David Lynch, surrealist filmmaker behind ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Mulholland Drive,’ dies at 78

David Lynch, the surrealist filmmaker who bridged the mainstream and avant-garde, exploring the sinister recesses of the human psyche - and the mysteries behind America’s white picket fences - with an unsettling blend of melodrama, whimsy and nightmarish horror, has died. He was 78.

His family announced the death in a Facebook post on Thursday but did not share additional details. “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us,” they wrote. “But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ ”

Mr. Lynch revealed in an interview last year that he had emphysema, adding that the lung disease - which he blamed on years of smoking - had limited his mobility and kept him homebound. He later took to social media amid speculation on his health and the future of his career, writing in a statement, “I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire.”

In movies such as “Blue Velvet” (1986) and “Mulholland Drive” (2001) as well as the TV series “Twin Peaks,” which premiered in 1990, Mr. Lynch shined an eerie light on hypocrisy, moral corruption and sexual violence, revealing the darkness lurking in even sweet-as-cherry-pie small towns.

The director of 10 feature films - or maybe 11, counting the 2017 revival of “Twin Peaks,” which he described as an 18-hour movie - Mr. Lynch received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2019. He also earned four Oscar nominations for directing “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and for directing and co-writing “The Elephant Man,” a 1980 historical drama about a hideously deformed but beautifully refined Englishman.

While that film was relatively straightforward, if nonetheless haunting in the story it told, Mr. Lynch was best known for work that was almost singularly strange, relying more on the emotional or allegorical power of its imagery than on conventional plot or dialogue.

“Eraserhead,” his dystopian 1977 debut, featured giant spermatozoa and a singing woman who lives inside a radiator; “Blue Velvet,” a voyeuristic coming-of-age story, opened with a sequence that lingered uncomfortably on swarming ants; and “Mulholland Drive,” a neo-noir drama, hinged on altered identities and dreamlike mysteries, including the appearance of an enigmatic blue box inside a character’s bag.

Like a magician declining to explain his tricks, Mr. Lynch refused to discuss the meaning of his films. “I like things that leave some room to dream,” he told the New York Times in 1995. “A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that kills the dream.”

Filmmaking was only the most prominent part of Mr. Lynch’s artistic life. A composer, printer, sculptor, furniture-maker, cartoonist, playwright and painter, he turned to moviemaking while in art school in the 1960s, in an effort to create a “moving painting.”

He went on to develop an expressionistic style that evoked the works of directors as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, although he said he was more interested in watching custom-car shows on television than studying old movies.

Mr. Lynch was perhaps “the first populist surrealist - a Frank Capra of dream logic,” wrote New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. With “Eraserhead,” a black-and-white cult classic about an addled new father (played by Jack Nance) and a mutant reptilian baby, Mr. Lynch effectively “reinvented the experimental-film movement.”

“Watching this daringly irrational movie, with its interest in dream logic,” Kael wrote, “you almost feel that you’re seeing a European avant-garde gothic of the ’20s or early ’30s … and yet there is a completely new sensibility at work.”

His movies were not always as experimental, or as well received. His 1984 adaptation of “Dune,” from a science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, was a $40 million fiasco; “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” a 1992 companion to the television series, was savaged by critics, with Vincent Canby of the Times writing, “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.”

But Mr. Lynch’s macabre imagery, deadpan irony and eccentric characters inspired a slew of “Lynchian” imitators, as well as independent directors including Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch. And with “Twin Peaks,” a supernatural murder-mystery soap opera, he and co-creator Mark Frost crafted what is widely considered one of the most influential shows in television history.

“If you look at TV drama since its inception, shows would tell the audience what they were going to see, show it to them and then tell them what they’ve seen. Nobody was ever puzzled by what was going on,” David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” told Time magazine in 2017. “With ‘Twin Peaks,’ Lynch and Frost show it to you and leave you thinking, ‘What did I just see?’ That was revolutionary, and it still is.”

During its first season, on ABC, the show drew 20 million viewers at one point and received 14 Emmy nominations, winning two, behind an ensemble cast that included Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean.

But the series cratered in season two after resolving the murder of Laura Palmer, a high school homecoming queen whose death sets in motion a plot involving a drug and prostitution ring, arson at a sawmill and an extradimensional red room where a dancing dwarf speaks backward.

Mr. Lynch distanced himself from the second season but came back to direct and co-write each episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” a critically acclaimed revival on Showtime that linked the series’s good-vs.-evil mythology to the making of the atomic bomb.

‘The other 90 percent’

In the studio, Mr. Lynch frequently collaborated with composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose jazzy, dream-pop scores undergird “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet.” Mr. Lynch was also the screenwriter for most of his films and served as his own sound designer, turning up the volume on hissing static, whistling teapots and creaking floorboards.

Comic filmmaker and actor Mel Brooks, whose company produced “The Elephant Man,” described Mr. Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” an incongruous blend of gee-whiz middle-American and mysterious oddball. He kept his hair in a towering white pompadour, buttoned his shirt to the collar but rarely wore a tie, and spoke with a cheery Western twang, occasionally declaring, “I’ll be ding-danged!” (Donning an eye patch, he bore a resemblance to filmmaker John Ford, whom he portrayed in a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 movie “The Fabelmans.”)

He seemed to exist in a state of perpetual bliss, despite being married four times and making movies involving rape and drug abuse. Mr. Lynch credited his inner peace to Transcendental Meditation, which he practiced twice daily for decades, espoused through his David Lynch Foundation and described as a way of boosting his creativity.

He also recalled a seven-year period in which he worked and ate every day at the restaurant chain Bob’s Big Boy, sitting down at 2:30 p.m. to order a chocolate shake, drink up to seven cups of heavily sugared coffee and jot down ideas on napkins.

Some of those sugar-induced visions wound up in “Blue Velvet,” sometimes cited as his greatest achievement. The film propelled Isabella Rossellini to movie stardom, revitalized the career of Dennis Hopper and “made the medium alive and dangerous again,” wrote film historian David Thomson.

Named for a love song popularized by Bobby Vinton, “Blue Velvet” starred MacLachlan as a college student who returns to his seemingly idyllic hometown and finds a severed ear in a vacant lot - a discovery that leads him toward an alluring lounge singer (Rossellini) and a sadomasochistic gangster (Hopper) with a fondness for narcotic gas.

The film, Mr. Lynch said, was shaped by a childhood memory of his upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, where he watched one evening as a beautiful but bloodied woman appeared out of the woods near his family’s home, naked and weeping.

“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods,” he told Rolling Stone in 1990. “And it just seemed to me that people only told you 10 percent of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other 90 percent.”

‘The art life’

The oldest of three children, David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Mont., on Jan. 20, 1946. His mother was an English-language tutor, and his father was a research scientist with the Agriculture Department.

The family settled in Alexandria, Va., where David took Saturday classes at the nearby Corcoran School of Art as a teenager and learned that some people painted as a profession. “When I found out adults could do that,” he told the Times, “that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and paint.”

With a friend, Jack Fisk - later a production designer and fellow director - he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. While painting a garden scene one night, Mr. Lynch seemed to hear the rustling of wind and see his oil-paint flowers sway in a breeze. The vision inspired his “moving pictures,” beginning with the grotesque and self-explanatory “Six Men Getting Sick” (1967), which won first prize at a school art contest.

In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at the American Film Institute’s conservatory and began working on “Eraserhead” during a period of personal crisis. He separated from his first wife, Peggy Lentz Reavey, with whom he had a daughter; supported himself with a $48-per-week paper route; and took up meditation, feeling an “emptiness” inside.

“My father is a big fan of the art life,” his daughter Jennifer Lynch later told Newsweek. “The idea of being bound by a family was in no uncertain terms a horrific experience for him, a nightmarish dream come true.”

The success of “Eraserhead” on the midnight-movie circuit attracted the attention of Brooks, who enlisted Mr. Lynch to direct “The Elephant Man.”

Created independently of the Broadway play of the same name, the film starred Anne Bancroft (Brooks’s wife), Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, whose elaborate prostheses for the leading role - created by makeup artist Christopher Tucker - helped spur the creation of an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling.

Mr. Lynch’s later films included “Wild at Heart” (1990), an eccentric riff on “The Wizard of Oz” that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival; “Lost Highway” (1997), a dreamlike narrative he described as a “psychogenic fugue”; and “Inland Empire” (2006), an unnerving tribute to actors and acting, starring Laura Dern.

Somewhat improbably, he also directed “The Straight Story” (1999), a G-rated Disney feature based on the true story of a farmer who drives a riding mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his estranged brother. “I think it may be my most experimental film,” Mr. Lynch said after the film premiered at Cannes. “Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.”

Mr. Lynch’s second marriage - to Mary Fisk, Jack’s sister - ended in divorce, after he began a relationship with Rossellini that lasted five years. His marriage to editor and producer Mary Sweeney, his longtime partner, ended in divorce after less than a year. In 2009, he married actress Emily Stofle. She filed for divorce in late 2023.

Mr. Lynch had four children: Jennifer, a filmmaker, from his first marriage; Austin, from his second; Riley, from his relationship with Sweeney; and Lula, from his fourth marriage. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In recent years, Mr. Lynch pursued an ambitious effort to raise $7 billion for Transcendental Meditation and build “peace palaces” around the world. But his art remained his principal focus, even as it continued to confound viewers.

“I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me,” he had told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don’t. They’ve got life going on around them, but they don’t look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”