(BD TOP NEWS BLOG)_ Director and writer David Lynch, known for pushing American cinema and television into dark, surreal realms of his imagination with films like *Blue Velvet* and *Mulholland Drive*, in addition to his groundbreaking series *Twin Peaks*, is dead at 78.
In 2024, Lynch disclosed he had been diagnosed with emphysema due to a lifetime of smoking. The disease prevented him from going outdoors or continuing his work as a director. His family confirmed his death with a heart-wrenching post 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.'"
From the series *Twin Peaks* to the movies *Lost Highway* and *Blue Velvet*, Lynch's work combines horror, film noir, mystery, and European surrealism. His storytelling is likened to Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel for the way in which its often impenetrable logic forged new ways of approaching cinematic narrative. The results have been some of the most unforgettable-and thought-provoking-experiences available to audiences.
David Lynch is a four-time Oscar nominee and received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2020.
A painter and maker of short animated and live-action films to begin with, Lynch burst onto the cinematic scene with his 1977 feature debut, *Eraserhead*. It was a nightmarish yet darkly humorous film that became a cult sensation in the midnight movie circuit. A style so singularly avant-garde, it took quick notice from Hollywood and international filmmakers alike.
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Lynch's next major project was with *The Elephant Man* in 1980, a tragic drama about John Merrick, a teratologically afflicted man who gained fame in Victorian England. The picture was produced by Mel Brooks and received eight Academy Award nominations, including Lynch's first Best Director nomination, earning Lynch a solid reputation as a director of emotional depth combined with artistic vision.
His ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert's *Dune* was less successful in 1984. Despite its $40 million budget and three years of production, the sprawling sci-fi epic tanked at the box office. The disappointment of *Dune* was soon offset by the critical acclaim Lynch received for *Blue Velvet* (1986), a deeply unsettling exploration of the dark underbelly of a seemingly idyllic small town. This film, along with the Palme d'Or-winning *Wild at Heart* 1990, sealed Lynch's mature style: a combination of surrealism, psychological intensity, and unsettling imagery.
In 1990, Lynch revolutionized television screens with *Twin Peaks*, which he co-created with Mark Frost. This groundbreaking ABC series was centered around the mysterious murder of a high school girl in a small lumber town and utilized taboo subjects and surreal storytelling. Where its first season was a phenomenon and earned 14 Emmy nominations, the program's popularity waned in its second. Its legacy, though, lived on with a prequel film, *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me* (1992), and a third-season revival on Showtime in 2017 that continued the baffling storylines and flummoxed its loyal core.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Lynch directed several features that continued to develop his unique storytelling style. Films like *Lost Highway*, 1997; *Mulholland Drive*, 2001; and *Inland Empire*, 2006, which concern themselves with dual identities, incomprehensible transformations, and shocking violence. While *The Straight Story* 1999 marshaled his powers for the restrained and touching chronicle of an elderly man's journey across states to meet his estranged brother. This film revealed a more gentle side to Lynch's work and received great critical acclaim, along with an Oscar nomination for its lead actor, Richard Farnsworth.
Lynch was resolutely opposed to any explication of his work, repeatedly invoking the private and subjective nature of art. Indeed, as he told *Lynch on Lynch* in 2005, "You figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody they wouldn't believe you or understand it in the same way you do."
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Outside of film and television, Lynch was a prolific artist in many other mediums. His paintings appeared in galleries worldwide, and he issued many albums of his music. He also produced *The Angriest Dog in the World*, a comic strip that ran for eight years in *The Los Angeles Reader*, and his idiosyncratic daily weather reports were heard first on radio, and then on social media. A devotee of Transcendental Meditation his whole life, Lynch founded the David Lynch Foundation to promote the practice and organized a series of star-studded fundraisers featuring Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, among others.
Lynch's work in film and beyond has been widely honoured: he accepted a special citation at the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards along with long-time collaborator Laura Dern, and a Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. In 2022 he played legendary director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's *The Fabelmans* and voiced *Robot Chicken*.
Born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, Lynch would grow up in several regions around the country before settling in Alexandria, Virginia, where he would finish high school. A initially poor student, Lynch took an avid interest in painting and would later study at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he first began experimenting with film. His early short works, like *Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)* and *The Alphabet* (1968), prepared the way for his future cinematic experimentation.
He married four times, leaving two daughters and two sons behind.* Such was his genius that Lynch has remained a solitary voice in cinema, known for his visionary narration and refusal to be bound by conventional narrative forms.
