David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 15, 2025)
David Lynch was a visionary American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor, who lived to see his style immortalised as an adjective in the Oxford dictionary.
Lynchian, it reads, blurs “surreal or sinister elements with the mundane” – an accolade fitting of the four-time Oscar nominee turned lifetime achievement recipient, whose character was as big as his films.
David Lynch once said he was inspired to become a filmmaker when, while painting, he inexplicably heard a gust of wind and saw the artwork move on canvas.
A painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen to encompass television, records, books, nightclubs, a line of organic coffee and his Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has died, five days shy of his 79th birthday.
In 2024, Mr. Lynch announced that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking, and that as a result any subsequent films would have to be directed remotely.
The diagnosis was the “price to pay” for his smoking habit, although he didn’t regret the enjoyment it gave him.
Lynch was a visionary.
His florid style and unnerving perspective emerged full-blown in his first feature, the cult film “Eraserhead,” released at midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent through the failed blockbuster “Dune” (1984) ; his small-town erotic thriller “Blue Velvet” (1986) and its spiritual spinoff, the network TV series “Twin Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1990 and 1991; his widely acknowledged masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” (2001), a poisonous valentine to Hollywood; and his enigmatic last feature, “Inland Empire” (2006), which he shot himself on video.
As David Lynch never truly embraced Hollywood, so Hollywood never truly embraced him.
His films were regularly celebrated by critics’ groups and lionized in France, where, 11 years after his Palme d’Or for “Wild at Heart”, he was named best director for “Mulholland Drive”.
But although he was nominated several times for an Oscar, he never received one.
After “Twin Peaks : The Return” (2017) Lynch never did return to feature film directing to give himself another shot at an elusive Oscar win, but he was granted an honorary lifetime achievement statuette by the Academy in 2019.
He also made a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical 2022 film, “The Fablemans”, playing filmmaker John Ford.
As Lynch himself once observed about his creative process :
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water.
But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”
His family announced his death in a Facebook post on January 16th, 2025, writing:
“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us.
But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’”