The director of Twin Peaks, who embraced the strange

David Lynch once said that he was inspired to become a filmmaker when, while painting, he inexplicably heard a gust of wind and saw the work moving on the canvas.

This moment defined his obsession with “seeing pictures move,” but also his flair for the strange – twisting reality on the small and big screen for nearly 40 years.

From Twin Peaks to films like Blue Velvet, the 78-year-old American director, who died months after being diagnosed with emphysema, became the modern face of the strange, disturbing worlds often hidden in everyday society. “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire”. .

A self-proclaimed dreamer, Lynch burst onto the scene through midnight box office with 1977’s Eraserhead. Disorienting horror, a commentary on male paranoia, set a layered pattern that ran through his work.

Four decades later, he lived to see his style immortalized as an adjective in the Oxford Dictionary. Lynchian, it readsblurs “surreal or sinister elements with the mundane,” an accolade befitting a four-time Oscar nominee and lifetime achievement winner whose character was as big as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. The son of a Department of Agriculture scientist, he spent most of his early life moving from one state to another with his brother and sister.

However, Lynch’s parents encouraged his artistic ambitions from an early age. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1990, he said his mother “saved” him by encouraging him to draw on scrap paper rather than using coloring books, where “the whole idea is to stay between the lines”.

That spirit inspired his films, tinged with a rebellious streak that he teased lasted from age 14 to 30. “People rebel so long these days,” he reasoned, “because we’re built to live longer.”

His youthful disillusionment with the tranquility of suburban life made him want “something out of the ordinary to happen” to challenge the superficiality of 1950s family ideals, a bleak dream brought to life in his films and shows.

Lynch’s black-and-white debut, Eraserhead , realized this vision far more successfully than his years at art school, where the main character descends into madness after giving birth to a monstrous child.

Critics were left confused, but its late-night success led to a breakthrough when an audience member recommended it to Mel Brooks, who asked him to direct The Elephant Man.

Co-written with Lynch, the film’s cast of future screen icons, including John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, transformed the story of stigma into an emotional, critical hit, surpassing the original play.

It earned Lynch Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay as part of the film’s eight nominations, including Best Picture.

But while Hollywood thought it had found a new master of blockbusters, Tinseltown quickly discovered that Lynch had no interest in mainstreaming his adaptation of the 1984 sci-fi epic Dune.

With questionable special effects, costumes and rock star Sting lathered in baby oil, Charles Bramesco of the Guardian wrote that Lynch’s experiments left the franchise “radioactive for decades”. “I’m proud of everything but Dune,” Lynch would later say on YouTube, admitting elsewhere that it nearly “killed” his career.

The wounds began to heal, however, when he returned to double down on his signature style — to spotlight his fascination with America’s grimy underbelly.

Starring Dune’s Kyle McLachlan, Blue Velvet follows a small-town boy who ends up in the underworld after he discovers a severed ear. Gritty and partly violent, it divided critics but earned Lynch his second Academy Award for Best Director.

“This is America for me,” Lynch would later describe this film in his book “Lynch on Lynch.” “There’s a very innocent, naïve quality to life, and there’s also horror and sickness.”

He won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the romance Wild at Heart in 1990, starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe.

But it was Lynch’s belief that American beauty and horror were two sides of the same coin, perfected in his television project Twin Peaks that same year, that defined him.

On paper, the disturbing drama explored the murky goings-on in an American logging town following the murder of teenage beauty queen Laurie Palmer, brought to life thrillingly by Sheryl Lee.

But audiences were truly mesmerized by what he offered on screen: a dreamlike nightmare of delightfully idiosyncratic characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, played once again by Kyle MacLachlan, in the apparent comfort of picket fenced America—cherry pie and coffee at that. number – before steadily reaching the living room with a stunning flow of sexual violence and murders. It was one that had never been seen on American television before.

The ABC show won three Golden Globe Awards in 1991, including Best TV Drama Series and Best Actor in a Television Drama for McLachlan.

“Without Twin Peaks and its massive expansion of television, half of your favorite shows wouldn’t exist.” wrote James Parker for The Atlantic.

The show, he continued, “effectively renegotiated television’s contract with its audience.”

It didn’t matter that the second season fell apart after the killer was discovered. The TV was no longer safe, it was intrinsically alive – ideas of the big screen and production values ​​somehow transmuted into living rooms in an era when the screen still ruled.

In 1992, audiences returned to Twin Peaks with the prequel film Fire Walk With Me, but nothing lived up to the original.

When the nation asked, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, it wasn’t just about solving the mystery, it was about finding refuge from the rotten realities that society would rather ignore. Lynch found his darkness.

He would eventually turn his attention back to the big screen to attack Hollywood’s diabolical tricks of fame, glamour, deception and loss of identity in films informally known as his Los Angeles Trilogy.

It started with 1997’s Lost Highway, to 2001’s Mulholland Drive, perhaps the closest aesthetic to Twin Peaks.

The psychological drama was critically acclaimed, earned Lynch his third Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and won Best Director at Cannes. In recent years, it has also gained recognition for its queer themes, particularly between Naomi Watt and Laurie Haring’s characters, which challenged traditional Hollywood storytelling at the time.

The latest was 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch’s last feature film, which, as before, proved to be just as mind-melting without showing Hollywood star culture without mercy.

As Mike Manser told BBC Arts Inside Cinema: “Lynch lures us in with the promise of familiar, traditional genre thrills and mysteries as a hedge before that weirdness starts creeping in.

“Eventually the mysterious box is opened, revealing the darker and more sinister story that Lynch has been telling us all along.”

In the last years of his life, Lynch enjoyed a revered cult status. In 2017, he directed Twin Peaks: The Return, a new series set 25 years after the events of the original series, with mostly the same cast.

Meanwhile, the series’ legacy lives on, inspiring dramas like True Detective and the critically acclaimed 2023 Playstation survival horror Alan Wake II.

Away from the camera, Lynch admitted that he sometimes struggled to balance the “complex business” of parenthood with his career.

He has four children – Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lula – with ex-wives Peggy Reevey, Mary Fisk and Mary Sweeney, and wife Emily Stoffle.

“I love all my kids and we get on great, but in the early years, until you can bond with them, it’s hard.” he told Vulture. “The main thing is work, and I know that I suffer because of it. But at the same time, I have a great love for children.”

Although Lynch never returned to feature directing to give himself another shot at the elusive Academy Award, the Academy presented him with an honorary statuette in 2019. He also starred in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 semi-autobiographical film The Fable Man. , playing director John Ford.

By the end of his life, his creative pursuits became more diverse, from his initial passion for painting to music. Just last year he released Cellophane Memories, an album with Chrystabell. This is in addition to his previous work creating music videos for artists such as Moby and Nine Inch Nails.

Discussing his emphysema diagnosis last summer, he said he was in “great shape” and “will never retire.”

He added that the diagnosis was a “price” to pay for his smoking habit, although he does not regret the pleasure it brought him.

But after a few months, his condition worsened. In an interview with People magazine in November, Lynch said he needed oxygen to walk.

However, his ideas live on, as unique as the way he described their thinking.

Speaking to musician Patti Smith for BBC Newsnight in 2014, he said: “I get ideas in bits and pieces. It’s like having a puzzle in another room – all the pieces together.

“But in my room they just flip me piece by piece.”