Legendary filmmaker David Lynch dies aged 78

In devastating news for the film industry and beyond, David Lynch has passed away at the age of 78. His family made the announcment in a Facebook post today (January 16), saying: “It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch... 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.’” No cause has been officially stated, though Lynch revealed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking.

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch spent much of his early life moving around the US with his family, who would go on to live in Idaho, Washington, North Carolina, and Virginia, inspiring his obsession with the American Dream and its dark underbelly. Like his iconic Twin Peaks protagonist, special agent Dale Cooper, he was a member of the Boy Scouts as a child and achieved the highest rank of Eagle Scout, though at school he showed little interest in academic work. 

“My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees,” he reminisced in the 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. “Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it.” This image perfectly encapsulates the influence that the filmmaker’s childhood had on his art, and its predominant themes: the horrors that linger behind the idyllic veneer of American suburbia, the bodies buried under the manicured lawn.

After school Lynch left for art college, pursuing a dream of becoming a professional painter, but dropped out after a year citing a lack of inspiration. Instead, he travelled to Europe in the hope of training under the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, but again this fell through, and he returned to America after just two weeks abroad. Painting’s loss was cinema’s gain. Again, Lynch enrolled in art school, this time at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, which is where he decided to branch out into short films after experiencing an intense desire to see his paintings move. 

His first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), came joint-first at the Academy’s end-of-year exhibition in 1967. More short films would follow – including The Alphabet and The Grandmother – setting the tone for a career-long exploration of the dark and the disturbing. However, it was several years later, in 1977, that Lynch would really make his mark. After moving his first wife and daughter to Los Angeles so he could study filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, Lynch started work on his debut feature film, Eraserhead (1977). According to Lynch, the black-and-white film, set in a dystopian wasteland that drew on his experiences in Philadelphia, was misunderstood by every reviewer at the time, but soon became a cult classic, with avid fans including Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas.

On the back of Eraserhead, Lynch was selected to direct 1980’s The Elephant Man, which picked up eight Academy Award nominations and saw him plunge headfirst into Hollywood. It didn’t last long, though. His next film, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune – later deemed a “total failure” by Lynch himself – was plagued by artistic compromises and a drastic theatrical cut, and was a critical and commercial flop.

Again, though, Lynch’s pain had a silver lining. After all, who knows if we’d have his masterpiece follow-up film, Blue Velvet, and Dune star Kyle MacLachlan in the lead role alongside Laura Dern, if the director had fully committed to blockbuster success? Any Lynch fan will know that Blue Velvet cemented Lynch’s reputation for putting the dark heart in the American Heartlands, with a lovably naive protagonist, striking imagery from a severed ear to white picket fences, moments of disturbing violence, and a soaring score featuring music by the late Angelo Badalamenti. The story, Lynch said, was “a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story”. 

Badalamenti, MacLachlan, and later Laura Dern also followed Lynch into his much-adored Twin Peaks project, which ran for two series in the early 90s. From the moment that high school student Laura Palmer turned up dead, wrapped in plastic, it was clear that Twin Peaks was something special. As it examines the effect of her supernatural death on a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the show walks a perfect line between the homely comforts of soap opera and the occult terror that saturates much of Lynch’s other work, and many agree that it changed the television landscape forever. (Lynch himself also put in a highlight acting performance as the hard-of-hearing FBI deputy director Gordon Cole.) It’s a very Lynchian twist, then, that the filmmaker chose to veer away from fan service when Twin Peaks was resurrected for a critically acclaimed third season in 2017, choosing instead to plunge us into an ever darker and more bizarre world populated by many returning cast members.

From the 1990s to the 2000s, Lynch went on to direct six more feature films – with standouts including Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Drive – and a couple of lesser-known TV series, On the Air and Hotel Room. Mulholland Drive, a dreamlike tale of mistaken identities and psychosexual enigmas starring Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, has consistently placed among the greatest films of all time in the decades since its release in 2001.

In recent years, however, Lynch devoted much of his time (besides working on a mystery project dubbed Wisteria) to other forms of expression. Besides continuing to paint, musical side projects such as Crazy Clown Time saw him collaborate with the likes of Karen O, Lykke Li, and Flying Lotus. Founded in 2005, meanwhile, his eponymous foundation was devoted to bringing Transcendental Meditation to adults and children around the world – Lynch himself began the practice in 1973, and noted its impact on his intuitive creative process in the autobiography/self-help guide Catching the Big Fish. “Ideas are like fish,” he wrote, drawing a comparison to consciousness. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.” 

In 2020, Lynch also revived his daily weather forecasts after a 10-year hiatus, alongside other videos such as archival short films, and a daily lottery that saw him pick seemingly-meaningless numbered balls out of a jar. Despite not knowing what many of the videos meant, exactly (did we ever know what he really meant?) a community of viewers tuned in religiously to watch them every day. This is a testament to how much he was loved by his fans – as well as actors, musicians, and other collaborators – for much more than just his filmmaking. As we mourn the loss of David Lynch, it’s worth returning to his own frequent sign-off during these daily videos: a reassurance that the clouds will burn away, and then we’ll be enjoying “beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way”.