In 1990, a television network let David Lynch put a dead homecoming queen wrapped in plastic at the centre of a prime-time drama. Twin Peaks became a national obsession, and the word “Lynchian” entered the language to describe the uneasy, dreamlike world he had been building on film since the 1970s. Lynch died on January 15, 2025, in Los Angeles. He was 78. He had been diagnosed with emphysema after decades of smoking, and days before his death the wildfires around Los Angeles had forced him to leave his home.
Missoula to Eraserhead
Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, and grew up in small towns across the American Northwest, the kind of places that later appeared in his films. He studied painting in Boston and Philadelphia before moving to Los Angeles to study film. He spent about five years making Eraserhead, a black-and-white nightmare about a man and his deformed baby, which became a midnight-movie hit after its release in 1977.
The Elephant Man to Mulholland Drive
Mel Brooks’s company hired him to direct The Elephant Man, which was nominated for eight Oscars in 1981. After the failure of Dune, he made Blue Velvet in 1986, with its severed ear in a field and Dennis Hopper’s terrifying Frank Booth. Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990. Mulholland Drive, in 2001, began as a rejected television pilot and is now often named among the greatest films of the century. He was nominated for four Oscars and received an honorary award in 2019.
Twin Peaks and beyond
Twin Peaks, made with Mark Frost, ran for two seasons on ABC, was followed by the film Fire Walk with Me and returned in 2017 as an 18-hour series. Lynch also painted, made music, sold his own coffee, posted daily weather reports online and practised Transcendental Meditation, which he promoted through a foundation he set up in 2005. He played Gordon Cole, the hard-of-hearing FBI chief, in Twin Peaks, and in 2022 played the director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.
Lynch rarely explained his films and refused to give interviewers the meanings they wanted. He said the films meant what audiences felt they meant, and four decades of arguments about them suggest that was the point.