A man with a tower of hair in an industrial wasteland tends a mewling, bandaged infant (1977)
Eraserhead — five years in the making at the AFI Conservatory, and a midnight-movie sensation.
Film · Hollywood
David Lynch
1946–2025 · American
American surrealism; the adjective 'Lynchian'
David Lynch trained as a painter and made films the same way, assembling dream logic, industrial noise and small-town Americana into work no one else could have signed. He gave his name to an adjective. Never a winner of a competitive Oscar despite three nominations for Best Director, he took the Palme d'Or, a Cannes directing prize and, at the end, an honorary Academy Award, and with Twin Peaks he changed what television was allowed to be.
How to spot them
- ▸Suburban picket fences with something rotting underneath; red curtains, chevron floors and flickering electric light
- ▸Dense industrial sound design and the brass-and-tremolo scores of Angelo Badalamenti
- ▸Dream logic and doubled identities: one character becoming another halfway through
- ▸A repertory of actors — Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, Naomi Watts — and Lynch himself as a shouting FBI chief
- ▸A refusal ever to explain what any of it means
Key films
A disfigured Victorian sideshow attraction insists that he is not an animal (1980)
The Elephant Man — eight Oscar nominations; the make-up snub led the Academy to create a make-up award.
A student finds a severed ear in a field, and a gas-masked man terrorises a nightclub singer (1986)
Blue Velvet — Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, and Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams'.
Sailor and Lula drive across the south with Wizard of Oz omens and a snakeskin jacket (1990)
Wild at Heart — Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1990, to loud booing.
A body wrapped in plastic beside a lake, damn fine coffee, and a room with red curtains (1990)
Twin Peaks — the television series with Mark Frost that asked who killed Laura Palmer; a 1992 film prequel and an 18-hour 2017 return followed.
A stubborn Iowa farmer drives a lawnmower three hundred miles to see his estranged brother (1999)
The Straight Story — a true story, and the only film of his rated G by the MPAA, released by Disney.
An amnesiac in Los Angeles, an aspiring actress, a blue box and a theatre where nothing is live (2001)
Mulholland Drive — begun as a rejected television pilot; it won him Best Director at Cannes.
A studio adaptation of a desert-planet novel, disowned by its director, who wanted his name off it (1984)
Dune — from Frank Herbert; the failure that made him insist on final cut thereafter.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Missoula, Montana, on 20 January 1946, the son of a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture; an Eagle Scout who was an usher at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961
- •He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before the AFI Conservatory
- •He was nominated three times for Best Director — for The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive — and never won; he received an Academy Honorary Award in 2019
- •He shared the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2001 with Joel Coen
- •Angelo Badalamenti scored most of his work from Blue Velvet onwards; Julee Cruise sang for him
- •He practised Transcendental Meditation daily from 1973 and founded the David Lynch Foundation to teach it
- •He posted a daily weather report from Los Angeles online for years, and drew the comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World
- •He made coffee, furniture and music under his own name, and directed advertisements including a Calvin Klein campaign
- •He revealed an emphysema diagnosis in 2024 and died on 16 January 2025, aged 78
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- NPR — David Lynch, who directed 'Blue Velvet' and 'Twin Peaks,' dies at 78
- Chris Rodley (ed.) — Lynch on Lynch