David Lynch (1946–2025)
179Jan. 17, 2025
Iconoclastic directorDavid Lynch, who with his darkly surreal films brought the avant-garde shrieking and scratching into the mainstream, has died at the age of seventy-eight. His family announced his death via asocial media postbut did not give a cause. Lynch, who began smoking at the age of eight, had been diagnosed with emphysema in 2020. A towering figure in the world of cinema, he changed the face of filmed narrative fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century with movies likeEraserhead(1977) andBlue Velvet(1986) and the noirish ABC television seriesTwin Peaks(1990–91), which at its own peak brought an off-kilter, intellectually challenging storyline and polished cinematography into the same 15 million American homes where the soap operaDynasty, its time-slot predecessor, had previously ruled. “Lynch’s great subject is instability and displacement: what happens when the ground disappears from beneath your feet, when you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time,”wrote Greil Marcus in 2006. ‘“I like the nowhere part of America,’ he has said, but in his films nowhere is where you find it, or make it.”
David Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. His mother was an English tutor, and his father was a forestry research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, who frequently left his son alone in nature while he made his rounds. ‘It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods,” Lynch toldTimein 1990. “There were odd, mysterious things. That’s the kind of world I grew up in.” Owing to the nature of his father’s job, Lynch experienced a peripatetic childhood as the family moved around among Idaho, Washington, Virginia, and North Carolina. Disinterested in school, the young Lynch focused on scouting, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout, of which he remained immensely proud, and on painting. In 1966, he enrolled in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; while studying there, he made his first experimental short film,Six Men Getting Sick.
In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and began work on his first full-length film, the body-horror featureEraserhead. The film, a distressing tale about a man caring for a child in a dystopian industrial setting, took five years to complete, finally appearing in 1977. While it failed to gain traction commercially, it caught the eye of noted comedian Mel Brooks, who hired him to directThe Elephant Man, a 1980 film based on the life of a deformed man living in nineteenth-century England, which Brooks was producing. “You wouldn’t think that anybody would select the director ofEraserheadto directThe Elephant Man,” Lynch toldBOMBin 2013. “But Mel Brooks . . . is very intelligent and creative, and he is an artist. He is very sensitive, and he really understands human nature. Otherwise, he couldn’t do those great comedies. I guessEraserheadspoke to him, and off we went.”
Securing eight Oscar nominations,Elephant Manwas a box-office hit, and Lynch went on to direct Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classicDunein 1984. Heavily edited in postproduction, the film flopped with audiences and critics alike, and Lynch struck out on his own withBlue Velvet, a neo-noir mystery thriller that he wrote and directed. Beautifully shot and soundtracked, rife with symbolism, and starring a nude Isabella Rossellini, the film, about the adventures of a young man who finds a severed human ear in a field, earned him his second Oscar nomination for Best Director and is frequently ranked among the top one hundred films of all time.
In 1990, Lynch turned his attention to the small screen, collaborating with onetimeHill Street Blueswriter Mark Frost to createTwin Peaks, a surreal mystery-horror series centered on a young FBI agent investigating the murder of a beautiful woman in a remote logging town. Lasting just two seasons, the series introduced to network television profound topics, disturbing elements, and high-quality production, all of which are considered de rigueur today but which were nonexistent in commercial TV at the time. These tenets, along with noirish themes and an uncategorizable weirdness, would continue to mark his output, which included the filmsWild at Heart(1990),Lost Highway(1997),Mulholland Drive(2001), andInland Empire(2006), with the director continuing to rack up accolades and awards—including the Palme d’Or, forWild at Heart; a Golden Lion for his contributions to cinema at the 2006 Venice Biennale; and an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019—for the duration of his career.
Lynch’s interests were diverse as his talent was monumental. He was a longtime and passionate practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and in 2005 established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Music, too, remained a touchstone, with Lynch directing videos for artists including Chris Isaak, Moby, and Nine Inch Nails, and releasing several of his own albums, collaborating with such luminaries as composer Angelo Badalamenti and Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman Karen O. Other interests included the weather, which he reported on viashort videosbeginning in the early 2000s, and interior design, such as that of the nightclubSilencio, which he opened in Paris in 2011.
In 2020, Lynch was diagnosed with emphysema. He quit smoking two years later. “A big important part of my life was smoking,” Lynch told People in 2024. “I loved the smell of tobacco, the taste of tobacco. I loved lighting cigarettes. It was part of being a painter and a filmmaker for me.” By late last year, he was unable to walk across a room unassisted. “It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head,” he mourned.
As ably as he crafted his films, Lynch back in 1992 summed up the tension that would turn out to mark his entire oeuvre. “It’s like being locked in a building with ten maniacs,” he told interviewer Kristine McKenna. “You know there’s a door somewhere and there’s a police station across the street where they’ll take care of you, but you’re still in the building. It doesn’t matter what you know about the other places,” he concluded, “if you’re still stuck in the building.”