‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Mulholland Drive’ Director Was 78

David Lynch, the writer-director whose films and TV series including Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks portrayed a seemingly bucolic America, only to reveal it as teeming with the mysterious and macabre, has died. He was 78.

Lynch’s death was announced on his Facebook page:

“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. 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.”

In August, he revealed that he was suffering from emphysema after many years of smoking and that he couldn’t leave home for fear that he would get COVID-19.

Nobody who saw Lynch’s works could mistake them for anyone else’s. Unlike other leading auteurs, he didn’t belong to a movement or fit easily into a genre; while his pictures echoed the mindset of a Luis Buñuel or a Salvador Dalí — critic Pauline Kael called him “the first populist surrealist” — and were influenced by such film noir landmarks as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd., they were sui generis; his creations, in fact, appeared timeless, strangely disconnected from any particular era or place, which made them all the more startling and disturbing.

These were horror stories that mixed the monstrous with the mundane, that emerged from a landscape of dreams or nightmares, their happy endings doing nothing to erase the discomfort they left behind. They were as perplexing as any drawing of M.C. Escher, as haunting as any Grimms fairy tale, only far harder to decipher — which sometimes led skeptics to wonder whether even Lynch had the key to unlocking them. Few doubted the power of his vision and imagination, though naysayers questioned his logical thread.

While the filmmaker could occasionally descend into self-parody, critics’ groups included his major pictures on lists of the most important movies of the past century. In a 2012 poll of nearly 900 experts, Sight & Soundmagazine ranked Mulholland Drive (2001) at No. 28 and Blue Velvet (1986) at No. 69.

There was, however, a notable discrepancy between Lynch’s international standing and his domestic reputation: none of his films is featured in the American Film Institute’s most recent ranking of the 100 greatest movies, published in 2007.

Nor was the Academy always supportive: nominated for four Oscars (as director for Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and 1980’s The Elephant Man, which also garnered him an adapted screenplay nom), Lynch was finally accorded an honorary Academy Award in 2019.

Like the only other modern American filmmaker to rank above him on the Sight & Sound list, Francis Ford Coppola (whose Apocalypse Now ranked 14th while The Godfather came in 21st), Lynch was that rarity in Hollywood: an artist who eventually turned his back on the art form he had mastered.

While he revisited his celebrated 1990-91 ABC series Twin Peaks with 2017’s disappointing Twin Peaks reboot for Showtime, his filmic output sputtered in the final decades and seemed to halt for lengthy stretches following his last feature, Inland Empire (2006).

Later in his life, Lynch drew more attention for a 17-minute short, 2017’s What Did Jack Do?, in which he played a detective interrogating a monkey, than for anything else he had done recently on film. That endeavor seemed as much a sly joke as an artistic statement.

Instead, after the panned Inland Empire, he devoted himself to his paintings (an interest that had preceded film) and two other primary endeavors: a coffee-making business and transcendental meditation, the Buddhist practice he had embraced in his late 20s.

“Everything in me changed when I started meditating,” he reflected in his unusual 2018 memoir, Room to Dream (co-written with Kristine McKenna), which alternated third-person and first-person chapters. “Within two weeks of starting, Peggy [his first wife, Peggy Lentz] comes to me and says … ‘Your anger. Where did it go?’”

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on Jan. 20, 1946. His father, Donald, was a research scientist and his mother, Edwina, an English teacher; their work led them to move frequently, from Montana to Idaho to Washington state to Virginia.

Never a stellar student, Lynch was shaped by the Boy Scouts, and in later years, many of those who knew him expressed surprise at the contradiction between his mild manners and the eruptions of violence and profanity in his art.

Anyone searching to explain Lynch’s work through his upbringing would have trouble. “My parents were so loving and good,” he wrote in his memoir. “They’d had good parents, too, and everybody loved my parents. They were just fair.” He added that “a lot of who we are is just set when we get here. They call it the wheel of birth and death, and I believe we’ve been around many, many times.”

After dropping out of several colleges (including Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Cooper Union), Lynch was working as an artist and printmaker in 1966 when he made his first film, the four-minute short Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). That and other early efforts led him to win a place at the AFI, which had just opened a Los Angeles-based conservatory that would subsequently rank among America’s finest film schools.

Enrolled alongside an unrivaled collection of students that also included Terrence Malick and Paul Schrader, Lynch spent the next several years making his first feature, Eraserhead (1977), a dystopian vision shot in black and white. Adored and abhorred in equal measure, the movie became a cult favorite, playing at midnight screenings in art houses across the country; no less a figure than Stanley Kubrick proclaimed it one of his favorite films.

Eraserhead improbably landed Lynch his first feature proper, The Elephant Man, when Mel Brooks (its equally improbable producer) fell in love with the director’s esoteric work. Based on the true story of Joseph Merrick (renamed John Merrick in the picture), Elephant Man told the story of a grotesquely deformed 19th century freak show performer (played by John Hurt) who’s discovered and cared for by an enlightened surgeon (Anthony Hopkins).

Lynch was still new to the profession of director and quirky enough that at one point the mercurial Hopkins allegedly tried to have him fired. “Hopkins wasn’t openly hostile, but he was aloof,” remembered producer Jonathan Sanger, “and one day he called me into his dressing room and said, ‘Why is this guy getting to direct a movie? What has he done? He did one little movie. I don’t understand this.’”

When Hopkins flew at Lynch and demanded, “Just tell me what you want!,” Lynch recalled that “this anger comes up in me in a way that’s happened just a couple of times in my life. It rose up like you can’t fuckin’ believe — I can’t even imitate the way I was yelling, because I’d hurt my voice. I screamed some stuff at him, then screamed what I wanted him to do, and [actress] Wendy Hiller turns to Tony and quietly says, ‘I would do what he says.’ So he did.”

On-set difficulties were forgotten when the movie proved a terrific critical hit, earning eight Oscar nominations (though it failed to win a single one).

That was as close to mainstream Hollywood acceptance as Lynch would ever get, and he was burned by his next venture, a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. After a year and a half of production in Mexico, editing got underway in Los Angeles.

“It was horrible, just horrible,” he explained. “It was like a nightmare what was being done to the film to make this two-hour-and-17-minute running time that was required. Things were truncated, and whispered voice-overs were added because everybody thought audiences wouldn’t understand what was going on.”

Lynch didn’t so much blame producer Dino De Laurentiis as himself. “I always knew Dino had final cut on Dune,” he wrote, “and because of that I started selling out before we even started shooting … It was pathetic is what it was, but it was the only way I could survive.”

The movie was panned by critics when it opened in 1984 and seemed likely to bring a sudden end to Lynch’s meteoric rise, only for him to be redeemed by his fourth feature, Blue Velvet.

Taking its title from the classic Bobby Vinton song, Blue Velvet used one of Lynch’s favorite narrative tropes — the detective story — to follow a naive young man (Kyle MacLachlan) as he sets out on a voyage of discovery triggered by a cut-off ear. His exploration leads him to a sexually abused lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini, cast after Helen Mirren turned down the role) and the deadly, perverse and menacing thug who keeps her under his control (Dennis Hopper).

Hopper’s villain, Frank Booth, a man driven to paroxysms of sexually fueled rage made all the more terrifying by the oxygen mask with which he covers his face, heightening his desires as he chokes off his air supply, remains arguably the most petrifying bad guy ever to grace an American film, one on the same iconic level as Hopkins’ own Hannibal Lechter in the more mainstream horror-thriller The Silence of the Lambs.

When Hopper first discussed the part, he told Lynch, “I have to play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth.” Answered Lynch, “That’s good news and bad news.”

But it wasn’t just Hopper who made the movie so memorable; it was also the director’s sheer skill at narrative, not least when he has his over-curious lead break into the singer’s home and hide in her closet, where his voyeurism matches the director’s own — only to be upended when the singer, whom he has observed naked, holds him at knifepoint and makes him disrobe, too.

This was the kind of virtuoso filmmaking Lynch had never displayed before and perhaps would never do again (with the arguable exception of Mulholland Drive). It made stars of MacLachlan, Rossellini and Laura Dern (as MacLachlan’s wholesome girlfriend) and became the most talked-about movie of 1986.

The New York Times‘ Janet Maslin called it “an instant cult classic. With Eraserhead, Elephant Man and Dune to his credit, Mr. Lynch had already established his beachhead inside the realm of the bizarre, but this latest venture takes him a lot further. Kinkiness is its salient quality, but Blue Velvet has deadpan humor too, as well as a straight-arrow side that makes its eccentricity all the crazier. There’s no mistaking the exhilarating fact that it’s one of a kind.”

That one-of-a-kindness may have won plaudits, but it also led to a puritan backlash, especially for Rossellini, who was lambasted for taking the kind of role that would have shamed her mother, Ingrid Bergman — an ironic critique, given that Bergman had been equally condemned when she left her husband and ran off with Roberto Rossellini.

Adding to the layers of irony, Lynch in turn left his own wife, Mary Fisk, for Rossellini, with whom he would have a yearslong liaison. (Married four times, he is survived by his last wife, Emily Stofle, and four children, including filmmaker Jennifer Lynch.)

Lynch’s foray into television with Twin Peaks proved an even greater sensation. The horror-mystery once more centered on a detective — played by MacLachlan — who teams with a local sheriff (Michael Ontkean) to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Its spooky view of the fictional, eponymous town in Washington was rendered all the more haunting by Angelo Badalamenti’s score, and the mysteries upon mysteries of the plot generated endless speculation (and some irritation) among fans.

While often cited as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, Twin Peaks lost steam when Lynch left in the middle of the series to shoot Wild at Heart — the 1990 Cannes Palme d’Or winner that starred Dern and Rossellini alongside Nicolas Cage — and he later blamed season two’s weakness on his relative lack of involvement, compared to that of co-creator Mark Frost.

“Mark got the recognition he wanted with the second season, when he was sort of in charge,” said agent-turned-executive Tony Krantz. “David wasn’t happy with the scripts, though, and there were storylines he hadn’t pre-approved. It was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you’re misperceiving the dream that made the first season of Twin Peaks so great. You’re mimicking and making faux versions of them.’”

The series was canceled in its second season; still, Lynch revisited it many times, not just with a feature (1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) but also the 2017 series, with little critical or commercial success.

Twin Peaks marked both the apogee of Lynch’s career as a popular influencer and a turning point in his ability to tap into the zeitgeist. Nothing he did again had quite the same ripple-effect through society, including his two immediate follow-up features, Lost Highway (1997) and The Straight Story (1999). The former never caught on with audiences, who found its story incoherent, while the latter, a road trip movie starring Richard Farnsworth, was better-received critically but also failed financially, despite landing its lead an Oscar nomination.

Those who had begun to find Lynch’s work gimmicky were shocked and even awed when he leaped back with the film many consider his masterpiece, or at least Blue Velvet‘s equal: Mulholland Drive. Starring Naomi Watts as a budding actress who’s newly arrived in Los Angeles, the 146-minute drama follows her as she forms a friendship with another young woman (Laura Elena Harring), who has become an amnesiac following a horrific car accident that’s left her for dead.

The project was something of a miracle, having begun as another TV series that was killed by ABC. It was only after the extraordinary efforts of Lynch’s friend, executive producer Pierre Edelman, that the venture was resuscitated a year and a half after the pilot was filmed in spring 1999. That protracted break may have helped Lynch gather his thoughts: he managed to cobble together his original cast and shoot an additional 18 pages, rounding out the plot and giving his mystery a coherence that Twin Peaks had lacked.

Again, the director used his favorite film structure, an investigation of sorts, as the two women attempt to learn about the amnesiac’s mysterious past, leading them into an ever-stranger world peopled by thugs, murderers, singers and filmmakers (including Justin Theroux in a spectacular turn as a narcissistic director).

If the movie at times teetered on the edge of the ridiculous — with some strangely over-the-top acting — Lynch left no doubt about its deliberateness; that was made clear in a dazzling “scene within a scene,” when Watts auditions for a role in a bad movie — one that Lynch staged to be not only dramatically mesmerizing but also heart-stoppingly real.

What is real, what is false? What is imagined, what is true? What is acted, what is genuine? These were just some of the questions Lynch posed in his most artistically and philosophically complex work, one that has been the subject of speculation ever since.

“When I saw [Mulholland Drive] the first time,” Harring once observed, “I thought it was the story of Hollywood dreams, illusion and obsession. It touches on the idea that nothing is quite as it seems, especially the idea of being a Hollywood movie star. The second and third times I saw it, I thought it dealt with identity. Do we know who we are? And then I kept seeing different things in it …

“There’s no right or wrong to what someone takes away from it or what they think the film is really about. It’s a movie that makes you continuously ponder, makes you ask questions. I’ve heard over and over: ‘This is a movie that I’ll see again,’ or, ‘This is a movie you’ve got to see again.’ It intrigues you. You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten. It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”

Long after Lynch finished his last film, the questions still linger.

Stephen Galloway is dean of the film school at Chapman University.