Some things go without saying, but we still feel the need to speak them aloud. There was no one else like David Lynch. Not before, not after. Tens to hundreds, maybe even thousands of filmmakers have been influenced by his fifty-plus years of work. While you could see a Lynchian brushstroke here and there, no one else has come close to reproducing his cinematic fingerprint.
My first experience with David Lynch was on a weekend in my mid-teens. Me and three friends hit the video store, rented Lynch’s feature-length 1977 debut Eraserhead on VHS, watched it in a small room on a 17-inch TV, and all of our jaws hit the foundation. That being said, I hated Eraserhead. I mean absolutely hated every single moment of it. Before you judge me too harshly, know this: While I resolved never to see the film again (a resolution I did not keep), I did recognize that even though Eraserhead created such a level of discomfort in me that I could barely tolerate it, I also knew I had never seen anything like it. There is a level of intrigue that one experiences when being hit in the face with a wholly original work, even if it’s served in a cup you would not drink from. Regardless of my personal and visceral reaction to the film, I understood that a director of unique talent and singular vision had entered my world.
David Lynch could not be ignored.
Lynch’s follow-up to Eraserhead arrived three years later with The Elephant Man. I also found his sophomore effort hard to digest, but for different reasons. I was immediately awestruck by his telling of the story of John Merrick (based loosely on actual events), a 19th-century Londoner with Proteus Syndrome—a disease that leaves the afflicted with severe physical deformities. Over the course of the film’s 123 minutes, Lynch exposes the full range of human kindness, as well as the depths of opportunism, derision, and cruelty. John Hurt’s portrayal of Merrick, delivered from underneath a mountain of makeup, is one of the handful of best performances I have ever seen. The problem I had with the movie wasn’t that it lacked for anything. It was the opposite. It was too good. When people ask me what is the saddest movie I’ve ever seen, my immediate answer is always The Elephant Man. I’ve probably viewed the entire film three or four times, but I’ve never been able to watch it in one single sitting. I have learned over time that I am not alone.
The Elephant Man was a significant critical and commercial success. The film’s box office gross quintupled its budget and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and a handful of technical nominations. David Lynch was now on every studio’s radar. Paradoxically, that became a problem. That problem’s name was Dune.
The attempt to adapt Dune already had a painful record. The iconoclastic Chilean Director Alejandro Jodorowsky started a treatment in 1974, but ever the eccentric, Jodorowsky couldn’t produce a version of the film that would have run less than ten hours. The film rights were then purchased by the notorious film producer Dino De Laurentiis, with Ridley Scott targeted to direct. Scott abandoned the project for Blade Runner due to the challenge of adapting the novel. After viewing The Elephant Man, De Laurentiis turned to Lynch. Lynch worked on the film for over three years, intending to make a film with a three-hour running time. Universal and De Laurentiis objected to the film’s length and cut the film by nearly 45 minutes, resulting in a full-on hatchet job that became the nadir of Lynch’s career. Lynch despised the experience of making Dune so much that even when offered many years later the opportunity to create a “Director’s Cut,” he refused and rarely spoke of the film for the remainder of his life.
Over a four-year span, Lynch had gone from a hot commodity to the maker of one of the most embarrassing films of the ‘80s. Such a reaction might have crushed another filmmaker so early in their feature-length career, but Lynch was the other kind. Lynch responded with his greatest film, Blue Velvet, in 1986. Imagine the courage (or hubris) that it took to cast Kyle MacLachlan, the lead of Dune, as the lead in your follow-up film. Lynch’s pulpy masterpiece looked under the hood of a bucolic hamlet called Lumberton in North Carolina and found the darkness at the edge of town. That darkness was played by Dennis Hopper, who, as an actor and director, was considered a washed-up drug addict. 1986 turned out to be a career-saving year for Hopper. The one-two punch of Blue Velvet and Hoosiers made him a viable casting option after years in the wilderness. Hopper was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Supporting Actor for his role as an alcoholic assistant coach in Hoosiers, a very different film about small-town life. As good as Hopper was in Hoosiers, that nomination should have gone to him for playing Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. In the history of cinema, few characters have been as terrifying as Frank Booth’s low-rent gangster. From the moment Hopper arrives on screen, puts a gas mask over his face, inhaling amyl nitrate, Frank Booth becomes a legendary villain. Lynch’s romantic partner, Isabella Rossellini, played Booth’s object of sexual abuse and gives the role a level of vulnerability that goes far beyond acting. I would call it “becoming.”
Blue Velvet restored Lynch’s luster in the world of film. Lynch received his second Oscar nomination for Best Director, and the film was a modest success at the box office. However, with the success of Blue Velvet, a healthy amount of controversy came along with it. Several name critics (including Roger Ebert) found the film polarizing and even abhorrent, particularly in what they saw as the film’s treatment of Rossellini’s character. The abuse her character endures is disturbing, and Lynch’s “male gaze” was taken to task. This criticism continued for much of Lynch’s career. His view of women was at times criticized as objectification of the worst kind. Critics inside and outside of the film world frequently decried his female characters as being sex objects and lacking agency. While I can understand the criticism, I think it’s notable that the many women who worked with him (including Rossellini, Laura Dern, Patricia Arquette, and Naomi Watts) speak of Lynch in glowing and deeply affectionate terms. None of them expressed regret, a feeling of objectification, or a lack of fulfillment in their roles. Their opinion matters, too.
After the success of Blue Velvet, Lynch took a surprising left turn by moving his next project, the cheekily titled Twin Peaks, to network television. For a year, the show was a rabidly followed cult sensation. With MacLachlan in tow as Lynch’s muse once more, Twin Peaks was a murder mystery with MacLachlan’s FBI agent investigating the death of a beautiful young woman named Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee–who deserved a better career) in the Pacific Northwest. That simple synopsis, however accurate, doesn’t come close to describing what a bizarre thriller/horror story/soap opera Twin Peaks is. “Dynasty” on acid it was called at the time, and it was a genuine sensation. However, when the mystery of Palmer’s murder wasn’t solved at the end of season one, an impatient viewing public drifted away from season two, and ABC did not renew the 18-time Emmy-nominated series. That Twin Peaks existed at all on regular network TV is something of a small miracle.
Between Twin Peaks’ two seasons, Lynch somehow found time to make Wild At Heart, a pulpy road movie that lived up to its title. With Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern playing a couple on the run who find more trouble in the form of Willem Dafoe as career criminal Bobby Peru, a Texan with the worst set of teeth anyone has ever laid eyes on. There is a scene between Dafoe and Dern while alone in a filthy hotel room that I cannot put into words, but it is one of the most strangely erotic and disturbing things I have ever seen in a movie theater. If you’ve seen Wild At Heart, you know. If you haven’t and choose to, you will know. Despite winning the Palm D’or at Cannes and scoring Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Diane Ladd as Dern’s demented mother (Ladd is also Laura Dern’s real-life mother) in the category of Best Supporting Actress, Wild At Heart was not met with the same acclaim as Blue Velvet. It’s strange mashup of pulp thriller with heavy notes of Elvis Presley and the Wizard of Oz was a real head-scratcher for many. I was one of those people who loved it and scratched their heads simultaneously.
After Twin Peaks ended, Lynch’s next film was a companion piece to the series Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. ABC might have been done with Twin Peaks, but Lynch wasn’t. The resulting 1992 film was met with the worst reviews of Lynch’s career outside of Dune. Time has a way of sorting things out, though, and the film has experienced a qualitative revision, even earning a Criterion release. With that revision, Lynch would return to the world of Twin Peaks a quarter of a century later. More on that in a bit.
Five years passed between the critical and financial failure of Fire Walk With Me and his next film, Lost Highway. If Wild At Heart was an audience conundrum, Lost Highway was almost stupefying in terms of one’s ability to follow along. The beginning of the film is relatively straightforward. Bill Pullman plays a saxophonist who, after a series of strange events, ends up in prison, convicted of murder. He then, with no explanation whatsoever, wakes up in the form of a completely different actor, Balthazar Getty. Patricia Arquette has a dual role as Pullman’s wife and a femme-fatale in the post-Pullman part of the film. Robert Blake shows up in a relatively small role as something akin to an above-ground devil. Blake’s “Mystery Man” may be the most terrifying character in Lynch’s oeuvre this side of Hopper’s Frank Booth. Lynch’s use of score (notably with the late, great composer Angelo Badalamenti) had always been a key aspect of his films, but with Lost Highway, Lynch married Badalamenti’s dream/nightmare-like musical vision with needle drops curated by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The finest of which involves Patricia Arquette (in femme-fatale mode) exiting a classic car to Lou Reed’s version of “This Magic Moment.” Shot in slo-mo, I dare say it’s one of the most staggering marriages of song-to-scene I’ve witnessed. Lost Highway received more acclaim than Fire Walk With Me, but reviews were decidedly mixed. Lynch was on his own train, and for many critics, the destination was often not to their liking. I can’t say I understood Lost Highway, but I could feel it and I loved how it felt.
For his next film, Lynch pulled the hardest 180 of his career with The Straight Story. Based on the true story of Alvin Straight, a septuagenarian who, due to poor vision, cannot legally drive. When Straight (a wonderful Richard Farnsworth, who received an Oscar nod for his performance) learns that his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke and doesn’t have long to live, he hops on his John Deere lawn mower and drives 240 miles at five miles per hour to see his brother before he dies. That’s it. That’s the film. It is impossibly beautiful, cinematic, and the only ‘G’ rated film Lynch ever made. If that isn’t enough, the film was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Yet, somehow, The Straight Story absolutely feels like a David Lynch movie. The mind reels.
Lynch attempted a return to television with Mulholland Drive, a one-hour neo-noir mystery pilot he filmed and shopped to the networks. Finding no takers, Lynch, rather remarkably, expanded the pilot (shot with network TV standards around sex and language in mind) into a feature film full of sex, foul language, and violence. Despite being even more surreal and arguably inscrutable than Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive was greeted with rapturous reviews; Lynch received his third Oscar nomination for Best Director and made a star of the great Aussie actress Naomi Watts–who is a revelation in what must have read like an impossible part on paper. Interpretations of the film are endless, and I can neither dispute nor confirm any of them. I can only tell you that it’s a masterpiece of a kind that exists in a zone of its own.
Lynch’s final theatrical release would be 2006’s Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern. Even for Lynch, Inland Empire was a highly experimental effort. Made for next to nothing ($3 million), Dern plays an actress whose persona starts to merge with the character she is playing in a film she is shooting. It’s a movie that, like many of Lynch’s, is hard to explain, but it is also undeniably affecting and brilliant.
Over the remainder of Lynch’s career, he essentially made short films that I’m sure will one day be put into a collection that will be discussed and pored over by film historians for ages. For his final major production, Lynch came back to the world of Twin Peaks, an 18-episode kinda/sorta third season that aired on Showtime. I say “kinda/sorta” because while many of the cast members from the series, such as MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee, reprise their roles, there isn’t what you would call anything approaching a linear narrative in this fever dream of a season. The Television Academy recognized the show’s brilliance regardless of the challenging nature of the material and awarded the show nine Emmy nominations, including two for Lynch in the directing and writing categories. I don’t know that anyone expected Showtime’s Twin Peaks to be Lynch’s swan song as a filmmaker, but in recent years, Lynch has been very open about his deteriorating health due to decades of smoking. In August last year, Lynch revealed that he was housebound and expected to remain so.
I was told a remarkable story about Mulholland Drive last fall while covering the Virginia Film Festival. Andy Edmunds, Director of the Virginia Film Office, shared that famed director Sydney Pollack was in Charlottesville for the fest in 2001, and the two hit it off. While walking the lovely thoroughfare where most of the festival takes place, Andy and Sydney passed by the Violet Crown Theater and saw that Mulholland Drive was playing. On a whim, they decided to see it. As the credits rolled and the two men made their way out of the theater, Andy related to me that they both were of the same mind: I don’t know what I just saw, but it was fucking brilliant. I laughed as Andy finished his story and, with admiration, said, “David Lynch.”
The films and television episodes of David Lynch existed in a world of his making that, while surely he had his influences, felt as if it were created from whole cloth. As perplexing and complicated as I often found his work, and for what some may have found frustrating due to gaps of logic, non-linear storytelling, or an overly extreme vision, I saw a new cinematic language written on screen right before my eyes. I don’t know how you quantify the wonder of David Lynch. I do know this: If someone were to say to me that the best director who ever lived is David Lynch, I might disagree, but I would not argue. What would be the point? He certainly was close enough to make such a grand statement be one filled with the ring of truth.
David Lynch died on January 16, 2025. He was 78 years old.
