David Lynch, the celebrated American filmmaker, artist, writer, and musician, has died, according to a message on his official Facebook page. He was 78.
Often lauded as one of the finest filmmakers of his generation, Lynch coined a distinctive and wholly unique style of storytelling, which often involved all-American normality jarring with warped scenes of unexpected violence. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense,” he once said of his work. “They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” Nominated for three best-director Academy Awards along with four Golden Globes, he was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for Wild at Heart and in 2006 received a career Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
As well as directing critically acclaimed film masterpieces like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, together with Mark Frost he created the 1988 television series Twin Peaks, which The Observer reported in 1990 “changed the ground rules for network television and… made David Lynch the most talked about cultural figure in America.” Revived in 2017, The Hollywood Reporter called the reboot “unsettling, weird, funny, and basically impossible to review.”
Such words were often invoked to describe Lynch’s work, which defied classification to such an extent that journalists, writers, and critics relied upon the much-maligned term “Lynchian” to sum up what they were seeing. “An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter,’” wrote novelist David Foster Wallace in 1996. “But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it.” He often found himself described as a surrealist, a description he resisted, telling The New York Times in 2008 that “it’s more than just surrealism to me.”
Lynch was born in 1946 in Montana. His father was a research scientist in the US Forest Service and the family moved around a lot when Lynch was young. “My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees,” he recalled. “Middle America as it’s supposed to be.” Despite a largely idyllic childhood, Lynch’s ambition to be an artist caused friction with his parents, but he nevertheless enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964.
He left disappointed after a year, enlisting two years later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It was while studying in Philadelphia that he met fellow student Peggy Reavey, and the two married in 1967 and had a daughter, Jennifer, in 1968. They divorced in 1974 and Lynch remarried three further times, with each marriage producing a child. When asked why he continued to marry, he told New York magazine in 2008, “We live in the field of relativity. Things change.” He also engaged in a long-term bicoastal relationship with Isabella Rossellini, who appeared in Blue Velvet. “Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalise them. David doesn’t translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional,” she said of his work. “Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it’s like fishing. He never knows what he’s going to catch.”
In 1968, while studying in Philadelphia, he produced a short film, Six Men Getting Sick, on a budget of $200, and was awarded joint honours in the school’s Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize. He sent his next short film, The Alphabet, to the American Film Institute, which awarded him a grant to produce his next script, The Grandmother (1970). Moving to Los Angeles shortly afterward, he began studying at the institute and developed the idea for Eraserhead. Created on a budget of $20,000 and produced at night as Lynch worked in the daytime delivering copies of The Wall Street Journal, the movie became a cult classic thanks to its popularity in late-night theatres, catapulting Lynch to stardom.
Following the success of Eraserhead, he directed Mel Brooks in The Elephant Man in 1980, with the actor telling him, “You’re sick, I want you to direct my movie.” From there, he helmed Dune, a poorly-reviewed blockbuster film which The Observer called a “mangled, virtually incomprehensible movie and a financial failure.” He made his comeback in 1986 with Blue Velvet, which starred his frequent collaborator Laura Dern, with Empire calling it “an American masterpiece.” The popularity cemented Lynch’s reputation as a cinematic titan. His odder behavior traits, like drinking the same milkshake every day at 2:30 p.m. at Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles for seven years, only grew his legend as an eccentric auteur director.
Outside of filmmaking, he worked as an artist and musician. Indeed, initially Lynch aspired to work as a painter, his ambition serving as the subject of the well-received 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. Today, his Francis Bacon-inspired paintings sit within the private collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and his alma mater, Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he exhibited in 2014. While his paintings were admired, they never reached the level of acclaim of his filmmaking, with The New York Times bluntly arguing, “Is Mr. Lynch as compelling a fine artist as he has been a filmmaker? The short answer is no.”
Called a “modern-day icon and polymath” by NME, Lynch also released two studio solo albums, along with three collaborative records and six soundtrack albums. He regularly collaborated with brands on advertisements, most notably with Calvin Klein, for whom he produced four films inspired by literary quotes in promotion of their scent Obsession. Eclectic in his choice of commercial partners, he worked with fashion clients like Dior, Saint Laurent, and Giorgio Armani, while also producing films for Clear Blue pregnancy tests, Alka-Seltzer, and New York’s Department of Sanitation. A keen furniture designer, Lynch presented a collection at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1997 and brought his eye to the nightclub industry when he created Silencio in Paris in 2011.
In later life, he became a vocal advocate of transcendental meditation. Beginning his personal practice in 1973, he set up the David Lynch Foundation in 2005, with the ambition of teaching children about meditation. “The things in life that used to almost kill you, stress you, depress you, make you sad, make you afraid—they have less and less power,” he told The New York Times of his practice in 2013. “It’s like you’re building up a flak jacket of protection. You’re starting to glow with this from within.” Receiving generous publicity thanks to the support of celebrity friends like Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Clint Eastwood, and Jerry Seinfeld, the foundation later supported at-risk populations like the homeless and military veterans. In 2006 he released a book on the topic, part autobiography and part self-help tome, called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.
More recently, Lynch engaged his devoted online fan base with daily weather reports from his home in Los Angeles, besides making an appearance in Steven Spielberg’s 2023 film The Fabelmans, playing director John Ford. In 2024, Lynch, a lifelong smoker, announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema.
He is survived by four children: Jennifer Lynch, Austin Jack Lynch, Riley Sweeney Lynch, and Lula Boginia Lynch.