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Remembering David Lynch, 1946 – 2025
Director David Lynch, whose works plumbed the dream life of the American unconscious, revealing both joy and the deepest of horrors within, died today at the age of 78.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time,” his family posted on Facebook. “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.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
From his earliest short films like The Grandmother through his early masterpiece of parental anxiety and industrial culture, Eraserhead, through features Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, among others, Lynch has been a paradoxical major influence of so many filmmakers today — paradoxical in what while being a major inspiration he was never truly, or at least successfully, imitated.
Here is how the Oxford English Dictionary defines “Lynchian”: “Characteristic, reminiscent, or imitative of the films or television work of David Lynch. Lynch is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.” Yet while that adjective is redolent across so many reviews of newer filmmakers work, few have been able to access and, most importantly, bring to screen such uncanny visions, textures and moods. Lynch’s ability to live in the most interior of worlds and then to venture out, opening these worlds up to his often returning collaborators to make his films, was without comparison. I often say that one mark of a good director is the ability to get what’s in their head onto the screen in the most unmediated way possible, and nobody did that better than Lynch. His films created symbolic languages for their viewers, offering ways to process ideas around adolescence, fatherhood, aging, abuse within the family, dissociation, identity and the role of fantasy in American life that felt both startlingly immediate while also mysteriously private. His films lent themselves to individual interpretation — offerings to those who needed them.
Lynch’s final major work was Twin Peaks: The Return, a “third season” of his 1990s television hit that was a capacious vehicle for what felt like so many of Lynch’s pent-up creative ideas as well as a series of elegant farewells for actors and collaborators — “Log Lady” Catherine Coulson, actor Miguel Ferrer, and even David Bowie. Described by its network, Showtime, as “the pure heroin vision of David Lynch,” the work felt like no other television. Released not as binge-viewing but in weekly installments, it was complete and highly personal reimagination of the medium’s potential, a thrilling rejection of conventional notions of character, pace and narrative development. The series’s overall audacity and vision prompted critical debates over whether it could truly be claimed by that medium. When the decade concluded, Cahiers du Cinema anointed Twin Peaks: The Return its best film.
Beyond the films themselves, Lynch was a perpetual motion machine of creativity across forms and formats — in addition to film and television, he painted, designed furniture, issued daily weather briefings, wrote books on creativity and worked to popularize Transcendental Meditation, a major interest. Unmade Lynch projects such as Ronnie Rocket have been the stuff of lore. After news of the director’s emphysema diagnosis appeared in an August 2024 Sight and Sound interview, Lynch consoled distraught fans with a statement on X, “I am filled with happiness and will never retire.” Before he died, among many other projects he was planning to make an animated children’s film, Snootworld.
When Filmmaker polled our editors, writers and freelancers about the Best Film of the ’00s, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive topped our list. His earlier Blue Velvet was the inspiration and subject for one major project here: Nicolas Rombes’s Blue Velvet Project, in which over one year the author analyzed Lynch’s classic by scrutinizing frames 47 seconds apart for their meanings and allusions. In 2012, Ariston Anderson attended a David Lynch masterclass and distilled from him 10 Rules of Filmmaking. And when returned to television in 2017 with Twin Peaks: The Return, we commissioned multiple pieces by critics, filmmakers and writers such as Rombes, Larry Gross, Gina Telaroli, Vadim Rizov, Andrew Bujalski and Michael Sicinski examining this work of cinema on TV from just a few of its multiple entry points. And that’s in addition to interviews with Lynch here on Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway.
A fuller appreciation of Lynch will appear in Filmmaker‘s next print issue but, for now, R.I.P. to this era’s cinematic great, David Lynch.
