David Lynch’s passing wasn’t expected, exactly.
In the past few years, he had been battling crippling emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. In November he told People that he could “hardly walk across a room. It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.” He only gave up smoking in 2022 but it was of little help. He was homebound (“I never really liked going out before so it’s a nice excuse,” he told People) and would do weather reports from inside his home, his gray hair in its usual electric shock state, his now gaunt face adorned with oversized Persol sunglasses. Still, there was idle talk that he’d return to filmmaking, which seemed like a physical impossibility in his current state (even though Lynch would swat down “retirement” talk). Rumors of a possible Netflix project had circulated in recent years.
But his death is still a huge loss – to the film community at large and to the audiences that lovingly embraced his work over the last several decades. Lynch’s work spoke to the outsider inside us all, as he picked at the edges of normal society to reveal the darkness underneath. He accomplished this through an usual and intoxicating mix of surrealism and humor, steeped in the iconography of Americana, in which mystery could be found in the most mundane of places.
Born in Missoula, Montana, presumably where he got his truly singular accent, Lynch eventually became a fellow of the newly formed American Film Institute, where he produced inscrutable short films. Lynch the major filmmaker arrived on the scene with 1977’s “Eraserhead,” a truly insane, one-of-a-kind movie about a man (frequent collaborator Jack Nance) who is forced to care for a deformed baby. Its dreamlike aesthetic and smoky black-and-white photography made it an instant midnight movie favorite and catapulted Lynch into the ranks of the most exciting filmmakers working today.
Three years later, he would release his first studio movie – “The Elephant Man,” based on the true story of Joseph Merrick (John Hurt), a deformed man who lived in London and became a medical curio. Executive produced by an uncredited Mel Brooks, Lynch was allowed to shoot in velvety black-and-white and direct movie stars like Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft and John Gielgud. Unadorned by a sentimentality that other directors would have utilized, “The Elephant Man” was a box office hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including one for Best Director. It was the mainstream success that Lynch needed so that he could keep being weird.
1984 saw the release of Lynch’s doomed “Dune.” He had toyed with big budget sci-fi movies before; George Lucas had approached him about directing “Return of the Jedi.” But in “Dune” he found something that he could really sink his teeth into. But the production was beset with problems and Lynch clashed frequently with producers. (You can read about it all in Max Evry’s brilliant oral history “A Masterpiece in Disarray.”) The resulting movie is caught between two worlds – the sphere of mainstream populism and the more esoteric, personal story that Lynch was dying to tell.
In 1986 the film that would come to define “Lynchian” would arrive. “Blue Velvet,” starring Kyle McLaughlan (a “Dune” survivor) and Laura Dern (who would become a fixture in Lynch projects), courted controversy from the beginning, thanks to its extreme depictions of sex and violence. MacLachlan starred as an everyday American boy who, upon discovering a human ear, goes on an odyssey involving mystery and suspense, embodied by Dennis Hopper’s psychopathic gangster Frank Booth. It’s with “Blue Velvet” that many of the hallmarks of Lynch’s filmography were developed – the hidden underbelly of seeming normalcy; a subversion of American iconography, particularly of the 1950s (the movie is named after the song written and composed in 1950 by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris that served as a top 10 hit for Tony Bennett). It earned Lynch his second Best Director Oscar nomination and while it wasn’t a financial smash, it is largely regarded as one of the great American films of all time.
1990 saw two Lynch masterpieces unleashed – one on the big screen and the other on the small.
In April, “Twin Peaks” debuted on ABC. Co-created by Lynch and Mark Frost, it was a one-of-a-kind mystery that galvanized television. MacLachlan played FBI Agent Dale Cooper, who is drawn into the titular northwestern town after a young girl named Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is found dead and wrapped in plastic. The town is full of oddball characters, low-level criminals and incompetent cops. Every episode opened up stranger new dimensions; the Black Lodge was a kind of spiritual waystation, populated by backwards-talking dwarfs and mute giants. Aspects of a typical procedural were deconstructed and turned upside down. The central mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was never meant to be explained or solved; how could you solve such a thing when evil permeated every molecule of a seemingly picture-perfect town?
“Twin Peaks,” ultimately, served as Lynch’s magnum opus. By the second season, he was getting pressure from the network to wrap up the mystery of Laura Palmer’s gruesome death. Lynch resisted and ultimately left the show, returning to direct the bonkers finale. He would come back to the world of “Twin Peaks” several times – for 1992’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” a beautiful, brilliant feature film that dramatized the seven days before Laura Palmer’s death; for several literary projects; and for “Twin Peaks: The Return,” an 18-episode series that ran on Showtime in 2017, which was completely directed by Lynch and took everything you expected a “Twin Peaks” revival to be and shook it violently. Featuring musical sequences, hundreds of characters and MacLachlan playing multiple iterations of his character. It is one of the most incredible things to ever air on television and its eighth episode, a black-and-white flashback that involves an atomic bomb and the birth of evil, is arguably one of the greatest single episodes of TV.
Released a few months after the original “Twin Peaks” debuted, “Wild at Heart,” adapted from the novel by Barry Gifford, was awash in sex and violence, with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the run. Lynch utilized “Wizard of Oz” references to enhance what could have been more predictable genre fodder (watch the terrific documentary “Lynch/Oz” for more on that). It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mom (and her villainous film mama), an Oscar nomination. While less of a sensation upon its initial release, it has been reevaluated as a key Lynch text.
“On the Air,” which ran for a single, seven-episode season on ABC the same year that “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” was released theatrically, was Lynch and Frost’s gonzo take on a sitcom. Lynch only directed the first episode and critics pilloried it. It remains a curio for Lynch die-hards only. More essential, perhaps, is 1993’s “Hotel Room,” an anthology series that Lynch developed for HBO in the wake of “Tales from the Crypt’s” zeitgeist-capturing success. Lynch directed the first and third episodes, working with “Wild at Heart” writer Barry Gifford. (Each episode is set at the same hotel in a different year.) They are intoxicating in singularly Lynchian ways, but the public’s response was tepid and HBO didn’t pick up the series for more episodes. (“Tales from the Crypt” ran until 1996.)
Lynch and Gifford re-teamed for 1997’s “Lost Highway,” an outstanding mystery that saw Bill Pullman as a man accused of murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette), who wakes up in the body of a younger man (Balthazar Getty), who is working for a mad gangster (Rober Loggia). It is full of unforgettable Lynch moments – when Robert Blake, in kabuki make-up, confronts Pullman at a party, asking Pullman to call his home, where Blake answers; a man who is impaled by a coffee table, his blood spilling out along the cool glass tabletop; a seemingly endless highway lit up by a pair of ghostly headlights. And the soundtrack, produced by Trent Reznor, remains one of the best of the 1990s. Just try playing “The Perfect Drug” and not bopping along. It was a box office disappointment but even Roger Ebert, who infamously dismissed “Blue Velvet” (one of his most notorious pans), admitted that it was a winner. It has since become one of his most celebrated works.
Two years after “Lost Highway,” Lynch returned to more restrained territory with “The Straight Story,” a sweet, based-on-a-true-story tale of an elderly man (played by legendary stuntman and actor Richard Farnsworth), who travels across the country on his tractor. This was a movie so heartwarming and handsomely square that it was released by Disney. Yes, Disney! Featuring some great performances by Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton and Everett McGill, it’s a low key charmer and very much worth seeking out. Your heart might burst.
2001’s “Mulholland Drive” showed Lynch’s uncanny ability to pivot. It was developed, years earlier, as the pilot for an ongoing, “Twin Peaks”-ish series that set up (but never paid off) several plot threads. “Twin Peaks” star Sherilyn Fenn claimed that the very first iteration of “Mulholland Drive” was meant as a spin-off of her character Audrey Horne. When ABC failed to pick up the series, Lynch obtained foreign money and reworked it into a sprawling feature, full of Lynchian flourishes – alternate dimensions, doubles, 1950s iconography. It won Lynch a Best Director prize at that year’s Cannes and, in recent years, is acknowledged as one of the great American features of all time. It topped a BBC poll in 2016 and was #8 in Sight & Sound’s critics poll of the best movies ever. Try walking behind a diner without expecting a crazy monster to pop out.
Lynch would only complete one more feature before his death, 2006’s “Inland Empire.” In some ways it’s the perfect bookend to his filmmaking career, since it harkened back to the low budget experimentalism of “Eraserhead.” It reunited Lynch with Dern, who plays an actress who starts to meld with one of her characters. A shoestring budget was cobbled together from foreign financing, with Lynch taking on many behind-the-scenes roles and shooting the movie on a consumer-grade camcorder. With a three-hour running time, a cast full of stars like Jeremy Irons and Julia Ormand, and a truly unhinged point-of-view, it is vintage Lynch at his most uncompromised and unhinged. Lynch famously launched an Oscar campaign for Dern by himself, sitting on the side of the road with a cow and a sign urging voters to consider the actress.
In 2022, Lynch appeared in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fablemans” playing another famous director, John Ford. His brief cameo, which arrives at the very end of Spielberg’s autobiographical opus, dramatizes a moment that Spielberg actually shared with Ford as a young man. Lynch-as-Ford gives Spielberg stand-in Sammy Fableman (Gabriel LaBelle) advice on cinematography. The scene is hilarious and powerful. And aside from the videos made within his house, it was the one of the last times that we would see Lynch in full power. (He also showed up in a recent Beatles documentary on Disney+, having seen them when they first arrived in America in 1964.)
In some ways, it was the perfect way to say goodbye to Lynch – a king of cinema, making everything he touched better and screaming his lungs out.