David Lynch, the celebrated director of avant-garde films such as Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Elephant Man and the much love TV show Twin Peaks, has passed away at the age of 78.
His family announced his death in a Facebook post on Thursday (16 January), writing, “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.’”
Known for his use of unsettling visuals, stream-of-consciousness storytelling style, and kitsch soundtracks, Lynch walked a tightrope between his artistic sensibilities and his inexplicable popular appeal among the more conventional moviegoing public, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael labelling him “the first populist surrealist”.
In his frequent collaborations with Hollywood luminaries such as Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Naomi Watts, Jack Nance and Harry Dean Stanton, the director leaves behind an oeuvre which rivals the medium’s most accomplished auteurs.
Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946 to an agricultural research scientist and an English tutor, the young David Lynch had aspirations of being a painter. He studied at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts but left after only a year, saying that he was “not inspired” by the experience. Instead, he travelled around Europe, hoping to train with Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka – however, he returned to the US after only two weeks after learning the artist was unavailable.
Lynch completed his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), in 1967 while attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The project was an experimental animated short film featuring six figures vomiting in sequence while a siren plays on a loop and bore many of what would later be considered hallmarks of Lynch’s directing style: absurdity, surrealism, jarring, unsettling imagery, and above all a keen sense of playfulness and humour.
The project was followed by short films The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970) and The Amputee (1974), the latter of which saw Lynch ‘s first on-screen appearance as an actor. Lynch would step in front of the camera many times over the course of his career, most notably as FBI agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks, and John Ford in the climax of Steven Spielberg’s film The Fabelmans.
The director’s big break came in 1977, with the release of his genre-defying experimental film Eraserhead. The film’s story – such as it is – follows Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), who finds himself caring for a monstrous child in a dreamlike, black-and-white parody of modern America.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its strange subject matter, the film managed to gross $7 million on a £100,000 budget and established Lynch as not only one of the most brilliant and daring filmmakers of the age but also, against all odds, as one that could turn a profit.
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While the film garnered negative reviews at the time, including from Variety, which called it “a sickening bad-taste exercise” with “little substance or subtlety”, the film is now seen as an exemplar of surrealism filmmaking, with some comparing it to Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or or Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.
Lynch found his first taste of mainstream critical acceptance with his 1980 biographical account of the life of Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man. The film, which starred John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and saw Lynch receive his first nod for Best Director. Hurt, who starred as Merrick in the film, called the movie the advent of probably one of the greatest directors of the 20th century”, and said of Lynch, “now there’s a man who talks the language of cinema”.
Lynch developed that language in the coming years and decades, and he directed his seminal works Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, each of which garnered the same combination of bafflement, disgust, fury, appreciation and ultimately critical acclaim that his early efforts did. His final full-length theatrical work, Inland Empire, was released in 2006, after which Lynch spent much of the rest of his life developing projects for television and the internet, writing and painting.
Though known primarily as a director of film, perhaps Lynch’s most enduring work is his television series Twin Peaks. Released in the early 1990s, the show quickly became one of the most intensely analysed and discussed shows on television, with its central mystery of who killed prom queen Laura Palmer capturing the attention of audiences the world over. Despite being steeped in Lynch’s trademark surrealism and non-linear storytelling, audiences were enthralled from the off, as speculation about the identity of Laura’s killer became watercooler conversation across the world. The show has been cited as a major influence on similarly acclaimed shows such as Lost, The X-Files and True Detective.
The show spawned a theatrical film – Fire Walk With Me – which was released after the show’s cancellation in 1992. While it was not received well at the time, with many fans considering it an unsatisfying way to wrap up the series (as it was, at the time, intended to do), like much of Lynch’s work has since been reappraised, and is now considered a cult classic.
The series was revived once again, this time as a limited series titled Twin Peaks: The Return, in 2017. Like the original seasons, The Return received critical acclaim and was named by Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and Esquire as the best television show of 2017. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest seasons of television ever made, with Sean T Collins of Rolling Stone calling it “one of the most groundbreaking TV series ever”.
In a 2024 interview with Sight and Sound, Lynch revealed that due to the likelihood that catching Covid would exacerbate his emphysema, which had become so bad that he could not travel more than a short distance before he ran out of oxygen, he could no longer direct in person. However, this did not stop him from continuing to work on several projects in his final years.
He is survived by his four children, Jennifer Lynch, Austin Jack Lynch, Riley Lynch, and Lula Lynch. His eldest, Jennifer, is a filmmaker in her own right, directing the film Boxing Helena in 1993, as well as working on TV shows including The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. She also wrote the New York Times bestselling book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which is set in the universe of her father’s show Twin Peaks.
Unlike his films, and very much like his life, Lynch leaves behind a legacy that is uncontroversial and unambiguous: he will, quite simply, be remembered as one of the greatest directors of all time. He leaves behind a body of work that will keep film students and scholars busy for generations, but the simple fact of his genius will never be in doubt.
To quote Roger Ebert’s four-star review of Mulholland Drive: “The way you know the movie is over is that it ends.”
David Keith Lynch, born 20 January, died at 78
