Simon Thompson explores the career of the late, great David Lynch…
To start this article off as simply as possible, David Lynch, one of American cinema’s greatest idiosyncratic directors is gone. While I knew that his health had sadly taken a turn for the worse since 2020, it still feels almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that an artist of Lynch’s calibre and originality is no longer here to share his sincerely heartfelt, yet surreal, uncompromisingly visceral depictions of a kind, twisted, Americana-that led to a fellow filmmaking legend (and an executive producer of two of his movies) Mel Brooks, to describe him as “Jimmy Stewart if he came from Mars.”
While he may not have the sheer volume of work (ten films and one groundbreaking TV show) that some of the other immortals of American cinema have, each project that he made represented a victory for his artistic merit over the forces of safe and predictable cookie cutter slop that Hollywood churns out in industrial quantities.
David Lynch was born in January 1946 in Missoula, Montana to Donald and Sunny Lynch. Owing to his father’s job as a research scientist for the USDA the Lynch family moved up and down the United States throughout his childhood, settling everywhere from North Carolina to Washington State.
Although an intelligent student and an Eagle Scout, Lynch found the school environment to be creatively stifling, instead taking an interest in both cinema and painting with his favourite film, The Wizard Of Oz becoming a constant reference point for his work years later. The young Lynch was also enamoured of the works of W.C Fields, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tati, and Billy Wilder.
Lynch’s interest in painting and drawing, however, came from his time living in Virginia where he met a friend of his father’s who painted professionally, and after seeing that you could make a living doing something artistic, that would immediately become the career path Lynch wanted to pursue for himself. Once he turned 18, Lynch enrolled in Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington DC but would subsequently transfer to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts where he shared a room with guitarist Peter Wolf.
Lynch found the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, however, to be completely uninspiring, resulting in him dropping out after a single year. No longer bound by any college commitments Lynch set off for Austria with his friend Jack Fisk, hoping, as he explained in Lynch on Lynch, without the formality of doing much research or much of an idea why, to train for three years under the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. They turned up in Salzburg only to discover that he was not in the castle where they thought he was teaching and that he only really ran a workshop.. as Salzburg was ‘too clean’ they came back after fifteen days touring around on the Orient Express. After this abortive adventure, Lynch returned to America and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Lynch’s time in Philadelphia is when the young artist would come into his own both socially and creatively, describing his time there as being full of “…. great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there.” While at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts he met his first wife Peggy, with whom he had a daughter, Jennifer.
Living in a crime-ridden neighbourhood of Philadelphia named Fairmount, and supporting his family through various odd jobs, Lynch began to make short films that would showcase the unique vision that he would come to be known for. Lynch’s new-found interest in filmmaking provoked a move to California where he enrolled at the AFI conservatory and directed his debut feature Eraserhead.
Conceived originally as forty two minute short film, Eraserhead represented, above all else, an exploration of Lynch’s time living in one of the shadier parts of Philadelphia with his wife and child. The movie tells the story of a mild mannered young man called Henry (Jack Valance), living in a futuristic yet run down urban wasteland. After the sudden news that his girlfriend is pregnant she gives birth to – and then subsequently abandons- a deformed baby (inspired by Lynch’s daughter’s real life health scares) leaving him to Henry, forcing Henry to confront his own fears about fatherhood and raising a baby in such a hellish environment.
Made over the course of three years from 1974-77 at weekends, and funded by Lynch through the combination of an AFI $10,000 grant, a loan from his father, and taking a paper route, Eraserhead represented a labour of love for Lynch to the extent that after an amicable divorce from his wife Peggy, Lynch lived in sets created for the film to immerse himself in the project as much as possible.
Filmed in a stark black and white, and stuffed to the gills with alienating, surreal, and disgusting imagery Eraserhead has an elegiac, yet strangely whimsical, quality that sets it apart from almost anything else you’ll see. Lynch’s use of German Expressionist angles and scale, as well as a repetitive industrial soundtrack, creates a crushing atmosphere that perfectly mirrors the beleaguered environments which the film depicts, and sets a thematic template of the idyllic America vs the reality of America – a contrast informed by Lynch’s picturesque Norman Rockwell-style childhood and his adult life living in Fairmount.
The polarising offbeat nature of this debut made it a hard sell for various mainstream distributors. At first he tried the Cannes Film Festival, but after it split the selection committee it wasn’t put in the festival rotation. After also being rejected for the New York Film Festival Lynch sent it to be screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival instead, who accepted it.
When midnight movie impresario Ben Barenholtz heard about the film, he picked up the distribution rights and circulated it throughout the underground cinema circuit, with Eraserhead becoming a word of mouth sensation in artistic circles. Alongside other works such as El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, and Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead is cited as one of the key movies in 70s underground cinema and found esteemed fans such as Stanley Kubrick and HR Giger. At the tender age of 31, Lynch was now one of the most talked about independent filmmakers of the decade.
As an established filmmaker, for his next movie Lynch wanted to direct his passion project Ronnie Rocket, a surrealist fable in the same vein as Eraserhead about “electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair”. Lynch contacted producer Stuart Cornfield, a fervent fan of Eraserhead about financing Ronnie Rocket, but realising that the script’s bizarre content meant no studio wanted to part with the cash, he asked Cornfield to help him find other scripts to direct instead. Of all the various scripts that he viewed, one intrigued Lynch above the rest, Chris De Vore and Eric Bergren’s The Elephant Man.
Through Cornfield he was put into contact with no other than comedy legend Mel Brooks, who after viewing Eraserhead with Lynch, hugged him and declared “you’re a madman, I’m in !” working with the young director on The Elephant Man as an uncredited executive producer. With a major Hollywood player allowing him creative autonomy, Lynch got to work on the film, rewriting certain sections of De Vore and Bergren’s original script to make the real life history the film covers more cinematic.
Set in Victorian London, The Elephant Man tells the story of Joseph Merrick (John Hurt) a severely deformed man held in a circus sideshow and rescued by a kindly surgeon named Frederick Treves ( Anthony Hopkins), who tries to help Merrick integrate into society.
With stellar acting by Hopkins and Hurt, as well as a truly humanistic message, The Elephant Man found Lynch in the midst of critical acclaim, awards, and unprecedented box-office success (grossing $26 million from a $5 million budget). Although it’s seen as the least Lynchian out of all of David Lynch’s works I think that’s a gross misrepresentation.
While The Elephant Man does follow a stricter three act structure than other Lynch films, the use of dream sequences (such as the herd of elephants at the beginning), the pantomime scene towards the end, the surreal filming of the freak show, the atmospheric black and white cinematography, and the contrast between the heavy industrial sounds with a soft melancholic soundtrack, are all pure Lynch.
With Eight Academy Award nominations in the bag, a Bafta for best film, and a Caesar for best foreign film to boot, Lynch was now in a feted position and being offered directing gigs left, right and centre. George Lucas, resoundingly impressed by both Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, wanted Lynch to direct the final film in the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi – but Lynch, with little interest in doing so, politely turned Lucas down and told him that he should direct it himself so that it would reflect his vision, and not another director’s.
After attempts to make Ronnie Rocket fell through due to the bankruptcy of Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studios, Lynch tried unsuccessfully to direct both an adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and a biopic about blues musician Robert Johnson, titled Love In Vain and based on a script by Alan Greenberg, that probably would have been one of the scariest movies ever made.
But then another big budget science fiction project came Lynch’s way, in the shape of an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic influential science fiction masterpiece Dune. The rights to make Dune into a movie had been bounced around by many different parties since the original publication of the novel (most famously Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade version), eventually falling into the hands of Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis.
The agreement Lynch signed to direct Dune bound him to make two more movies for the producer on top of the initial agreement. Lynch set to work on a Dune script with Elephant Man alums Eric Bergren and Chris De Vore. The trio wanted to make a movie that was as faithful to Herbert’s original novel as possible, but immediately ran into disagreements with De Laurentiis over the adaptation’s direction.
Set in a far distant futuristic feudal society Dune tells the story of two warring houses, the Atreides and the Harkonnens, and their quest to control a rare commodity known as the spice Melange, that originates from and only grows on the inhospitable desert planet Arrakis. Because of the qualities that the spice Melange produces and its scarcity value, the galaxy’s various noble fiefs are angling to control Arrakis so that they are able to harness spice production.
Through various machinations by the Harkonnen family, House Atriedis’s patriarch Duke Leto is murdered, leaving his eldest son Paul the responsibility of stopping Arrakis’s natural resources from falling into the wrong hands.
While Lynch loved exercising his imagination when it came to building the movie’s sets, and taking the surreal quasi-religious elements from Herbert’s novel and putting them on the screen, he found big-budget studio filmmaking to be tiresome and stifling. Although the film had an excellent cast featuring a young Kyle MacLachlan in his debut as Paul Atreides, Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, Francesca Annis as Lady Jessica, and Sean Young as Chani, the final product was mauled by critics at the time for being inaccessible and cold, audiences finding it to be derivative from Star Wars (despite the fact that Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, and Star Trek have all liberally borrowed from Dune as it was published first), failing to make its staggering $40-42 million ($133 million in 2025 money) budget back.
Thanks to various director’s cuts and the simple passing of time, however, Dune today is now a reappraised cult classic with its fans citing Lynch’s beautiful moody futurist art direction, Brian Eno’s score, and the newly restored footage that gives the movie way more structure than the original 1984 theatrical cut, showing why Lynch’s Dune is a misunderstood gem.
Sadly, in the mid-1980s this level of retroactive kindness towards Dune was unavailable to Lynch, and after being scarred by big budget filmmaking for life, he decided to make his next movie his most personal since Eraserhead, the neo-noir masterpiece Blue Velvet. Although still under contract with Dino De Laurentiis to produce another Dune movie in what was supposed to be a franchise, due to the failure of the first movie at the box office Lynch was free to make his second film under contract about whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to make was a script he had been working on since 1973 called Blue Velvet.
The germ for the idea began when Lynch had a feeling that Blue Velvet would be a compelling title for a movie, then building on from that Lynch became preoccupied by an image of a severed human ear saying that, “I don’t know why it had to be an ear. Except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body, a hole into something else … The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind so it felt perfect.”
Juxtaposed with this grizzly image would be Lynch’s fascination with Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the song Blue Velvet, which the director thought captured the Americana that had drastically shaped Lynch’s youth and that Lynch himself made a visual emphasis in much of his work.
Set in a small North Carolina town, Blue Velvet follows a mild-mannered college student named Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), who returns home after his father suddenly falls ill. While out walking in the woods near his house, Jeffrey comes across a discarded severed human ear. Initially contacting the police, Jeffrey comes across a local girl, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) the daughter of the town’s lead detective, who tells him the ear is connected to local night club singer Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini). As Jeffrey begins to investigate for himself, he discovers that Dorothy is embroiled in a vast criminal conspiracy spearheaded by an unpredictable psychopath named Frank (Dennis Hopper).
Taking inspiration from film noir, 50s Americana, Hitchcock, and Southern Gothic such as Night of the Hunter, Blue Velvet represented a turning point in Lynch’s career where he moved from the sparse style of his early work to the lush, yet haunted, Dark Americana of much of his later work. Although analysing a film like Blue Velvet is an article in itself, for the sake of brevity the key theme of the story above anything else is the idea of people having double lives and environments which seem benign enough having horrible secrets lurking under the surface, something that Lynch returned to constantly.
Lynch has called Blue Velvet one of his most intensely personal works, as he drew the setting from his childhood and also specific scenes such as when Dorothy appears naked outside Jeffrey’s house, were inspired by a childhood episode where Lynch and his brother saw a naked woman walking down the street in public at night, which made him cry.
Made with a small budget of $6 million and comprising a cast of relative unknowns in Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, a star name whose career at that point had been on the rocks in the shape of Dennis Hopper, and character actors such as Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance, Blue Velvet was a style of filmmaking far more suited to Lynch. Blue Velvet would prove to benefit Lynch in many ways, as through this production he would meet his go-to composer Angelo Badalamenti, work with future recurring collaborators Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, and to top it all off would become romantically involved with Isabella Rossellini.
Although it divided many critics at the time with its graphic and uncompromising content, Blue Velvet found its fair share of champions in the media where the consensus was that the movie represented a return to form for Lynch after Dune. Since the 1980s the critical estimation of Blue Velvet has only increased, probably owing to critics such as Roger Ebert (who completely missed the mark on it) no longer shaping the critical consensus. Now, rightfully regarded by anyone with a half a brain as being one of the best American films of that decade, Blue Velvet has lost none of its power to entrance and shock.
Lynch would spend the rest of the 1980s flitting from proposed script to proposed script. First there was an attempt, at some point, to revive Ronnie Rocket, then Dino De Laurentiis tried to get him to direct Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, but Lynch balked at the idea of making another studio movie and turned it down.
Lynch also attempted to adapt S.E Feinberg’s stage play The Happy Worker, a black comedy about a group of men digging a hole. When one of them questions why they are doing it he is promoted to a management position – resulting in everyone else resenting him and his life completely collapsing. Lynch even got as far as location scouting before production stalled.
In an ironic twist of fate, however, two movies at the end of the 1980s that Lynch would, sadly, never get to make, drastically shaped his next endeavour. In 1987, flying high after the success of Blue Velvet, a Warner Bros executive approached Lynch to make a movie about the life of Marilyn Monroe, called Venus Descending, a semi-adaptation of Anthony Summer’s Monroe biography, Goddess.
This put Lynch in touch with veteran TV writer Mark Frost, mainly known for his work on the seminal cop show The Hill Street Blues. Lynch and Frost immediately hit it off and produced a script together centring around the last few months of Monroe’s life before her tragic death at just 36. Unfortunately the script would prove to be something of a legal minefield and as a result Warner Bros. got cold feet at the eleventh hour and scrapped it.
With his new creative partner in tow however, Lynch wrote another script, this time a comedy entitled One Saliva Bubble. Taking place in a small town in Kansas, the plot involved a secret government project going wrong when a guard’s spit accidentally ends up in the weapons system setting off a side effect which causes “all kind of wacko hell [to break] loose”, in Lynch’s words. Conceived as a joyfully stupid gross out comedy, Lynch wanted the double act of Steve Martin and Martin Short in the main roles – but the bankruptcy proceedings that the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group was undergoing at the time prevented it from getting off the ground.
After Lynch and Frost realised that they couldn’t shop the script to another studio, as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, through various frustrating legal stipulations, still had the rights, the duo got to work on one of the most seminal and groundbreaking series in the history of American television – Twin Peaks.
The surreal small-town setting of One Saliva Bubble was sub-consciously changed to Twin Peaks, and the tragic Hitchcockian blonde of Venus Descending leading a double life, now became Laura Palmer, the murdered teenage girl whose death irrevocably changes the town.
Taking place in the eponymous town located in the Pacific Northwestern United States, Twin Peaks follows an eccentric FBI Agent by the name of Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) who is brought to the small town to investigate the brutal and senseless murder of teenager Laura Palmer, the town’s beautiful Homecoming Queen, found washed up and wrapped in plastic in a nearby river. Working with local law enforcement in the shape of Sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean), Cooper’s friendly nature, competence, and mind boggling eccentricities neatly gel with the strangeness of Twin Peaks the town and the residents themselves, as his investigation continually leads him to stranger and stranger occurrences.
A mixture of Americana, surrealism, detective fiction, black comedy, melodramatic soap opera, and horror, simply put, there was absolutely nothing like Twin Peaks on TV when it was first released in 1990. Its influence on shows ranging from Northern Exposure to The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as its quality direction and intelligent scripting kicked off the era of prestige American television that various other HBO and AMC shows would continue in the years after.
At the airing of its first season Twin Peaks was a cultural phenomenon, propelling Lynch into a level of household recognition that, despite the success of The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, he hadn’t been previously accustomed to. Merchandise for Twin Peaks was everywhere, catchphrases from the show’s characters were being repeatedly used, and the question of who killed Laura Palmer was the topic of many a bar conversation. In a pre-internet age this level of commercial interest in such a niche, cult property was truly astonishing.
Overall 1990 would prove to be one of the best years of Lynch’s life. Not only did he have a smash-hit tv show on his hands, but his next movie Wild At Heart, an adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel of the same name about a pair of young lovers named Sailor and Luna (played by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern respectively) won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Conceived by Lynch as a love-letter to The Wizard of Oz as well as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, the film divided American critics (mainly Roger Ebert) who believed that the characters were underdeveloped, completely missing that that was Lynch’s intention to begin with.
Lynch had reached a point where he found himself in demand as a director of commercials for companies as varied as Yves Saint Laurent, and the Japanese coffee company Naomi, and even directing a teaser trailer for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous world tour.
All these demands however found Lynch unable to focus on Twin Peaks itself. Thanks to ridiculous pressure from the ABC higher-ups to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer, the writers were forced to kill “ the goose that laid the golden eggs” as Lynch and Frost’s idea was for the killer’s identity never to be revealed at any point.
After the godawful second half of season 2 of Twin Peaks, Lynch returned to salvage the show. Although letter writing campaigns and Lynch’s public appearances demanding the show stay on the air kept it going for longer than planned, ABC and their lack of imagination saw no future in Twin Peaks as a commercial property, scrapping it after only a year on the air and a massive season two cliff-hanger.
These events would it make plainly obvious to Lynch what his next movie should be – the first in a planned trilogy of spin-off films to wrap up the story of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Co-written with Robert Engles, after a personal falling out with Mark Frost, Fire Walk With Me focused on the last week in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), as well as a subplot involving the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks, a year before the events of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks take place.
Imbued with a far darker tone, and much more graphic than the original series due to it not being bound by the censorship standards of network TV, Fire Walk With Me is a shocking, visually resplendent, ear-pleasingly soundtracked by Angelo Badalamenti, dreamlike masterpiece, anchored by a wonderful performance by Sheryl Lee, which only adds even more texture to the lore of the Twin Peaks universe.
The film was not well received due to a myriad of factors, such as series regulars either taking on smaller roles, like Kyle MacLachlan, or not appearing at all in the case of Sherilyn Fenn; the film offering little to no answers at all about the ambiguous ending of the show’s second season; and dealing with disturbing topics such as incest and murder in a no-holds-barred style. To make matters even more complicated the movie also requires audiences to have a working knowledge of seasons 1-2 of Twin Peaks, which makes it harder for first time viewers to appreciate Fire Walk With Me on its merits.
These ingredients created the perfect storm for contemporary American critics to maul Fire Walk With Me. Upon its release in 1992 USA Today criticised it for being too dark giving it one star out of a possible four, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times described it as “not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be”. Dissenting voices such as the novelist/critic Steve Erikson and British film critic Kim Newman eloquently championed the film, but to no avail.
Like Dune before it, in the years since 1992 Fire Walk With Me has undergone an unexpected massive critical U-turn largely due to changing tastes, a collection of deleted scenes which help the plot to make more sense becoming available relatively recently, and a younger generation of cinephiles-turned-film-critics raised with Lynch’s work recognising its qualities as a moody and tragic noir melodrama.
Sadly, only grossing $4.2 million from a $10 million dollar budget domestically, the only country where Fire Walk With Me turned a profit was in Japan, where the appetite for all things Lynch and Twin Peaks has been at permanent fever pitch for decades. Because of this box office failure, the two planned sequels were scrapped, leaving Lynch, who invested so much of his time and passion into the production, feeling spurned.
After a failed tv pilot in 1993, Lynch returned to moviemaking in 1997 with the purposefully alienating, angry, Lost Highway. Co-written with Lynch’s previous Wild At Heart collaborator Barry Gifford, Lost Highway tells two separate stories, one of a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) who is haunted by unmarked anonymously sent VHS tapes of him and his wife (Patricia Arquette) in their house and the other about an auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty), who falls in love with his criminal boss’s (Robert Loggia) girlfriend (also played by Patricia Arquette). What links the two stories together is a shadowy figure by the name of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) driving the plot in the background.
Inspired by the events of the OJ Simpson trial, and borrowing from filmmaking styles such as film noir, German Expressionism and the French New Wave, Lost Highway is a dreamlike neo-noir psychological thriller that represents one of the most intentionally confusing chapters in Lynch’s filmography.
Made from a place of professional angst, due to the critical reception of Fire Walk With Me five years earlier, Lost Highway has a discernibly angrier tone than any other Lynch work with its confusing plot being akin to a gigantic middle finger to his critics both in and outside Hollywood.
Although panned at the time, Lost Highway has since garnered a devoted cult following due to its distinctive visuals, its theme of surveillance and being watched becoming more relevant than ever in an age of social media and mobile phones, and its ambiguous narrative that lends itself nicely to multiple re-watches.
In a move that would once again confound audiences, Lynch’s final movie of the 1990s was a quiet, slice of life road drama distributed by Disney, of all studios, entitled The Straight Story. The film follows an elderly World War II veteran named Alvin (Richard Farnsworth), who, after hearing that his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke, decides to undertake a massive road-trip by tractor all the way from Iowa to Wisconsin, as he is physically unable to drive a car due to his poor health. Aided by the kindness of the various strangers he meets along his way, the message of The Straight Story is an infectiously optimistic and life affirming one.
A mixture of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa style humanism with a John Fordesque use of scale, The Straight Story is a sombre and understated affair anchored by a towering performance by Richard Farnsworth who, despite suffering from terminal cancer during filming, gave it his absolute all.
Critically, The Straight Story was the first time Lynch had gathered unanimous praise since The Elephant Man nineteen years before. Roger Ebert in an Opposite Day style twist gave the movie four out of four stars, and Janet Maslin effusively praised it in The New York Times declaring that ; “The Straight Story is.. [more] about gazing at the sky, about experiencing each encounter to the fullest, than it is about getting anywhere in a hurry. It’s been too long since a great American movie dared to regard life that way.”
Nominated for a Palm d’Or, a best score Golden Globe for Badalamenti (which he, cruelly, didn’t win), and winning a best American film trophy at the Bodi Awards, The Straight Story represented an unexpected welcoming back to prominence for Lynch. Now in a position to get projects commissioned again, Lynch decided to try and mount another TV pilot.
Working once again with ABC, Lynch’s pilot focused on a woman emerging from a car crash with $125,000 in cash and a blue key, with no memories of how either ended up in her possession. Despite shooting footage, ABC for one reason or another changed their minds and pulled out at the last minute – leaving Lynch to secure funding from the French company StudioCanal to turn his hour of footage into a feature film entitled Mulholland Drive.
If Lost Highway was Lynch dipping his toes into the swimming pool of dual narratives, then Mulholland Drive was him cannonballing in headfirst. Taking the original pilot plot of an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) ending up in a car wreck, Lynch combined it with two connecting stories, one centred around an aspiring Hollywood actress (Naomi Watts) who moves to Los Angeles and is wrapped up in Laura Harring’s arc, and a separate plot following a big shot Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) who is going through quite possibly the strangest and most depressing afternoon of his life.
In stark contrast to The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive is a movie which constantly plays with the conventions of filmmaking, from eschewing a traditional three act structure to create an open-ended narrative; to forcing the audience to constantly question whether the events in the film aren’t just taking place in the character’s heads; to the use of dream sequences and vignettes; Mulholland Drive is a movie which can be dissected and picked up apart for hours on end, and you’ll still not end up with any clearer meaning.
The most simple interpretation however is that the movie is, in the words of critic J. Hoberman, a kind of “ poisoned love letter” to Hollywood in the vein of one Lynch’s all-time favourite movies, Sunset Boulevard. It’s a story which takes the very concept of screen stardom and turns it into an existential nightmare.
Despite the movie’s ambiguity and uncomfortable surreal imagery, Mulholland Drive proved to be Lynch’s second critical consensus smash in three years following on from the unanimously positive reception The Straight Story had received in 1999.
Film critic Stephen Holden compared it to Fellini’s 8 ½, in that both films are works of auteurist self-reflection, noted Lynch sceptic Roger Ebert gave it four out of four calling it a “ surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it”. The film subsequently ending up on multiple best of the year lists, and going on to be named the movie of the decade for the 2000s by publications ranging from Cahiers Du Cinema and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, meant that Lynch had now entered an elder statesman auteur phase of his career.
In the five year gap between Mulholland Drive and what would be his last feature film, Inland Empire, Lynch began to dabble in flash animation creating a series of online shorts entitled Dumbland, as well as a disarmingly odd web sitcom called Rabbits. Lynch once again proved himself to be ahead of the curve when it came to the use of the internet, fully understanding its powers of communication and the do it yourself opportunities that it provided a great deal more than many of his contemporaries did.
In addition to his experimental internet work Lynch was back to making commercials again, most famously culminating in him making a black and white short to advertise Sony’s then upcoming PlayStation 2 console, which featured a duck quacking and a one armed man in a darkened room. Eating away at him during this relative sabbatical however, would be an idea for movie titled Inland Empire.
Shot entirely on a Sony handheld digital video camera, without a completed screenplay, with a shoot mostly taking place in Poland and almost completely self-financed and edited by Lynch – Inland Empire represented an exploration of guerrilla filmmaking for the director in a film only made possible through that method.
Recruiting regulars Laura Dern, Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux for a stream of consciousness narrative which starts off as the story of an actress (played by Dern) who takes on a part in an American remake of an unfinished Polish movie whose production shut down in mysterious circumstances. Branching out from this is a complex spider’s web of a plot, involving extensive dream sequences, psychological dissociation, flashbacks to a group of prostitutes in 1930s Poland, and the nature of reality itself.
For Lynch, who had just turned sixty during the movie’s production, to make something so bold and experimental at an age when most filmmakers settle back into old habits or slow down altogether is truly worthy of respect, regardless of whether you enjoy Inland Empire or not. Although, like much of Lynch’s work, Inland Empire completely divided critics and audiences at the time of its 2006 release in the years since it has come to be re-appraised as an underrated jewel in Lynch’s filmography, being compared to Bunuel’s Un Chien Anadolu and Bergman’s Persona in how the movie forces the audiences to continually question what they are looking at.
In spite of Dern’s truly brilliant performance, she sadly wasn’t nominated for a best actress Oscar. So, in typical Lynchian fashion, the director decided to campaign for Dern’s nomination by sitting on a deckchair on an L.A. street, next to a live cow, chatting to the various passersby.
From the late 2000s-early 2010s, for Lynch, although still directing commercials such as an eleven minute long web film for Dior, an animated piece with the band Interpol, and a Duran Duran concert, things would be strangely quiet in terms of feature film or television series projects. After both a documentary about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and an original script entitled Antelope Don’t Run No More fell through, Lynch seriously considered quitting directing to focus on painting and music.
In an eerie twist of fate, however, almost 25 years after Laura Palmer’s famous declaration at the end of the second season of Twin Peaks, a series long thought to be sadly dead and buried after its abrupt cancellation in 1991, the show was revived by Showtime, re-teaming Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost once again.
Picking up from where the first two seasons left off, Twin Peaks The Return was the show that Lynch had always wanted to make but was hampered from doing so by the various censorship restrictions foisted upon him by ABC. Structured as an 18 hour movie rather than as a conventional tv show by Lynch, The Return is an elaborate mosaic with each of its 18 episodes building the complete picture of Agent Cooper’s odyssey back to Twin Peaks.
With the backing of Showtime (a premium cable channel) Lynch had no restrictions from the top in how surreal he could make the show, as well as being able to display violent and disturbing acts which were only mentioned via dialogue in the first two series. As a result, The Return is a complete assault on the senses – thanks to both its high end production and beautifully stylised cinematography, as well as Lynch’s creativity not being curtailed by unimaginative executives and focus group clipboard holders.
What makes the quality of The Return so startling however, is that in an age of reboots and revivals that actively diminish from their original series or characters (see Picard or Kenobi or The X-Files: I Want To Believe or The Rings of Power), The Return actively expands the lore of the original Twin Peaks while still staying true to the core values that made it the medium-defining show that it was.
Secondly, in both a television and pop culture landscape that has been so strongly influenced by Twin Peaks since it first aired in 1990, The Return still comes across as bold, fresh, original, and daring despite audiences now being fully accustomed to the changes it brought about in the first place.
With the unanimous critical and audience acclaim afforded to him for The Return, Lynch had practically reached canonisation status as one of American cinema’s all-time greats. Off the back of The Return he was given a new deal for several projects by Netflix (which sadly didn’t amount to anything beyond a seventeen minute short film) with a TV show titled Unrecorded Night coming the closest to being made before the 2020 Covid pandemic shut down production.
In the last five years of Lynch’s life, he would work on smaller scale projects such as turning up to do a spoken word piece for music producer Flying Lotus on his track Fire Is Coming and uploading daily weather reports discussing the weather and offering sage advice from his Los Angeles home, a practice he kept up from 2020- April 2023. His last filmmaking project, strangely enough, would be in front of the camera not behind it – portraying Hollywood legend John Ford in a five minute cameo in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fablemans, in exchange for a big bag of Cheetos.
In August of last year, Lynch publicly disclosed that he had been diagnosed with emphysema, brought about by a smoking habit he started at the age of eight. His condition had become dire to the point that he was unable to leave his house, but despite his ill-health he believed that he could still direct a production remotely, hoping to bring Antelope Don’t Run No More, Unrecorded Night, and an animated film entitled SnootWorld to life.
In January 2025, during the Southern California wildfires which hit the city of Los Angeles so terribly, Lynch was evacuated from his house, with the smoke and polluted air coming from the fires exacerbating his illness. On 16th January 2025, Lynch died of a cardiac arrest, with lung disease being cited by doctors as an underlying cause.
Tributes were paid by friends and frequent collaborators, his filmmaking contemporaries, and critics. Lynch’s overall legacy as an artist is the only thing associated with him you could describe as knowable, from having an adjective made from his name in the dictionary, to inspiring numerous filmmakers such as Takashi Miike, Panos Cosmatos, Charlie Kaufman, Todd Solondz, David Firth, Donald Glover, and Adam Elliot, influencing video games (e.g. the Silent Hill series, Persona 4, the work of Suda 51, Deadly Premonition etc), musicians (Flying Lotus, Nine Inch Nails, Xiu Xiu) and The Sopranos and Mad Men creators David Chase and Matthew Weiner naming Lynch as a direct influence.
While Lynch himself may sadly no longer be with us, his work and the hopeful philosophy that he carried in his life will be forever eternal. Still, however, movies and the world at large will be a much poorer place now that David Lynch has gone.
“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.”
David Lynch 1946-2025
Simon Thompson
