The Death of David Lynch: The Twin Peaks Director Who Embraced the Weird

David Lynch once said that he was inspired to become a filmmaker when, while painting, he spontaneously heard a gust of wind and saw the artwork moving across the canvas.

The moment defined his passion for “moving paintings,” but also his passion for the grotesque, twisting realities on the small and big screen for nearly 40 years.

78-year-old American director, who is dead Months after announcing her emphysema diagnosis, she became the contemporary face of the queer worlds that are often hidden in everyday society – from the TV series Twin Peaks to films such as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. .

A self-proclaimed daydreamer, Lynch burst onto the scene via the midnight movie circuit with 1977’s Eraserhead. Disquieting horror, a commentary on masculinity, sets the layered template that runs through his work.

Four decades later, he lived to see his style immortalized as an adjective in the Oxford Dictionary. Lynchian, it readsblurs “worldly elements with elements of the surreal or unreal” – a fitting tribute to the four-time Oscar nominee turned Lifetime winner, whose roles were as big as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946 in Missoula, Montana. The son of a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture, he spent most of his early life moving from state to state with his brother and sister.

However, Lynch’s parents encouraged his artistic ambitions from an early age. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1990, he said his mother “saved” him by encouraging him to draw on scrap paper instead of using coloring books, where “the whole idea is to be between the lines”.

This ethos inspired his films, a rebellious streak he teased that spanned the ages of 14 to 30. “People are rebels these days”, he argued, “because we are made to live longer”.

Adolescent disillusionment with the quiet environment of suburban life left him yearning for “something to happen” to challenge the superficiality of 1950s family ideals—a dark dream that his films and shows embodied. What was alive?

Lynch’s black-and-white debut feature Eraserhead achieves this vision far more successfully than during his years at art school, with its protagonist descending into madness after the birth of a terrifying child.

Critics were left confused, but his late-night cinema success sparked a breakthrough when an audience member recommended him to Mel Brooks, who asked him to lead The Elephant Man.

Co-written by Lynch, the film’s cast of eventual screen icons, including John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, turned the story of Clunk into an emotional, critical hit, surpassing the original stage play.

As part of the film’s eight nominations, including Best Picture, Lynch received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay.

But if Hollywood thought it had found a new blockbuster master, Tinseltown quickly discovered that Lynch had no interest in playing mainstream with his 1984 adaptation of the sci-fi epic Dune .

With questionable special effects, costumes and rock star stings covered in baby oil, The Guardian’s Charles Brimesco wrote that Lynch’s experiences left the franchise “radiant for decades”. “I’m proud of everything but Devon,” Lynch would later tell a YouTube Q&A, while admitting elsewhere that it nearly “killed” his career.

The wounds began to heal, however, when he returned to doubling down on his signature style – keeping his attention on America’s dirty underbelly in his sights.

Blue Velvet, starring Kyle McLachlan from Devon, follows a small-town boy who becomes trapped in the underworld when he discovers a severed ear. Part brutal and violent, it divided critics but earned Lynch a second Oscar nod for best director.

“That’s the way America is to me,” Lynch would later describe the film in his book Lynch on Lynch. “There’s a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s also a fear and sickness”.

He won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990 for Romance Wild at Heart, starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe.

But it was Lynch’s belief in American Beauty and horror being two sides of the same coin, perfected in his TV project Twin Peaks released that same year, that came to define him.

On paper, the haunting drama explores the farcical goings-on in a US logging town following the murder of teenage beauty queen Laura Palmer, brought to life hauntingly by Sheryl Lee.

But viewers were really captivated by what he had to offer: a dreamlike nightmare of wonderfully strange characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, again played by Kyle McLachlan. Paid, in the seeming comfort of picket fenced America – cherry pie and coffee included – before arriving without a hitch. With its chilling sexual exploitation and murders in living rooms. It was one that had no place on American TV before.

The ABC show won three Golden Globe Awards in 1991, including Best TV Drama Series and Best Actor in a TV Drama for McLachlan.

“Without Twin Peaks, and its massive expansion of television possibilities, half of your favorite shows wouldn’t exist,” James Parker wrote for The Atlantic.

The show, it continued, “effectively renegotiated its TV deal with its audience”.

It didn’t matter that the second season ended after the killer was revealed. TV was no longer safe, it was visually alive – the ideas and production values ​​of the big screen somehow adapted to living rooms in an era when the silver screen reigned supreme.

In 1992, audiences were taken back to Twin Peaks with a prequel feature film, Firewalk With Me, but nothing quite matched the original run.

When the nation asked “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”, it wasn’t just about solving the mystery, but finding refuge from the rotten realities society would ignore. Lynch had found his darkness.

He would eventually turn his attention back to the big screen to attack Hollywood’s evil machinations of fame, glamour, deception and loss of identity, in films unofficially known as his Los Angeles Trilogy.

It started with 1997’s Lost Highway, before 2001’s Mulholland Drive – perhaps the closest to Twin Peaks in terms of aesthetics.

The psychological drama was critically acclaimed, earning Lynch his third Best Director Oscar nomination and a Best Director gong at Cannes. In recent years it has also been recognized for its queer themes, particularly between Naomi Watt and Laura Harring’s characters, which challenged conventional Hollywood storytelling at the time.

Last came 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch’s last feature film, which proved to be as mind-melting as ever – showing no mercy to Hollywood star culture.

As Mike Muncer told BBC Arts’ Cinema Inside: “Lynch lures us in with the promise of familiar, traditional genre thrills and mystery as a safety net, before the strangeness sets in. felt

“Finally, the mystery box is opened, revealing a deeper, more terrifying story than the one Lynch has been telling us all along.”

In his later years, Lynch achieved venerable cult status. In 2017, he directed Twin Peaks: The Return, a new series set 25 years after the events of the original show, with much of the same cast.

Plus, the show’s legacy lives on, inspiring dramas like True Detective and 2023’s critically acclaimed PlayStation survival horror game Alan Wake II.

Off camera, Lynch admitted that he sometimes struggled to balance the “tough business” of fatherhood with his career.

He welcomed four children – Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lola – with ex-wives Peggy Revy, Mary Fisk and Mary Sweeney, and estranged wife Emily Stoffel.

“I love all my children and we get along great, but in the early years, before you can talk to them, it’s hard,” He said to the vulture. “Work is the main thing, and I know that I have suffered because of it. But at the same time I love the children very much.”

Although Lynch never returned to feature film directing to give himself another shot at winning an Oscar, he was awarded an honorary lifetime achievement statue by the Academy in 2019. He also had a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 semi-autobiographical film, The Fable Men. The filmmaker is playing the role of John Ford.

His artistic activities became increasingly diverse towards the end of his life, from his original passion of painting to music. Just last year, she released Cellophane Memories, an album with Chrystabell. This added to his previous work creating music videos for artists such as Moby and Nine Inch Nails.

Discussing his emphysema diagnosis last summer, he said he was in “great shape” and “will never retire”.

He added that the diagnosis was the “price to pay” for his smoking habit, although he did not regret the pleasure he got from it.

But within months his condition deteriorated. In a November interview with People magazine, Lynch said she needed oxygen to walk.

His ideas live on, however, as he describes the way he thinks about them.

Speaking to musician Patti Smith for BBC Newsnight in 2014, he said: “I get ideas in pieces. It’s like there’s a puzzle in another room – all the pieces fit together.

“But in my room, they just flip me one piece at a time.”