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 Thursday but provided no details. In 2024, 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.
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 1991 and 1992; 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 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,” 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.
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. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.
Performative normality was evident in 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 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, 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 Lynch’s first Hollywood feature, "The Elephant Man” (1981), to label him "Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Perhaps in response, 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 Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula but lived there for only a short time. The family soon moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to Spokane, Washington.
The deep timberlands of the Northwest left a profound impression on 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, North Carolina, and then Alexandria, Virginia, where David Lynch 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,” Lynch said in a 1997 interview. "I saw vivid images — plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows.”
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 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, 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 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. Lynch was hired by 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’ "Star Wars,” but if 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, De Laurentiis bankrolled 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, 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 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. Lynch’s scarcely less controversial follow-up, "Wild at Heart,” starring 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, 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 FBI agent (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.
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 Times. (Lynch had better luck when he and Frost revived "Twin Peaks” in 2017, picking up on the cliffhanger that ended the original iteration a quarter-century before, albeit withholding MacLachlan’s stellar FBI agent until the final episode.)
After "Fire Walk With Me,” 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.” 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 5 mph) to visit an estranged brother.
Crafting a masterpiece
Two years later, 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 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 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,” 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, Dern. Lynch’s most experimental film since "Eraserhead,” "Inland Empire” meditated on the power of recording. A blandly inscrutable movie as well as an homage to Dern, who is on screen throughout, "Inland Empire” has no logic apart from its movie-ness.
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 Fisk and Sweeney, he had a lengthy relationship with Rossellini. His daughter Jennifer Lynch is also a filmmaker.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
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