David Lynch: The mind-bending Twin Peaks director who embraced strange things

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

This moment defined his passion for “watching paintings move”, but also his propensity for strangely-twisted realities on the small and big screens for nearly 40 years.

The 78-year-old American director, who died months after announcing his emphysema diagnosis, became the contemporary face of the strange, unsettling world often hidden within everyday society – from the TV series Twin Peaks to films such as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. till. ,

A self-proclaimed daydreamer, Lynch burst onto the scene via the midnight movie circuit with 1977’s Eraserhead. Disorienting horror, a commentary on male paranoia, set 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 reads“Blures surreal or frightening elements with the mundane” – a four-time Oscar nominee turned lifetime achievement recipient whose characters 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 Agriculture Department, he spent his early life moving from one state to another 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 that his mother “saved” him by encouraging him to draw on scrap paper rather than in coloring books, where “the whole idea is to stay between the lines”.

This ethos inspired his films, which featured a rebellious streak that he continued from the age of 14 to 30. “People live longer these days”, he argued, “because we are meant to live longer”.

Youthful frustration with the tranquility of suburban life made him yearn for “something different from the ordinary” to challenge the superficiality of 1950s family ideals – a dark dream that his films and shows brought to life.

Lynch’s black-and-white debut Eraserhead achieved this vision far more successfully than his years in art school, with its central character descending into madness after fathering a terrible child.

Critics were skeptical, but its late-night cinema success sparked a major breakthrough when an audience member recommended him to Mel Brooks, who asked him to direct The Elephant Man.

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

It earned Lynch Oscar nominations for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay, as part of the film’s eight nominations which also included Best Picture.

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

Featuring questionable special effects, costumes and rock star Sting soaked in baby oil, Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote that Lynch’s experiments left the franchise “radioactive for decades”. “I’m proud of everything except Dune,” Lynch later told a YouTube quiz, while admitting elsewhere that it almost “killed” his career.

The wounds began to heal, however, as he returned to double down on his signature style – drawing on his fascination with America’s seedy underbelly.

Blue Velvet, starring Dune’s Kyle MacLachlan, centers on a small-town boy who becomes trapped in the underworld when he finds a severed ear. Somewhat brutal and violent, it divided critics but earned Lynch his second Oscar for Best Director.

“That’s what America is to me,” Lynch later described the film in his book Lynch on Lynch. “There is a very innocent, naive quality to life, and also a horror and a sickness”.

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

But it was Lynch’s belief that American beauty and horror were two sides of the same coin, proven in his TV project Twin Peaks, released the same year, that defined him.

On paper, the disturbing drama explored the suspicious goings-on in an American logging town following the murder of teen beauty queen Laura Palmer, brought frighteningly to life by Sheryl Lee.

But audiences were really mesmerized by what it presented on screen: in the apparent comfort of picket-fenced America, a dream-like nightmare of wonderfully eccentric characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, again played by Kyle MacLachlan – Cherry Pie and Coffee included – before arriving without hesitation into the living room with a horrific stream of sexual abuse and murder. This was something that had never had a place on US 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 MacLachlan.

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

He added, the show “effectively renegotiated the TV contract with its viewers”.

It doesn’t matter that the second season faltered after the killer was revealed. TV was no longer safe, it was completely alive – the ideas and production values ​​of the big screen somehow transmitted into the living room in an era when the silver screen still ruled.

In 1992, audiences were taken back to Twin Peaks with the prequel feature film, Fire Walk with Me, but nothing matched the original performance.

When the nation asked “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, it was not just about solving the mystery, but about overcoming the rotten realities that society ignores. Lynch had found his darkness.

Eventually he focused on the big screen to attack the devilish machinations of Hollywood fame, glamour, deception and loss of identity, informally known as his Los Angeles Trilogy.

It started with 1997’s Lost Highway, before 2001’s Mulholland Drive – perhaps the closest it’s come aesthetically to Twin Peaks.

The psychological drama received critical acclaim, earning Lynch his third Best Director Oscar nomination and winning the Best Director award at Cannes. In recent years it has also been recognized for its quirky themes, particularly between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s characters, which challenged conventional Hollywood storytelling at the time.

The last time was 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch’s final feature film, which proved to be as soul-stirring as ever – showing no mercy to Hollywood star culture.

As Mike Munser told BBC Arts’ Inside Cinema: “Lynch lures us in with the promise of familiar, traditional genre thrills and mysteries as a safety net, before the weirdness starts to creep in.

“Finally, the mystery box is opened, revealing the deeper, more sinister story that Lynch has really been telling us all along.”

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

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

Away from the cameras, Lynch admitted that he sometimes struggled to balance the “tricky business” of fatherhood with his career.

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

“I love all my kids 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 I’ve suffered because of it. But I also love my children very much.”

Although Lynch never returned to feature film directing to win an Oscar, he was presented with an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Statue by the Academy in 2019. He also made a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical 2022 film, The Fablemans. , playing film producer John Ford.

From his original passion for painting to music, his artistic activities continued to diversify until the end of his life. Just last year, he released an album Cellophane Memories with Christabel. This added to his previous work producing music videos for artists such as Moby and Nine Inch Nails.

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

He said the diagnosis was “the price to pay” for his smoking habit, although he has no regrets about the pleasure he got from it.

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

However, his ideas are alive, his way of thinking about them is equally unique.

Speaking in conversation with musician Patti Smith for BBC Newsnight in 2014, she said: “I get ideas in pieces. It’s like there’s a puzzle in the other room – all the pieces are together.

“But in my room, they turn me over one piece at a time.”