David Lynch, visionary ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ director, dead at 78
The filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist crafted a singular style that teetered between dreams and nightmares
By Jon Blistein
David Lynch, the singular American filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist who conjured dreams and nightmares of unsettling beauty and psychic horror, has died. He was 78.
Lynch’s family confirmed his death on Facebook, writing, “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.”
A cause of death was not given, but in the years leading up to his death, Lynch was battling emphysema, which he contracted after years of smoking cigarettes (he revealed the diagnosis publicly in 2024). The disease left Lynch largely homebound, because the risk of catching Covid-19 or other bugs would potentially exacerbate his health issues. However, he continued to work, writing on Twitter at the time, “I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire.”
As a filmmaker, Lynch honed and presented a distinct style that teetered on the edge of the real and surreal. In masterpieces like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mullholland Drive, and Twin Peaks (both the two TV series and the 1992 film Fire Walk With Me) he toyed with the mundane and the uncanny, balanced brutal violence and total love, and plumbed the depths of the supernatural and psychological. His work delighted, mystified, and horrified viewers, and rarely offered easy answers.
“They mean different things to different people,” Lynch said of his films in a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone. “Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It’s OK. Just as long as there’s not one message, spoon-fed. That’s what films by committee end up being, and it’s a real bummer to me.” He added: “Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.”
Along with his 10 feature films and television work, Lynch directed an array of commercials and music videos, including visuals for artists like Nine Inch Nails, Moby, and Interpol. He was a dedicated musician himself, releasing a variety of solo and collaborative albums, including several with longtime composing partner Angelo Badalementi. And Lynch was an avid painter and visual artist, who exhibited his work around the world and spent nearly a decade drawing his own comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World.
David Keith Lnch was born Jan. 20, 1946 in Missoula, Montana, but he spent much of his early life moving around the country due to his father’s job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. His parents encouraged his artistic interests too: He drew on the reams of graph paper his father brought home from work, and said his mother “saved” him by refusing to give him coloring books where “the whole idea is to stay between the lines.”
But while Lynch’s childhood was, by all accounts, a calm and happy one — despite all the moving — he seemed cognizant of, and fascinated by, darker forces. In a telling exchange from that 1990 RS interview, he recalled the beaming smiles plastered on the faces of people in advertisements during the Fifties: “It’s the smile of the way the world should be or could be. They really made me dream like crazy. And I like that whole side of it a lot. But I longed for some sort of — not a catastrophe but something out of the ordinary to happen.”
He added: “Once you’re exposed to fearful things, and you see that really and truly many, many, many things are wrong — and so many people are participating in strange and horrible things — you begin to worry that the peaceful, happy life could vanish or be threatened.”
After high school, Lynch studied art at schools in Washington D.C. and Boston, but got little out of the programs. He spent several years traveling around Europe, and when he returned, moved to Philadelphia and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Around the same time, Lynch married his first wife, Peggy, and the couple had a daughter, Jennifer, in 1968.
Lynch has described his time in Philadelphia as both terrifying and deeply inspirational. One house he lived in was catty-corner to the city morgue, and Lynch once convinced the night guard to let him wander around. Another house was robbed on multiple occasions, with a boy who was murdered down the block in another home. “The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense,” he said in the 2005 book Lynch on Lynch. “There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.”