David Lynch was an artist from Missoula, Montana. He wrote and directed the films Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway (co-written by Barry Gilford), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (co-written with Robert Engels, based on the series by Lynch and Mark Frost), Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Dune (based upon Frank Herbert’s novel), The Elephant Man (co-written by Christophe De Vore and Eric Bergren, based on Frederick Treves’ The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity), and Eraserhead. He also directed the film The Straight Story. For television, he created Hotel Room (with Monty Montgomery) and On the Air and Twin Peaks (with Frost).
His short films include What Did Jack Do?, Idem Paris, Lady Blue Shanghai, Absurda, Darkened Room, Premonition Following an Evil Deed, The Cowboy and the Frenchman, The Amputee, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Online, he created the web series Rabbits and DumbLand. He created music videos for Nine Inch Nails, Interpol, Moby, X Japan, and Chris Isaak and directed the concert films Duran Duran: Unstaged and Industrial Symphony, No. 1.
In addition to occasionally serving as his own editor, composer, art director, special effects designer, cinematographer, animator, and sound designer, he acted on many occasions, his credits including The Fabelmans, Robot Chicken, Louie, Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, DumbLand, and Twin Peaks in each of its variations. He also produced the studio albums Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream in addition to musical collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti, Chrystabell, and Dean Hurley.
His painting and photography were exhibited in Copenhagen, New York, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Los Angeles, Poland, Philadelphia, London, Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico.
He passed away during the wildfires in Los Angeles, California, in January 2025.
*****
I’m in mourning. Seriously. And I’m tired of my heart breaking over these great artists we’re losing who remind me of a different time, almost a different world. In this case, it is one who created his own unique universe of dark beauty. I hope this does you justice, Mr. Lynch.
*****
I’ll never forget taking a stack of library-owned VHS tapes back to my apartment adjacent to Bennington College. While working as a library assistant at the Crossett Library at the liberal arts school, I had come across a complete collection of the first season of Twin Peaks along with the “European” version of the Pilot. So few people believed in Twin Peaks (originally titled, with writer Mark Frost, Northwest Passage) that the great American artist David Lynch had to prepare a “straight-to-video,” “closed-end” movie for overseas distribution—just in case the series was not picked up. It was picked up—and became a national phenomenon. After I digested the first season, I borrowed the 2nd season’s VHS tapes through interlibrary loan as quickly as snail mail could deliver.
I’ll never forget watching the Twin Peaks pilot. It was in the dead of winter in a small Vermont hamlet, and very late at night; I was alone and frightened to death. I followed Lynch’s vision into the Black Lodge, a red-curtained dreamscape where The Man from Another Place speaks both forwards and backwards, dances, and introduces a Laura Palmer-like clone who whispers a secret to Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dale Cooper that would not be revealed until well into the second season. As this was a closed-end version, I simply let it take me and consume me. I could ponder the meaning, but that was never the point with Lynch’s art and the fact he didn’t explain his films drove his detractors (particularly Roger Ebert) mad and, in the end, even they had to accede that David Lynch, along with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese (and throw in Spielberg and Lucas if you must) was the greatest living American filmmaker. And he is gone. And I feel as though the world should mourn first and then celebrate, with a piece of cherry pie and a damn fine cup of coffee, the work of this authentic American genius.
Back to the Black Lodge: Kyle MacLachlan, an early Lynch collaborator, sat looking as if twenty-five years of cobwebs had plastered him in his seat as if he had been frozen in time. Sheryl Lee’s haunting Laura Palmer (or her doppelganger) confuses Agent Cooper, the only one who can speak forward, while shadows of owls pass overhead and, with the most unique television score perhaps ever, it ended as soon as it came. I woke up in a cold sweat—several hours later; exhilarated and riven. The only other thing I remember is that I clung, terrified, to my girlfriend when she came home until the sun, what little ever of it set on our corner of the Northeast Kingdom, finally rose.
By the time I got around to watching the next episode, Lara Flynn Boyle’s character Donna explained Twin Peaks—the whole thing. In these few lines, she encapsulated the essence of what it was: a masterpiece featuring the best and funniest of humanity with the darkest realms of human (or supernatural) imagination. Reflecting on her last 24-hour period (in which she has lost her best friend and fallen in love), she says, “I know I should be sad, and I am, part of me is. But it’s like…it’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream...and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.” That’s what Twin Peaks is. That’s David Lynch’s work summed up in a nutshell. Now that he’s gone, who do we have beside Scorsese & Coppola? Catherine Breillat, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson? No matter your pick, there’s now no one like David Lynch.
In the above biography, I called him an artist, not simply a filmmaker. As a young man, at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynch was a painter. He was a painter then and he never stopped painting or producing gorgeous, though explicitly erotic fine art photography. It seems, in the end, he would have been happy if he could have lived as a painter. But it was in Philadelphia where Lynch looked at one of his paintings and deigned that it would move, not unlike Michaelangelo deliberately destroying one of his sculptures with a chisel and begging it to speak! The result was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) his film debut. Whether the image was moving or stagnant, the sound score deafening or silently or deadly, Lynch became the foremost filmmaker of his time in rapid succession though he would fight critics all his life and, at one time, felt he had sold out. There were amazing years and lean years—the life of a public artist whose own persona in web shows and on late night television—finally endeared him to the nation—or, at least, those of us who still care about art.
Eraserhead is one of those late-night movies that finally find their niche audience. With what would be a long-time collaborator, Jack Nance, Eraserhead was the movie in the ‘70s that filmmakers, if not audiences en masse, were watching; Stanley Kubrick being one such admirer. In some ways, it is a distillation of all his work in one moribund puzzle (though Twin Peaks is an elevated work of art). Bits and pieces of that puzzle were given to us from time to time, from masterpiece to masterpiece. We would find Eraserhead’s odd, lightning-striped floor again in his magnum opus. We would see a master of sight, sound, and silence grow and grow into perfection, whether he worked on filmstock or through digital means.
An unlikely Hollywood producer would bankroll Lynch’s next project—a biopic of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”—starring Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, and Lesley Dunlop. That producer was Mel Brooks, husband of Bancroft, who did not wish a serious movie to be held back by his name in the credits. The result was, perhaps, Lynch’s most sentimental movie though perhaps a “movie of sentiment” would be a better term because I would not want to denigrate a masterpiece, though it bears little resemblance to his other works except in the otherworldliness and fever dreams, which would become a staple of Lynchian art.
The mid-1980s were the best and worst of times for Lynch. With European film impresario Dino de Laurentiis, he wrote and directed the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi allegory Dune and the intensely personal Blue Velvet, which was the first Lynch film to set a vision for the rest of his career—a woman in trouble, maturation for a protagonist who first senses the violence of the world and appreciates its beauty more at the same time. Dune was a colossal failure, and the only film Lynch apologized for. Blue Velvet was the film that put him on the map.
Although Mr. Lynch might not want me to, I think more and more people are coming round to the notion that Dune has exquisite moments even if it doesn’t, in Hollywood terms, work. The director was furious that an “Extended Edition,” made for television and air travel, would include scenes he had cut from the film. So, he took his director credit as the infamous Alan Smithee and screenwriter credit Judas (Iscariot) (John Wilkes) Booth. Nevertheless, this version, released on DVD many years ago now gives one insight as to what interested Lynch in Herbert’s universe which was, even with phenomenal special effects, just too large to be filmed in 1984. Lynch felt he sold out, releasing a product without final cut to fill an audience hungry for science fiction after everyone wanted their own Star Wars clone. Though there is some great weird stuff in it, it was his Waterloo. Interest has finally grown with the release of a recent, Oscar-nominated film that took two films what Lynch took actually just fine and with a little more humor.
Casting the fresh-faced MacLachlan out of Yakima, Washington, giving Dennis Hopper the role of a lifetime that led to a major screen comeback, and the appearance of Lynch’s then-partner, model Isabella Rossellini as the lounge singer who croons the Bobby Vinton classic. An unsettling look at the dark side of suburbia, Blue Velvet has done nothing but improve over countless viewings. One doesn’t soon forget its images, neither the scene where Dean Stockwell lip synchs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” perhaps the most surreal moment in a major American release in that era. There is, of course, the lovely Laura Dern, who would become frequent collaborator to Lynch and who would be his final film heroine with Inland Empire.
While most extolled its virtues, poor old Ebert—a hero of mine—just got his Bue Velvet review wrong in print and on television. He would continue to get it wrong all the way through until the late-90s Straight Story—he didn’t even like The Elephant Man!—but, thankfully, before he passed away, he caught up to America’s finest film surrealist.
It is surprising, perhaps, that a filmmaker’s finest work was a television series, but Mulholland Drive aside, the cultural phenomenon of the original two-season run of Twin Peaks was not only a popular and critical success, but an artistic one. From the beginning, the pilot introduced a revolution of cinematic style that made every television show at the time look hopelessly old-fashioned. This was partly due to the contributions of composer Angelo Badalamenti and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (father of Zoey). It has been said many times that, without Twin Peaks, there would have been no second golden age of television. Twin Peaks allowed quirkier, darker shows that led to a renaissance principally spurn by HBO with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, but also mainstream shows like Picket Fences. It equally inspired ground-breaking (but horribly overlooked) series like FOX’s Profit and even video games where the creators of The 7th Guest received their inspiration for mood.
According to Lynch, Laura Palmer’s killer was never to be revealed though co-creator Frost disagrees with this somewhat. Back in that day, usually a murder case on a TV show would be resolved within the hour. When it was not resolved at the end of season one, the public became dissatisfied, eventually leading the producers to reveal the secret mid-way through Season 2. Though those revelation episodes are some of the finest in the original series, there was nowhere to go after that. Frost went off to begin work on the film Storyville and Lynch, disgusted with television, went to make Wild at Heart. Between the revelation and the original series finale, there were many dark days for Twin Peaks.
Lynch won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart, a film that is oft-forgot as one of his greatest works to this day. A neon-punk noir, not unlike Oliver Stone’s later U-Turn, the film is inspired by influences as diverse as Elvis Presley, The Wizard of Oz, Marlon Brando’s character (with the snakeskin jacket) in Sydney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (based on the Tennessee Williams play Orpheus Descending), and the dual nature of beauty and violence, good and evil—Lynch’s creative sandbox. It also gives us, perhaps, Nicolas Cage’s most daring performance and I would fight for that despite his Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas. We all know he is fearless, but that fearlessness was never used to its full potential until this breakthrough. Sadly neglected on its release, there are those of us who are in the know and our lives are better for it.
But Laura Palmer, Lynch’s most perfect creation, was still his muse. He came back to rescue the 2nd Season Twin Peaks with a frightening and masterful finale and, when its cancellation was assured, went into pre-production on a film based on the series. Without Frost (who wanted a sequel rather than a prequel), Lynch collaborated with one of the series’ best writers, Robert Engels, on a Twin Peaks film subtitled Fire Walk with Me. Rather than tie up the series’ loose ends, which was expected, the film delved into the dark final days of Palmer’s dual life—as both the charitable Homecoming Queen and the coke-addicted victim of the ultimate evil. Over time, finally, the film has received the recognition it deserves, but to say that the contemporary response was vicious would be an understatement. Some fans of the series got nothing wrapped up and were, therefore, upset. Some fans disliked that the film took all the soap opera out and focused on the nightmare visions of the Black Lodge. Critics, who had let Lynch fly too high with Blue Velvet and his mainstream success, got their revenge for a film they were not intelligent enough or ready to understand.
The Twin Peaks film is, indeed, a polarizing one. But it could also be said to be a perfect polarization. Its principal themes—incest and sexual abuse—is not an easy one to digest and the myriad symbols and poetic flourishes don’t make it a popcorn movie. Then again, it is not fully an art film, but it leans in that direction. Unlike some of Lynch’s other films with their moments of dreamy. happiness, there is little of that. This is a deeply serious film and perhaps more unsettling than the average fare. It requires all your senses and organs working in harmony to see its beauty and appreciate its strangeness. It might even be better than Blue Velvet, but perhaps not as great as Twin Peaks: The Return, which we will come back to later.
Lynch left Cannes, where Fire Walked with Me was booed and did not release another film for five years. But, as an artist, he was fearless. In that interim, he would brew up the films that were, in my opinion, the high of his career. His next project would continue into the dark world of “not-knowing.” This is not as common in film as in the theatre, where the audience has the final word on the play’s meaning. Lynch did not make his films to be understood, but to be experienced. Barry Gilford, whose work inspired Wild at Heart, and Lynch provided us Lost Highway, a film so opaque to some as to have no meaning whatsoever. It was not, however, an outright failure—it was an interesting one that was introducing us to a Lynch who was done with linear, narrative filmmaking. The frightening screen return of Robert Blake was enough to make Lost Highway a film that many puzzle over, not knowing the joy was the journey. In the early 2000s, it was adapted into an opera by Olga Neuwirth and Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek.
In a left turn unlike in any filmography, Lynch went from R-rated nightmare-scapes to a G-rated Disney film with The Straight Story, a true story about a man who drives his lawnmower across the Midwest. A glorious send-off to Richard Farnsworth’s career, here was an easy critical darling, even with Roger Ebert, who finally gave a thumbs up to Lynch. But The Straight Story is not an anomaly, except where ratings are concerned. Though a surrealist, and a dark one at that, Lynch loved life, people, and the simple American plains where he was raised. Until his death, his business card didn’t mention master painter, master filmmaker, or anything of the kind. It simply read: “David Lynch. Eagle Scout. Missoula, Montana.”
Lynch’s last two films (I don’t like using that word last) were Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, films so inevitably entwined it is perhaps best to speak of them together. Both seem to be an expression of the terrors of identity. Not the identity crisis happening in our current culture, but the real truth of our broken lives, seated so precariously over a fence of good/understanding and evil/psychological horror. Mulholland Drive is the best looking of the two (Ebert finally threw up a “Mea Maxima Culpa” and “got” a Lynch film) and perhaps the most thought-provoking. Inland Empire was the result of Lynch getting into digital rather than celluloid film and carrying out many artistic expressions as such online like the animated series DumbLand and a curious short called Rabbits, which was eventually enveloped into Empire.
Both films are about Los Angeles in a general way and are named after familiar places to locals. Both feature the typical Lynchian damsel in distress, though they are not and are never pushovers and seem to have the only potential for sanity though, like many, they will succumb. Both are experimental, but with an eye toward mass audiences with high-profile actors like Naomi Watts, Justin Theroux, and even old Lynch favorites like Grace Zabriskie, who played Laura Palmer’s tortured mother, and whose performance in Inland Empire is deliciously unsettling.
But, even with talents like Zabriskie, Empire didn’t achieve mainstream success, partly because of its length and partly because of its density, and the usual moaning from some critics who felt Lynch was just toying with them. I hope now is the time to seriously consider Inland Empire for the American canon. It is an epic descent into the Maelstrom with grand humor, but you must work at it. I happen to find the story straightforward, and I take a lot of it at a face value most can’t see. Lynch did say in many interviews his films always tell a definite story—you just must unlock the clues to get it—but he much more appreciated that audiences have their own interpretations, and he would not never have robbed them of that, except when the executives at ABC told him to.
To say Lynch will be missed is the understatement of the century. I use no hyperbole when I say there is not anyone working now who was better, more demanding or more loving of his audience, certainly no one more daring. Not every filmmaker developed their own style like Lynch, but then again few had such bravery, indeed few had that much humanity. From his artwork to the coffee he sold through his website to the films he gave us and the lives he touched, the world was happier with David Lynch in it, dreaming his dreamy dreams.
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