Twin Peaks director who embraced the weird

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

The moment defined his obsession “to see how pictures move”, but also his sense of the bizarre – twisting reality on the small and big screen for almost 40 years.

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

A self-proclaimed dreamer, Lynch burst onto the scene through the midnight film circuit with 1977’s Eraserhead. Disorienting horror, a commentary on male paranoia, set a layered template that ran through his work.

Four decades later, he lived to see his style immortalized as an adjective in the Oxford Dictionary. Lynchian, it readsit blurs “surreal or sinister elements with the mundane”—praise befitting the four-time Oscar nominee turned Lifetime Achievement winner, whose character was as large as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on January 20, 1946. The son of a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, he spent much of his early life moving from state to state with his brother and sister.

But Lynch’s parents encouraged his artistic ambitions from an early age. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1990, he said his mother “saved him” by encouraging him to draw on scrap paper instead of using coloring books, where “the whole idea is to stay between the lines”.

This ethos inspired his films, tinged with a streak of rebellion that he said lasted from the age of 14 to 30. “People protest for so long these days,” he reasoned, “because we were created to live longer.”

A youthful frustration with the placidity of suburban life left him longing for “something unusual to happen” 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 feature Eraserhead realized this vision far more successfully than his art school years, with its central character driven mad after fathering a terrifying child.

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

Co-written by Lynch, the film’s cast of future film icons, including John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, transformed the story of stigma into an emotional, critical hit, surpassing the original theatrical run.

Lynch received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, as part of the film’s eight nominations, which included Best Picture.

But if Hollywood thought it had found a new blockbuster master, Tinseltown quickly discovered that Lynch wasn’t interested in playing mainstream with his adaptation of the 1984 sci-fi epic Dune.

With questionable special effects, costumes and rock star Sting sprinkled with baby oil, the Guardian’s Charles Bramesco wrote that Lynch’s experiments left the franchise “radioactive for decades”. “I’m proud of everything but Dune,” Lynch later told a YouTube Q&A, while elsewhere admitting it almost “killed” his career.

However, the wounds began to heal when he returned to double down on his signature style – putting his fascination with America’s dirty underbelly on display.

Blue Velvet, with Dina’s Kyle MacLachlan, followed a small-town boy caught underground after discovering a severed ear. Brutal and violent in parts, it divided critics but earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for best director.

“This is America for me,” Lynch would later describe the film in his book Lynch on Lynch. “There’s a very innocent, naive quality to life, and there’s also horror and disease.”

He won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the romance Wild at Heart in 1990, 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, perfected in his TV project Twin Peaks released the same year, that defined him.

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

But viewers were truly captivated by what he offered on screen: a dreamlike nightmare of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, played again by Kyle MacLachlan, in the seeming comfort of a fenced-in America – including cherry pie and coffee – before than it unflinchingly reaches into living rooms with its gruesome undercurrent of sexual abuse and murder. It was one that previously had no place on American television.

The ABC series won three Golden Globes in 1991, including Best TV Drama Series and Best Actor in a TV Drama for MacLachlan.

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

The show, he continued, “effectively renegotiated the TV contract with the audience.”

It mattered little that the second season faltered after the killer was discovered. Television was no longer safe, it was deeply alive – ideas for big screens and production values ​​somehow found their way into living rooms in an age when the screen still ruled.

In 1992, viewers were brought back to Twin Peaks with the previous feature film, Fire Walk With Me, but nothing lived up to the original series.

When the nation asked “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”, it wasn’t just about solving a mystery, it was about finding refuge from a corrupt reality that society would rather ignore. Lynch found his darkness.

He would eventually return to the big screen to attack Hollywood’s devilish tricks of fame, glamour, deceit and loss of identity, in films unofficially known as his Los Angeles Trilogy.

That started with 1997’s Lost Highway, before 2001’s Mulholland Drive – perhaps the closest in aesthetic to Twin Peaks.

The psychological drama received critical acclaim, earning Lynch his third Academy Award nomination for Best Director and winning the Best Director gong at Cannes. In recent years, it has also been recognized for its queer themes, particularly between the characters of Naomi Watt and Laura Harring, which challenged the traditional Hollywood storytelling of the time.

Last came 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch’s last feature film, which proved just as mind-melting as before – showing no mercy to Hollywood star culture.

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

“In the end, the mysterious box is opened, revealing the darker, more sinister story that Lynch has really been telling us all along.”

In his final years, Lynch enjoyed an esteemed cult status. In 2017, he directed Twin Peaks: The Return, a new series set 25 years after the events of the original series, with much of the same cast.

At the same time, the series’ legacy lives on, inspiring dramas like True Detective and 2023’s acclaimed Playstation survival horror game Alan Wake II.

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

He fathered four children – Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lulu – with ex-wives Peggy Reavey, Mary Fisk and Mary Sweeney and estranged wife Emily Stofle.

“I love all my children and we get along great, but in the early years, before you can bond and talk to them, it’s difficult,” he told Vulture. “Work is the main thing and I know that I have caused suffering because of it. But at the same time I have a great love for children.”

Although Lynch never returned to feature directing to give himself another shot at the elusive Oscar win, the Academy awarded him a lifetime achievement statuette in 2019. He also made a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 semi-autobiographical film, The Fablemans, portraying director John Ford.

Towards the end of his life, his artistic pursuits became increasingly diversified, from his original passion for painting to music. Just last year he released Cellophone Memories, an album with Chrystabella. This is in addition 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 “great shape” and was “never going to retire”.

He added that the diagnosis was “the price to pay” for his smoking habit, although he did not regret the pleasure it gave him.

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

However, his ideas live on, as unique as the way he described thinking about them.

Speaking to musician Patti Smith on BBC Newsnight in 2014, he said: “I get ideas in fragments. It’s like there’s a jigsaw puzzle in the other room – all the pieces fit together.

“But in my room they just throw piece by piece at me.”