether I like it or not,” Lynch said, adding he didn’t expect to make
another film.
“I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it,” Lynch said. “I
wouldn’t like that so much.”
Lynch broke through in the 1970s with the surreal “Eraserhead” and
rarely failed to startle and inspire audiences, peers and critics in the
following decades. His notable releases ranged from the neo-noir
“Mulholland Drive” to the skewed gothic of “Blue Velvet” to the eclectic
and eccentric “Twin Peaks,” which won three Golden Globes, two Emmys and
even a Grammy for its theme music. Pauline Kael, the film critic, called
Lynch “the first populist surrealist — a Frank Capra of dream logic.”
“‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Elephant Man’ defined him as a
singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade,”
director Steven Spielberg said in a statement. Spielberg noted that he
had cast Lynch as director John Ford in his 2022 film “The Fabelmans.”
“It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David’s own
movies,” Spielberg said. “The world is going to miss such an original
and unique voice.”
“Lynchian” became a style of its own, yet one that ultimately belonged
only to him. Lynch’s films pulled disturbing, surrealistic mysteries and
unsettling noir nightmares out of ordinary life. In the opening scenes
of “Blue Velvet,” among suburban homes and picket fences, an
investigator finds a severed ear lying in a manicured lawn.
Steven Soderbergh, who told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was
a proud owner of two end tables crafted by Lynch (his numerous hobbies
included furniture design), called the biographical drama “Elephant Man”
a perfect film.
“He’s one of those filmmakers who was influential but impossible to
imitate. People would try but he had one kind of algorithm that worked
for him and you attempted to recreate it at your peril,” Soderbergh told
the AP. “As non-linear and illogical as they often seemed, they were
clearly highly organized in his mind.”
Lynch, who was married four times and had four children, never won a
competitive Academy Award. He received nominations for directing “The
Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and, in 2019, was
presented an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
“To the Academy and everyone who helped me along the way, thanks,” he
said in characteristically off-beat remarks. “You have a very nice face.
Good night.”
Actors regularly appearing in his movies included Kyle McLachlan, Laura
Dern, Naomi Watts and Richard Farnsworth. McLachlan, who starred in
“Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks,” said Lynch “was in touch with something
the rest of us wish we could get to.”
“I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever
met,” McLachlan said on Instagram. “David was in tune with the universe
and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of
human.”
Aside from furniture making and painting, Lynch was a coffee maker,
composer, sculptor and cartoonist. He exuded a Zen peacefulness he
attributed to Transcendental Meditation, which his David Lynch
Foundation promoted. In the 2017 short film “What Did Jack Do?” he
played a detective interrogating a monkey. He regularly ate at, and
espoused the joys of, the Los Angeles fast-food restaurant Bob’s Big
Boy.
Lynch was himself a singular presence, almost as beguiling and deadpan
as his own films. For years, he posted videos of daily weather reports
from Southern California. When asked for analysis of his films, Lynch
typically demurred.
“I like things that leave some room to dream,” he told the New York
Times in 1995. “A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that
kills the dream.”
Lynch was a Missoula, Montana, native who moved around often with his
family as a child and would feel most at home away from the classroom,
free to explore his fascination with the world. Lynch’s mother was an
English teacher and his father a research scientist with the U.S.
Agriculture Department. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest before
the family settled in Virginia. Lynch’s childhood was by all accounts
free of trauma.
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David Lynch appears at the Governors Awards in Los Angeles on Oct.
27, 2019. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
 “David’s always had a cheerful
disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to
dark things,” a childhood friend is quoted as saying in “Room to
Dream,” a 2018 book by Lynch and Kristine McKenna. “That’s one of
the mysteries of David.”
He praised his parents as “loving” and “fair” in his memoir, though
he also recalled formative memories that shaped his sensibility.
One day near his family’s Pacific Northwest home, Lynch recalled
seeing a beautiful, naked woman emerge from the woods bloodied and
weeping.
“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods,” Lynch told
Rolling Stone. “And it just seemed to me that people only told you
10% of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other
90%.”
He had an early gift for visual arts and a passion for travel and
discovery. He dropped out of several colleges before enrolling in
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning a decade-long
apprenticeship as a maker of short movies. He was working as a
printmaker in 1966 when he made his first film, a four-minute short
named “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times).” That and other work landed
Lynch a place at the then-nascent American Film Institute.
There, he began working on what would become his 1977 feature debut,
“Eraserhead.” The film, featuring Jack Nance with high-rising hair
to rival the Bride of Frankenstein, took four years to make and
debuted in theaters at midnight. It took nearly as long to develop a
cult following and the interest of Hollywood. Stanley Kubrick became
an advocate and George Lucas approached him about directing a “Star
Wars” film. Another fan was Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch's next
movie, “The Elephant Man.”
“He is very sensitive, and he really understands human nature,”
Lynch told Bomb magazine of Brooks. “Otherwise he couldn’t do those
great comedies. I guess ‘Eraserhead’ spoke to him, and off we went.”
“The Elephant Man,” about Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man
who became a circus attraction in 19th century Europe, earned eight
Oscar nominations. Producer Dino De Laurentiis then hired Lynch to
director a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” The film
was a flop with critics and audiences — Lynch described producers'
trims and tweaks in post-production as “a nightmare” — but, still,
the movie attracted a cult following over the years.
After that came 1986's “Blue Velvet,” starring Isabella Rossellini,
Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and McLachlan. Kicked off by the Bobby
Vinton song, the detective story that twists its way to Hopper's
oxygen-mask maniac, peeled back the superficial veneer of Reagan-era
America.
“There are things lurking in the world and within us that we have to
deal with,” Lynch told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “You can evade
them for a while, for a long time maybe, but if you face them and
name them, they start losing their power. Once you name the enemy,
you can deal with it a lot better.”
In 1990, Lynch debuted both the Palme d'Or-winning “Wild at Heart,”
with Nicolas Cage and Dern, and the radical TV series “Twin Peaks.”
The show, a surreal sensation about the mysterious death of
high-school homecoming queen Laura Palmer, was a sensation, earning
five Emmy nominations for its first season.
“Twin Peaks,” which Lynch created with writer Mark Frost, remains
one of the most enigmatic and singularly director-driven series to
ever find a wide American audience on television. It clung to Lynch,
too, who returned to it with the 1992 prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
With Me” and a 2017 series.
After the nocturnal noir “Lost Highway” (1997) and the comparatively
simple road movie “The Straight Story,” starring Richard Farnsworth
as a 73-year-old man who travels cross country by lawn mower, Lynch
directed his last masterpiece, 2001’s “Mulholland Drive.”
The film, starring Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts as young
actors in Hollywood, was assembled out of a failed TV pilot. But
that restructuring only enhanced the movie's intoxicating puzzle, a
doppelganger murder mystery. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, it
ranked as the eighth greatest film of all time.
Lynch's last feature was 2006's “Inland Empire,” a fragmented and
experimental thriller made without a script and shot on digital
video.
In 2005’s “Lynch On Lynch,” edited by Chris Rodley, Lynch addressed
some of the mysteries at the heart of his work.
“The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets,” he
said. “It’s like a little egress. You can go into it, and because it
keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of
things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start
seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it
becomes like a dream.”
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AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed reporting.
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