David Lynch, the multi-hyphenate film director and artist known for classics both cult and traditional, from Blue Velvet (1986) to Mulholland Drive (2001), has died at the age of 78. His death was confirmed by his family on Facebook today, January 16. Last year, Lynch announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema and was unable to work or leave his house.
Despite the state of Lynch’s health, the overwhelming initial response to the news of his death has been one of shock. Lynch is widely considered an institution unto himself — primarily of cinema, but also painting, music, photography, and pop entertainment in general — such that his presence was utterly integrated with the cultural landscape. His departure leaves a void as uncanny as any one of the many unsettling scenes in Twin Peaks (1990–2017), Lynch’s television debut.
Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, Lynch spent his youth constantly relocating with his family because of his father’s job at the United States Department of Agriculture, giving him a panoramic view of the country that fit well with the way his work would later cross so many parts of it. He began making art at an early age and was briefly enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before dropping out in short order. Lynch started making short films in his 20s, eventually realizing that filmmaking was his true pursuit, leading him to study at the American Film Institute Conservatory in the 1970s. His time there culminated in Eraserhead (1977), which gradually became a cult hit and precipitated the rest of his career.
Lynch’s work was so influential as to become unnoticeable to the untrained eye, woven deeply into the tropes and aesthetics of cinematic horror, surrealism, and melodrama. He was one of the few filmmakers whose very name became an adjective; possibly even its own subgenre. His obituary could be filled with nothing but a list of iconic images that spring to mind when one thinks of the term “Lynchian”: the most terrifying swaddled newborn ever conceived, lying on the floor in Eraserhead; Dean Stockwell, illuminated by a light held under his chin, crooning Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet; Laura Dern running out of the darkness toward the camera, first in slow motion and then with alarming speed, in Inland Empire (2006).
Lynch reinforced his reputation as the paramount conjurer of the uncanny through his prolific work as an artist, which even preceded his film career. His paintings and sculptures evince a disconcerting jaggedness, full of human-ish figures of queasily unnatural proportions, muted colors that feel like they’ve had blood dry on them. They’re often mixed-media, reinforcing the sense that they aren’t made with, but rather evolved out of, the muck of everyday life. That quality enhances the disturbing tactility of the paintings, which read less as flat images and more as windows into dark worlds that one may fall into if they aren’t careful.
Lynch’s career and abilities were so expansive that even paying full tribute to the weird and the eerie within it would be shortchanging him. Less fantastical films like The Elephant Man (1980) and The Straight Story (1999) are built mainly around two-hander scenes between their protagonists and people whom they coax into opening up about their everyday hardships. Fire Walk with Me (1992) is not just a seminal horror movie but also a searingly empathetic portrayal of a teenage girl in a psychological crucible.
The broader Twin Peaks enterprise is overbrimming with beautiful moments of emotional rawness and intimacy between its characters. Commentators largely agree that the show’s singular strangeness shifted the course of television. Yet a scene that has circulated notably on social media in the wake of Lynch’s death is the simple moment when Major Garland Briggs tells his son, Bobby, how much he loves him.
Another popular clip sees Lynch himself, playing his character Gordon Cole on Twin Peaks, recounting in an episode of the 2017 revival of the show how he told his co-workers that they had to accept their transgender colleague. “Fix their hearts or die!” has since become a queer rights catchphrase — just one aspect of Lynch’s considerable queer fanbase.
Lynch’s performance as Cole doesn’t feel too different from the persona he carried in his public appearances, his often-viral tweets, or his prolific YouTube channel (on which he, among other things, continued his practice of delivering weather reports). His nasal voice and halting manner of speaking made him instantly identifiable and endearing to many, elevating him to living meme status in his latter years. He was one of the few creative individuals who seemed like he could have stepped out of one of his own works (or as Dennis Lim put it, a man from another place). The world is a little less strange now without him, and poorer for it.
