David Lynch Dead at 78: The World’s Most Influential Filmmaker Redefined Cinema — and Became an Adjective
David Lynch is dead at the age of 78. By any measure the most influential filmmaker of our time, the Missoula, Montana-born artist left such a mark that his very name became an adjective. There’s Hitchcockian, and then there’s Lynchian.
Controversial, visionary, and absolutely singular, his films from “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet” to “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive” were immersive plunges into rich cinematic landscapes of twisted psyches and luscious surfaces.
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The news of Lynch’s death was confirmed on his official Facebook page.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'”
“It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
That’s a fitting sentiment for the man with the aw-shucks, Jimmy Stewart demeanor we saw post weather report videos on his Twitter feed in the last years of his life. For all the demented killers and weirdos in his films — the nitrous-oxide huffing abusers and albino cowboys, the sadistic, sexually abusive fathers, not to mention Bobby Peru — his films were also startling evocations of Americana: The picket fences at the beginning of “Blue Velvet,” the small town diners and gas stations of “Twin Peaks,” the gentle rural rhythms of “The Straight Story.” Jonathan Rosenbaum once criticized Lynch’s aesthetic for being really not that far afield from that of Walt Disney and Main Street U.S.A. One time, when Lynch was asked to provide a biography, he simply stated “Eagle scout. Missoula, Montana.”
Born there on January 20, 1946, Lynch’s life itself was one of unabashed Americana. As an Eagle Scout, he attended the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. From an early age, he was interested in painting, and becoming a professional artist was his sole preoccupation for much of his early life. Unhappy experiences at the Corcoran School of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, led to him traveling around Europe for three years with his friend and fellow artist, Jack Fisk, who would become the production designer on many of his films as well as a legendary collaborator of other filmmakers such as Terence Malick and Martin Scorsese.
Eventually, Lynch settled in Philadelphia and enrolled in the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Painting is something he’d continue throughout his entire career, but while in Philadelphia he experimented for the first time with filmmaking. Or rather, animation. His short “Six Men Getting Sick” from 1967 is a repeated animation showing symbolic vomiting. It’s eerie and unsettling, exactly what you’d think he might have made as his first film. And these years in Philadelphia proved troubled ones: As the city’s industrial life was hollowed out, Lynch became obsessed with its factory smokestacks and pervasive smog. In his exhibitions of his photography throughout his life, you could see Lynch’s obsessions with industry and its decay. These years proved a huge influence on the ambient industrial sounds in “Eraserhead” and the role of the factory in “Twin Peaks.”
More short films followed in the years after “Six Men Getting Sick,” films that have since been collected on DVD and prove instructive for the development of his aesthetic. “The Alphabet” was another work in animation. “The Grandmother,” however, was a particular leap forward: Having sent “The Alphabet” and his premise for “The Grandmother” to the American Film Institute, the still-new academy awarded him $7,200 to make this most ambitious short. It combined animation with live action to tell the story of a young boy whose parents speak in dog-like barks and who appears to “grow” his own grandmother, like a plant in soil, to take care of him. It’s tender, sad, affecting, and disturbing all at once, just the way “Twin Peaks” could go from a trio of teenagers singing “Just You and I” in the manner of The Fleetwoods to a gruesome murder.
When it was completed in 1970, “The Grandmother” ran 33 minutes. His first marriage to Peggy Lentz was breaking up, and he began a romance with Jack Fisk’s sister, Mary. Studying at the American Film Institute as an artist in residence (to this day, Lynch may be the single greatest alumnus ever of the AFI, and he was featured regularly in their annual tribute shows, including in their lifetime achievement ceremony for Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s “The Elephant Man”), the academy supported the development and production of his first feature, “Eraserhead.”
“Eraserhead” inverted the dynamic of “The Grandmother.” This time it was about an adult having to take care of a child. And what a child at that. Looking like the cross between a spermatozoon and a tadpole, this needy, frail little infant is wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, resting on the dresser and then the drawer of poor Jack Nance’s apartment in an industrial hellscape. Nance, who would appear in multiple other Lynch productions as part of what became a quasi-stock company for Lynch, sports a towering bouffaint of curly hair: an eraserhead. More sperm-like imagery pervades the movie, as strange larvae fall around Nance and the mysterious Lady in the Radiator (Lauren Near) as she performs the song “In Heaven.” Is it a dream? Is it a hallucination? Is it merely an expression of all the Nance character’s fears? It all culminates in the infant suddenly bursting through its swaddling clothes when Nance tries to kill it and becoming a devouring monster. And maybe the world ends too.
This particular combination of the cutesy and the absolutely disgusting would become a Lynch signature. Industrial imagery yet again pervades “The Elephant Man,” set in hazy, smokestack-filled 19th century London. Where “Eraserhead” was provocative, earning raves from the likes of Rosenbaum but condemnation from mainstream critics such as Roger Ebert, “The Elephant Man” was surprising for just how extraordinarily, overwhelmingly moving it was. Lynch could combine genuine, heartrending emotion with unsettling material in a way no one else could touch. It’s what you feel when you hear Laura Dern’s Sandy in “Blue Velvet” relate her dream about a flight of robins spreading love over all the world. Or Major Briggs in “Twin Peaks” sharing his vision about his son, all scored to transcendent Angelo Badalamenti synths.
It’s what made Lynch’s first and only foray into blockbuster filmmaking such a misguided idea, when he accepted an offer from Dino de Laurentiis to direct an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” in Mexico City after “The Elephant Man” earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture at the 1981 Academy Awards. Lynch had previously said he met with George Lucas about directing “Return of the Jedi,” a movie he had “next door to zero interest” in directing, and that he developed a massive headache when meeting with him. Lucas — who took Lynch to a restaurant that served nothing but salad — showed Lynch volumes full of concept art he’d already commissioned, and Lynch knew then that “Return of the Jedi” would not be his own film.
With “Dune,” he did have a chance to give some of his signature flourishes. With Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, he was able to engage in a level of grotesquerie that was Lynch’s own. Not to mention, he fused outlandish sexuality with utter sadism in the spectre of Sting’s loincloth-clad Feyd Rautha in a manner that would pop up in his subsequent work. De Laurentiis took final cut out of his hands and ultimately delivered a more pedestrian vision for the theatrical cut in 1984. It bombed. In interviews throughout the rest of his life, Lynch made clear he disowned “Dune” and that the film was a great source of sadness for him. But it also first paired him with more actors who would populate his growing cinematic stock company: Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Alicia Witt, and most importantly, Kyle MacLachlan. As viewers of Lynch’s work, you would be very misguided to write off his “Dune.” Compromised though it may be, it’s still a critical film in his development as an artist. Some, including the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, even consider “Dune” to be among his best work.
Without “Dune,” we surely never would have gotten “Blue Velvet.” A re-teaming with Kyle MacLachlan, but also producer De Laurentiis, “Blue Velvet” represented a “one for me” after the “one for them” in his Herbert adaptation. For all the controversy it inspired, all the handwringing interviews asking him about its violence, its sexuality, and, even whether, as Roger Ebert alleged in his review of the film upon its release in 1986, it exploited its lead actress, Lynch’s then girlfriend Isabella Rossellini, this is a film made by an eagle scout from Missoula, Montana. David Thomson once said “Blue Velvet” was “Beowulf at the International House of Pancakes,” a portrait of picket-fence Americana (picket fences and beautiful rosebuds literally do dot a crystalline blue sky in the opening shot) and the crepuscular darkness underneath, as immediately the film cuts to an image of centipedes and other insects crawling, grasping, and clawing each other beneath the still, picture-perfect surface. Is it even a metaphor? It’s too literal to be subtext. It’s just text. And indeed the darkness pervades all aspects of this idyllic town of Lumberton, North Carolina (or “Lumberton, U.S.A.” as an early radio broadcast declares, because no town as Andy Hardy-meets-Hardy Boys-perfect as this one could ever belong to just one state). The inky, puce walls of the apartment complex where Rossellini’s nightclub singer lives is as industrially hellish as anything in “Eraserhead.” And of course, Dennis Hopper, huffing nitrous oxide as rapist, gang leader Frank Booth is a vision of male bestiality ripped out of a Francis Bacon painting (Lynch has acknowledged Bacon as a key influence on his work).
“Blue Velvet” is one of those watershed moments in movie history. It was to 1986 what “Psycho” was to 1960. And with the particular combination of its extreme violence, sexual panic, and its homespun all-American aesthetic, was it actually a work of outsider art? Or a deeply conservative expression of Reaganism? The ’80s were a time when the ’50s did seem to make a comeback in many aspects of American life. The debates continue to this day, and Rossellini recently told IndieWire what she really felt about Ebert’s accusations that she was exploited while making it.
With “Blue Velvet,” that aesthetic would pervade much of Lynch’s work from there on out: dramatic mixtures of darkness and light (both metaphorically and in terms of actual cinematography) as extreme as anything Lucas had envisioned in his space saga, but brought to earth to comment on America and the human condition. There would be camp in Lynch’s work: Smeared lipstick figures heavily into both “Blue Velvet” and its Palme d’Or winning follow-up “Wild at Heart.” Moments of spirituality and deep empathy, largely powered by the music from his collaborator Badalamenti. Folksy aphorisms (“Damn good coffee!”). Intentionally stilted line deliveries. And deep, rich soundtracks, crackling and crisping with the hum of the nascent digital era. To that point Lynch’s aural environments had been created by legendary sound designer Alan Splet. In the later works, Lynch would design the soundscapes himself. Even when he’d work with other sound artists such as Dean Hurley, Lynch would often think about the sounds that would tell his stories, even before he conceived of the images.
All of which is to say, by the time he directed the pilot of “Twin Peaks” for ABC (he exerted a guiding hand over its first season and the early part of its second) the idea of what would be known as “Lynchian” was set. The extreme zoom out from the lattice-like ceiling of the police station when Ray Wise’s Leland Palmer is being interrogated in a Season 2 episode. Joan Chen’s Josie being trapped in a piece of furniture. An episode’s opening shot beginning in outer space. Anything was possible in the universe Lynch had created with “Twin Peaks.” You can draw a direct line from The Lady in the Radiator in “Eraserhead” to David Bowie’s voice giving life to a kind of industrial teapot in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Folksy and unsettling, homespun and avant-garde. You know Lynchian when you see it: It’s the teen angst of “Wild at Heart” and Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru graphically shooting his head off with a shotgun. It’s the headlights of a car frantically jostling down a lonely road like your eyes darting in REM sleep to start “Lost Highway.” It’s the digital hell of Robert Blake video-recording everybody in that movie, and the fuzzy bunnies and Phil Spector songs of “Inland Empire” (one of the early features shot on digital video). The campfires and muffled battle sounds on the soundtrack when war vets are recounting their past traumas in “The Straight Story” (a movie actually made for Walt Disney Studios and rated G, perhaps proving Rosenbaum’s thesis right). And it’s in the heart of his greatest film, the one that most profoundly captures his entire creative voice, “Mulholland Drive.”
Initially a kind of spinoff of “Twin Peaks” and developed as a TV show for ABC centered on the character of Audrey, “Mulholland Drive” ended up being rescued by French producer Alain Sarde when ABC rejected it (if ever there was a nemesis for Lynch, it was Bob Iger, who took creative control of “Twin Peaks” out of his hands and ultimately canceled the show after it was a phenomenon in 1990.) The story of two women and their connection in the Hollywood Hills, “Mulholland Drive” captures the dreams, sweaty desperation, and down-on-one’s-luck depravity of Tinseltown better than any film since “Sunset Boulevard.” If Lynch’s work had always worked in black-and-white, good-and-evil binaries, “Mulholland Drive” went beyond either-or in its morality and its worldview, while retaining so many echoes of his previous work. No movie has shown the darkness of Hollywood quite like this, but also its lustrous beauty and possibility as summed up in two scenes: one where Naomi Watts’ Betty recites a bit of silly boilerplate soap opera dialogue, and another where she acts it out with the utmost passion and conviction and commitment as if it were Chekhov. There can be depth in shallow things. We call it Tinseltown, based on cheap Christmas ornamentation, but it sure does glitter, and it sure can be beautiful. (For what it’s worth, that concept of reading the same bit of silly dialogue in diametrically opposed ways, showing how little the words on the page really can matter, is a bit Lynch likely got from “Andy Hardy’s Spring Fever” in 1939, where Mickey Rooney pulls the same trick) With “Mulholland Drive” we got a film where many things can be true at once, where traumas and injustices exist but judgments aren’t quickly forthcoming; it’s hard to imagine how anyone could call this a Reagan-approved vision, even with an Old Hollywood star in Ann Miller appearing.
And it all began as a TV pilot. A film that might be the best motion picture of the 21st century.
Before people started fretting about what’s film and what’s TV, Lynch had already shattered and discarded those labels. He shot a film with grainy video in “Inland Empire” when few others saw its gloomy, muted textural possibilities (something he’d embraced for his far earlier DV short film “The Amputee”). And he returned to TV again, partnering with Showtime for “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which aired in 2017 as one of his purest, most uncompromised visions. Instead of relying on nostalgia, he delivered Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper as a barely sentient simpleton, among many other ways of breaking down and reframing the way viewers saw his creation. And like “Mulholland Drive” it mixed horror and deeply felt emotion in an unclassifiable way, turning “Twin Peaks” into a story about returning a somehow-revived Laura Palmer to her mother, who lost her murdered daughter so many decades before. Then, as anyone who was seen the show will remember, it ends with a scream. One still ringing in our ears over seven years later.
Lynch’s work had that ability to haunt. And his influence can be seen in so many places, there’s no point in even enumerating it. Yes, there’s Hitchcockian. And then there’s Lynchian. He was that magnitude of a talent. His vision was that potent. Both instantly identifiable and worthy of endless obsession and scrutiny and study. It will be a spectre that haunts cinema forever.
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