David Lynch, the director of Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, who has died at the age of 78, leaves behind the cinematic descriptor “Lynchian”, described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with the mundane” and “using compelling visual images to emphasise a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace”.
Even this may not be enough for Lynch obsessives, for whom he was the ultimate countercultural outlier, the weirdo’s weirdo, who changed film and television for ever.
Sometimes, the nature of the reaction to someone’s death feels like all the eulogy you need. Lynch’s passing has resulted in an outpouring that in certain ways seems reminiscent of the response to David Bowie’s death in 2016: at once vast and intensely personal. Even his family’s death announcement was peppered with Lynchisms (“As he would say: ‘Keep an eye on the donut and not on the hole’”): idiosyncratic winks and in-jokes aimed directly – intimately – at Lynch loyalists, that self-selecting cluster of society who “got” him to his core.
Tributes surged in from across the spectrum because throughout Lynch’s life there were few creative pies (film, TV, music, art, adverts, lockdown online weather reports) the ever-curious former art student from Montana didn’t relish sticking his finger into. Mel Brooks, who hired Lynch to helm The Elephant Man (1980), observed: “If his name was in the credits, you knew the film was really worth seeing.” The musician Chrystabell, whose final collaboration with Lynch, Cellophane Memories, came out in 2024, called him “singular and irreplaceable”. Steven Spielberg, who cast Lynch as John Ford in his 2022 film The Fabelmans, hailed his “original and unique voice”. And so on … and on.
Certain actors seemed to view Lynch as tantamount to being their creator. Kyle MacLachlan, whose work in Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986) and Twin Peaks (1990-2017) closely allies him with Lynch in the public imagination, talked of being “plucked out of obscurity”. Naomi Watts, who starred in 2001’s Mulholland Drive, spoke just as bluntly of “flunking auditions left and right” until she met Lynch, asking: “How did he even ‘see me’ when I was so well hidden, and I’d even lost sight of myself?”
Was this one of Lynch’s key gifts: seeing people? The instinctive outsider never falling out of step with the marginalised and overlooked? In the same way, his work “saw” America: not only the orderly sentimental surface beauty and innocence he revelled in subverting (the visceral white picket fences of Blue Velvet; Twin Peaks’s delicious but ominous cherry pies) or even the much-documented underbelly. Lynch ranked among the select group of artists to lift up the first underbelly to find another underbelly beneath, one that seethed and glistened twice as hard.
Then there was his warmth. Despite Lynch’s lifetime achievement Oscar and immense influence (Joel and Ethan Coen; Charlie Kaufman; Stanley Kubrick, who told the cast of The Shining to watch Eraserhead), you never got the sense of a snob – that auteur coldness that locks ordinary people out. Lynch embraced television in the 1990s, when the medium was still scorned, resulting in the format-smashing Twin Peaks. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” turned out to be only one of the questions on the table as MacLachlan’s all-American detective (“A damn fine cup of coffee!”) found himself locked in a thrilling, maddening downward spiral involving small-town America, secrets and disturbances.
That some aficionados may not have appreciated Twin Peaks being reprised later (in the 1992 film prequel, Fire Walk With Me and the delayed third series, Twin Peaks: The Return) is putting it mildly. For some, it amounted to cultural heresy, akin to the Sex Pistols re-forming. However, few could deny the impact of Twin Peaks paving the way for other disrupters: Lost, The X Files, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things and more besides. Part murder mystery, part soap, part surrealist Luis Buñuel-esque fantasy, part existential fugue, Twin Peaks ripped up the manual on what television should be.
Indeed, despite the adjective “Lynchian”, it’s a surprisingly tricky business finding a common thread to Lynch’s work. His 1977 debut, Eraserhead, was a radical arthouse horror (chickens, radiators, lead actor Jack Nance’s vertical hair) with the monochrome aesthetics of a patchy office photocopy, and a scrambled “fear of fatherhood/adulthood” message. A much-married father of four, Lynch was open about how he loved his children but initially found the responsibilities difficult. His third film, the Frank Herbert adaptation Dune, was big-budget, studio-compromised and mind-numbing (the only film Lynch professed to regret).
Blue Velvet – for many his masterpiece – delivered a version of small-town America involving a sadomasochistic deviant (Dennis Hopper) gasping into a mask as he assaulted the brutalised, mixed-up heroine, played by Isabella Rossellini. The Palme d’Or-winning Wild at Heart (1990), starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, was an outcast odyssey drenched in left-field Americana; Mulholland Drive was a fever-dream-cum-noir-distillation of the Hollywood nightmare (a theme also mined in 1997’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire in 2006).
Elsewhere, the much-garlanded Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, told the harrowing story of John Merrick, whose disfigurements made him a cause célèbre in English Victorian society, and told it (almost) straight. Likewise, The Straight Story (1999) was a poignant, folksy affair, following an old man making a cross-country journey through America to see his estranged brother.
Where was our weirdo’s weirdo in any of this? The Straight Story in particular was like Lynch trying on “ordinary” – or should that be “everyman”? – for size. It was as if he was mischievously saying: “Look, I can produce these heartwarming storytelling narratives – and with immense pleasure and skill. I just usually choose to go another way.”
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Maybe it was Lynch’s sense of outlier mischief that led to him nominating Vladimir Putin for the internet ice-bucket challenge in 2014. Perhaps it was his subversion that kept him smoking most of his life (he finally implored others to give it up after his emphysema reduced him to being unable to walk without extra oxygen). It could be that the art student was still present in his personal styling: generally tie-free with the top button done up, that quasi-Eraserhead quiff shooting up.
Along the way, Lynch produced that oeuvre: one of the most surrealist, uncompromising, innovative and downright alarming in cinematic history. His films are gothic American fairytales for very messed-up adults. Lynch didn’t want you to have a good time at his movies – he wanted you to have an interesting time, as if someone had popped hallucinogenic drugs into your popcorn. To the vexed question “what does Lynchian mean?”, it appears to means anything he wanted it to mean in that moment.
As for his attitude to death, in a revealing 2001 interview with Lynn Barber for the Observer, Hopper told an anecdote about being at the late Dean Martin’s house and Lynch saying of Martin: “Yes, he’s gone, and we’re standing here now and just in a flash there’ll be another group standing here and we’ll be gone.”
Hopper added: “The only reason you go into art is that you hope you can cheat death a little bit by leaving something that’s going to last beyond your own time.”
Wherever Lynch is, let’s hope the coffee is damn fine.
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