The avant-garde filmmaker David Lynch in 2014. Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.
Credit...Sara Hirakawa for The New York Times

David Lynch Dead: ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ Director Was 78

A visionary, his films included “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” He also brought his skewed view to the small screen with “Twin Peaks.”

by · NY Times

David Lynch (1946-2025) 

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David Lynch, a painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen to encompass television, records, books, nightclubs, a line of organic coffee and his Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has died. He was 78.

His family announced the death on social media on Thursday, but provided no details. In 2024, Mr. 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.

Mr. 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 spinoff, the network TV series “Twin Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1990 and 1991; 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.

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.

The Lynchian “is at once easy to recognize and hard to define,” Dennis Lim wrote in his monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place.” Made by a man with a longtime devotion to the technique of transcendental meditation, Mr. Lynch’s films were characterized by their dreamlike imagery and punctilious sound design, as well as by Manichaean narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved evil.

Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.

Performative normality was evident in Mr. 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 the 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, Mr. Lynch’s interviews, at once laconic and gee-whiz, were blandly withholding.

This baffling affect led Mel Brooks or his associate, Stuart Cornfeld, both of whom facilitated Mr. Lynch’s first Hollywood feature, “The Elephant Man” (1981), to label him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Perhaps in response, Mr. Lynch chose to identify himself as “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

Defining His Style

The first child of Donald Lynch, a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and Edwina (Sundholm) Lynch, David Keith Lynch was born on Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula but lived there for only a short time. The family soon moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to Spokane, Wash.

The deep timberlands of the Northwest left a profound impression on Mr. 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, N.C., and then Alexandria, Va., where David 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.

Philadelphia, then in a state of urban decay, was a revelation. The city had “a great mood — factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters and the darkest night,” Mr. Lynch said in a 1997 interview. “I saw vivid images — plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows.”

Mr. Lynch, whose morbid, faux-childlike canvases were made under the spell of Francis Bacon, began incorporating film loops in his paintings. Although he dropped out of art school in 1967, he remained in Philadelphia for another three years, painting and making short films.

In 1970, he received an American Film Institute fellowship and relocated to work on the feature project that would eventually become “Eraserhead.” An unclassifiable movie that Mr. Lynch would always associate with Philadelphia, “Eraserhead” concerned a depressed young woman and a bewildered young man with a freakish coiffure cohabiting a hellish industrial urban nowhere, their conjugal life rendered unbearable by the mewling of their hideous mutant offspring (which resembled, but was never identified as, an animated skinned rabbit).

Remarkably crafted, “Eraserhead” was four years in production and required another three to consolidate an audience. Ben Barenholtz, the exhibitor and distributor who pioneered the midnight movie a half-dozen years earlier with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “El Topo,” opened “Eraserhead” at the zero hour at Cinema Village in New York in late 1977.

Voluptuously drab, hallucinatory yet visceral, the movie was confounding. Despite its nauseating special effects, “Eraserhead” seemed too arty for the grindhouses of 42nd Street.

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 (the venue that incubated the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” cult) where, adopted by a downtown audience, it played for two years.

By then, Mr. 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, for his company Brooksfilms. Although staid when compared with “Eraserhead,” the film contained several passages — notably the waltz of terror when Merrick is trapped and unmasked in a railway station urinal — that gave Mr. Lynch free rein to display his gifts.

A commercial as well as a critical success, garnering eight Oscar nominations, “The Elephant Man” resulted in a more elaborate commission. Mr. Lynch was hired by the producer Dino De Laurentiis to adapt Frank Herbert’s cult science fiction novel “Dune” after several earlier attempts fell through.

“Dune” was an influence on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but if Mr. De Laurentiis expected another “Star Wars,” he was disappointed. With its primordial, impressively nasty special effects, “Dune” (1984) was not a Saturday afternoon kiddie show. Neither was it an art film.

“There are no traces of Mr. Lynch’s ‘Elephant Man,’” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, “But the ghoulishness of his ‘Eraserhead’ shows up in the ooze and gore distinguishing many of the story’s heavies.”

Although “Dune” was a commercial failure, Mr. De Laurentiis bankrolled Mr. Lynch’s next film, “Blue Velvet.” Appearing midway through President Ronald Reagan’s second term, “Blue Velvet” turned Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign inside out. A spellbinding blend of raw pathology and Kabuki sweetness, the film, Mr. Lynch’s first personal project since “Eraserhead,” ruthlessly exposed the depravity behind a picture-postcard facade of malt shoppes, football fields and rec-room basements.

The heart of the film, which starred Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and Mr. Lynch’s sometime alter ego Kyle MacLachlan, is a 20-minute sex scene replete with voyeurism, rape, sadomasochism, implied castration, all manner of verbal and physical abuse, elaborate fetishism, and a ritualized kinkiness for which there is no name.

Both hailed and reviled, “Blue Velvet” was rejected by the Venice Film Festival. Mr. Lynch’s scarcely less controversial follow-up, “Wild at Heart,” starring Ms. 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, Mr. 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. Even more than “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” (made in collaboration with Mark Frost) seethed with bizarre and, as in any Lynch film, bizarrely ordinary characters, including a straight-arrow investigating F.B.I. agent (Mr. MacLachlan).

A near-instant sensation, “Twin Peaks” earned five Emmy Award nominations for its first season. Its mystery was dispelled when the killer’s identity was revealed a third of the way into the second season. Nevertheless, the show staggered on, hemorrhaging viewers over its next 13 episodes.

Mr. Lynch provided a “Twin Peaks” prequel in “Fire Walk With Me” (1992). Inverting the premise of the series, the film placed the murdered girl at center stage in a self-referential drama of teenage wantonness replete with rape, incest and voodoo. “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times. (Mr. Lynch had better luck when he and Mr. Frost revived “Twin Peaks” in 2017, picking up on the cliffhanger that ended the original iteration a quarter-century before, albeit withholding Mr. MacLachlan’s stellar F.B.I. agent until the final episode.)

After “Fire Walk With Me,” Mr. Lynch came perilously close to self-parody with “Lost Highway” (1997), an earnestly trippy, tenderly adolescent, strenuously sinister evocation of rockabilly badness written with Barry Gifford, a film noir aficionado whose novel formed the basis for “Wild at Heart.” Mr. Lynch then reversed course with a premise so shamelessly feel-good it might have even embarrassed Steven Spielberg. “The Straight Story” (1999) dramatized the true story of Alvin Straight (played by Richard Farnsworth), a 73-year-old Wisconsin man who piloted a John Deere lawn mower 240 miles (at five miles per hour) to visit an estranged brother.

Crafting a Masterpiece

Two years later, Mr. 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 longtime critical detractor, Roger Ebert. Widely regarded as Mr. Lynch’s masterpiece, it finished eighth on the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.

“Mulholland Drive” unfolds in a Los Angeles at once seductive and malign. Fashioned from the ruins of a rejected television pilot, the movie concerns the misadventures of two would-be movie stars, one dark and mysterious (Laura Elena Harring), the other blond and perky (Naomi Watts). The mood is ultra Lynchian. An ominous rumbling underscores the sinister delirium, as the movie careens from one violent non sequitur to another, taking literally the notion of Hollywood as a dream factory.

The idea of the movie industry as an occult conspiracy is even more apparent in “Inland Empire” (2006), a movie that Manohla Dargis, reviewing it for The New York Times, characterized as the earlier film’s “evil twin.”

Indeed, willfully abstruse, “Inland Empire” all but refuses to be a movie. Having compared the film medium to “a dinosaur in a tar pit,” Mr. Lynch shot “Inland Empire” piecemeal on an amateur grade DV camcorder, incorporated material from a web sitcom featuring rabbit puppets and a 70-minute interview with his star, Ms. Dern. Mr. Lynch’s most experimental film since “Eraserhead,” “Inland Empire” meditated on the power of recording. A blandly inscrutable movie as well as a homage to Ms. Dern, who is onscreen throughout, “Inland Empire” has no logic apart from its movie-ness.

The film, which Mr. Lynch released himself, would be his last feature. In 2011, he created a private member’s club in Paris that he named Silencio, for the eerily empty movie house in “Mulholland Drive” in which Rebekah Del Rio sings, a cappella, her Spanish version of the Roy Orbison song “Crying.” The club is located on Rue Montmartre in a subbasement where Émile Zola supposedly wrote “J’accuse.” Additional branches opened in Ibiza, Spain; at Art Basel in Miami; and, in 2024, in New York City.

In 2014, Mr. Lynch’s alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, presented a full retrospective of his paintings, drawings, prints and assemblages called “The Unified Field.” While allowing that Mr. Lynch’s films were more realized than his graphic art, the critic Ken Josephson wrote in The Times that “Lynch completists” would find the exhibition “a fascinating, must-see show” noteworthy for revealing the influence of Francis Bacon.

Mr. 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 Ms. Fisk and Ms. Sweeney, he had a lengthy relationship with Ms. Rossellini. His daughter Jennifer Lynch is also a filmmaker.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

A generational colleague of the so-called movie brats — George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg — Mr. Lynch belonged to no counterculture save his own. Hardly an ex-hippie, he was twice a guest at the Reagan White House, although there is no evidence that the president, who famously kept up with current Hollywood movies, screened “Blue Velvet” at Camp David.

Even more than Mr. Lucas, whose first hit was “American Graffiti,” Mr. Lynch had an abiding interest in the youth culture of his adolescence, repeatedly playing on the gender stereotypes and using popular music of the early 1960s. Rather than nostalgic, however, his approach was radically defamiliarizing.

Mr. Lynch had his own sense of Hollywood. Where Mr. Lucas remembered his first movie as the animated Disney feature “Cinderella” and Mr. Spielberg declared that his was Cecil B. DeMille’s circus spectacular, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Mr. Lynch’s seminal movie was “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie,” a turgid 1952 melodrama described in The New York Times as “a mawkishly sentimental tribute to the old-fashioned barbershop and to the dubious felicities of living in an American small town.” The Big City was cast as a fount of sin.

As Mr. Lynch never truly embraced Hollywood, so Hollywood never truly embraced him. His films were regularly celebrated by critics’ groups and lionized in France, where, 11 years after his Palme d’Or for “Wild at Heart,” he was named best director for “Mulholland Drive.” But although he was nominated several times for an Oscar, he never received one.

After “The Elephant Man,” Mr. Lynch was asked by Mr. Lucas to direct “Return of the Jedi.” Had he accepted the invitation, the “Star Wars” saga might have ended there and then in a miasma of weirdness.

Mr. Lynch never made a conventional, crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie. But in 2022, he agreed to a cameo in one: Mr. Spielberg’s autobiographical feature “The Fabelmans,” where the enigmatic if not eldritch Mr. Lynch was cast as John Ford, the maker of westerns and the grand old curmudgeon of American cinema. It was a sentimental gesture that one can only call Lynchian.

Ash Wu contributed reporting.