Lynch’s body of work extended into painting, photography, design and beyond; he shot promos for Michael Jackson, and gifted breakfasters both a widely syndicated comic strip (The Angriest Dog in the World) and his own Signature Cup brand of coffee. The critic Pauline Kael, who witnessed his mid-Eighties transition from fringe figure to American art cinema’s new hope, described him as “the first popular Surrealist”, reflecting on a directorial persona that was equal parts folksy and eccentric. Lynch merrily confessed to frequenting L.A. diner Bob’s Big Boy every day for seven years, and spent the Noughties posting weather reports on his website.
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946, the son of Donald Walton Lynch, a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, and Edwina “Sunny” Lynch (née Sundholm), an English tutor of Finnish descent. In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch can be heard reflecting upon what was a generally blithe but naggingly unsettled upbringing in Atomic Age America: he became an Eagle Scout – serving among the ushers at JFK’s inauguration – but his father’s work required the family to move towns on a regular basis.
By all accounts, this antsiness persisted into Lynch’s adolescence. He dropped out of the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts within a year of enrolling (“I was not inspired AT ALL in that place”), then abandoned a planned three-year trip around Europe with friend (and soon-to-be-noted production designer) Jack Fisk, where the youthful pair hoped to train with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, after just fifteen days. It was only upon entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966 that his ambitions seemed to coalesce. Here, Lynch found a mentor in the painter Bushnell Keeler, and a wife in fellow student Peggy Lentz, whom he married in 1967.
A series of short films brought Lynch to the attention of the newly formed American Film Institute, and he was invited to join the Institute’s Conservatory for emergent talents in Los Angeles in 1971. After relocating to the West Coast and rejecting the wisdom of his more conventionally minded tutors, Lynch spent the next five years tinkering on the strange, obsessive Eraserhead, an entirely distinctive, eternally harrowing vision seemingly informed by its director’s disquiet at becoming a young father. (Peggy had given birth to daughter Jennifer in 1968, before the couple divorced in 1974.)
Entirely at odds with the moment of Jaws and Star Wars, Eraserhead nevertheless came to be embraced on the midnight movie circuit and won the director admirers in high places: Stanley Kubrick claimed it as one of his favourite films, while Mel Brooks reportedly embraced Lynch after an early screening, declaring “You’re a madman. I love you!” It was Brooks who helped finance Lynch’s much-garlanded follow-up The Elephant Man (1980), a retelling of the John Merrick story elevated by John Hurt’s committed lead performance, and the director’s empathy for its tragic outsider-hero. It won three BAFTAs and was nominated for eight Oscars.
By this point, Lynch had remarried – to Mary Fisk, Jack’s sister, in 1977 – and started receiving the major studios’ more promising scripts. He turned down Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Return of the Jedi (1983) to partner with the Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis on an ambitious filming of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction doorstopper Dune. Opinions vary on the outcome, which was heavily recut by distributors Universal and eventually emerged as one of 1984’s biggest financial disasters, but all accounts suggest it was not one of Lynch’s happier creative endeavours.
Producer and director patched up their differences for 1986’s Blue Velvet, which now seems like the first full definition of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous adjective “Lynchian”. A subversive coming-of-age tale in which boyish naïf Kyle MacLachlan falls under the spell of a sexually masochistic chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) and her brutal gangster lover (Dennis Hopper), it was wide-eyed and wondrous one moment, deeply disturbing the next, the tonal shifts alarming critics and audiences alike: both Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode have written about overcoming their initial visceral dislike of the film to appreciate its dark visions of adolescence and small-town Americana.
Lynch sealed his unlikely place within the mainstream with his next project Twin Peaks, a primetime TV series for the ABC network co-created with Hill Street Blues veteran Mark Frost. With its young, sexy cast, abiding murder-mystery hook (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”) and idiosyncratic approach to screen time and space, the show became a global sensation, revolutionising television’s approach to serial drama, and for a while, an albatross around Lynch’s neck: he couldn’t top it, not with a second run in 1991, nor the much-maligned movie prequel (the crushing Fire Walk with Me, 1992) nor the succession of one-season wonders (1992’s On the Air, 1993’s Hotel Room) he found himself developing.
His solution was to retreat once more to the fringes, walking away from Twin Peaks during its second run to direct Wild at Heart, a Cannes Palme d’Or-winner in 1990, full of those wayward energies the ABC censors wouldn’t let pass. The filmmaking became stranger and stranger still. After Fire Walk with Me was booed at Cannes, Lynch embarked on the violent neo-noir Lost Highway (1996), before throwing fans for another loop with the atypically linear, U-rated road movie The Straight Story (1999): the director reported overhearing one preview screening attendee asking “Isn’t it odd that there are two directors called David Lynch?”
Such duality may have factored into 2001’s Mulholland Dr., a project borne of an abandoned TV pilot and the director’s fascination with the twisting, Moebius-like roads around his L.A. retreat. Intertwining the fates of two actresses – one light, one dark – it was immediately embraced as an early 21st century classic, with David Thomson citing it as “one of the greatest films ever made about the cultural devastation caused by Hollywood”. Subsequent projects ventured further off the beaten path: 2002’s Rabbits was a web series that re-envisioned the sitcom with human/rabbit hybrids, 2006’s Inland Empire an experimental three-hour splurge.
For a while, it seemed as if Lynch might never direct again: sequestered in his Hollywood Hills studio, he returned to painting, weathering his parents’ deaths and a one-year marriage to his long-time collaborator Mary Sweeney. A pair of 2016 documentaries – The Art Life and Blue Velvet Revisited – helped sustain the director’s mystique, while suggesting how his hands-on methods might just have passed into obsolescence in the new digital age. Then in October 2014, the cable network Showtime announced Lynch would be returning to television with a revival of Twin Peaks, picking up where the first two seasons had left off.
The result – 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return – was unlike anything aired on television at its moment, and not terribly like the original show, despite the return of several key performers. Working for a cable channel rather than a major network and utilising new digital technology allowed Lynch to expand and travel beyond the boundaries of the small-town America he and Frost had described a quarter-century before. Neither an exercise in easy nostalgia nor simple fan service, unsentimental in its depiction of the effects the years had wrought upon its cast, this revival instead built towards a major meditation on old age, and our inability to turn back the clock.
Lynch himself remained cheerily enigmatic in interviews, speaking only to present new variations on the idea all his works should ultimately speak for themselves: “Life is very, very confusing, and so films should be allowed to be, too.” His personality and outlook expressed itself elsewhere: in a run of offbeam performances that stretched from his FBI agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks to a bartender in Family Guy and as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022); in a love of music that grew out of his extraordinary sound design and eventually yielded several albums; and in his lifelong advocacy for the benefits of transcendental meditation.
He is survived by his fourth wife, the actress Emily Stofle, and by four children: the director Jennifer Chambers Lynch (by Peggy Lentz), Austin Jack Lynch (by Mary Fisk), Riley Lynch (by Mary Sweeney) and Lula Lynch (by Stofle).
David Lynch, born January 20, 1946, died January 16, 2025.
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