The Conduit of Dreams: R.I.P. Visionary Filmmaker David Lynch | Under the Radar | Music Blog for the Indie Music Magazine
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David Lynch in 2011.

The Conduit of Dreams: R.I.P. Visionary Filmmaker David Lynch

The Legend Was Behind Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Eraserhead, and More

Jan 16, 2025 Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

Visionary film director, TV creator, and musician David Lynch has died at age 78. He co-created (with Mark Frost) the groundbreaking early ’90s TV show Twin Peaks and directed such classic films as Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Dr. He also released several albums, both solo and collaborative ones.

Lynch’s family issued a statement today on social media: “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.”

Lynch had recently announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema and could no longer leave the house. In an interview with the British film magazine Sight & Sound, published last November, Lynch said that if he was to direct again it would have to be remotely. According to Deadline, Lynch was forced to evacuate his home due to the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles in the last week, which perhaps led to his passing when he took a turn for the worse.

Lynch’s first film was the years-in-the-making cult classic Eraserhead in 1977, a one of a kind debut and true independent film. The acclaim for Eraserhead led to Lynch being hired by Mel Brooks (acting as producer) to make The Elephant Man, a biographical drama film starring John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins. Lynch famously turned down the opportunity to direct the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, instead helming a 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. The production of the film was troubled and Lynch was dissatisfied with the final product.

Musician/actor Sting, who acted in Dune, posted a brief tribute to Lynch on Instagram today: “David was a modern giant of the avant garde. I am so proud to have worked with him on the first Dune movie.”

The sci-fi epic was a notorious flop, but Lynch returned to his indie roots for 1986’s Blue Velvet, perhaps his most iconic film.

1990’s Wild at Heart won the top prize (the Palme D’Or) at the Cannes film festival. In a statement to Deadline today, the film’s star Nicolas Cage said: “He was brave, brilliant, and a maverick with a joyful sense of humor. I never had more fun on a film set than working with David Lynch. He will always be solid gold.”

1990 also saw Lynch revolutionize television with Twin Peaks, a groundbreaking and surreal murder-mystery show set in the Pacific Northwest that gripped TV viewers across America (and in other countries), as they tried to work out who killed local teenager Laura Palmer. FBI special agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan, star of Blue Velvet and Dune) comes to town to help solve the murder. The show was a dizzying mix of genres, mixing in elements of crime/detective dramas, soap operas/melodramas, teen dramas, and supernatural horror films, but it was all very distinctly the work of Lynch.

We ran an extensive article on Twin Peaks in our ’90s Issue last year and while we weren’t able to talk to Lynch, our writer Austin Trunick interviewed many of the cast members of the show, who had glowing things to say about working with Lynch. “I think there comes with age a calmness, and it’s there when working with David. There’s no uncertainty,” said MacLachlan. “There’s a confidence that I really welcome when working with David.”

“I just had to trust David and he’d make something beautiful,” said Mädchen Amick, who played Shelly Johnson on the show. “He doesn’t always know the meaning of what he does. He’s a conduit: something visual or artistic comes from the universe, and he’s sort of the channel that it goes through. He puts it out and lets other people take from it what they want.”

Amick also told us: “I do believe that David Lynch is our modern day genius: our Amadeus, our Da Vinci.”

Piper Laurie, a Hollywood legend and three-time Oscar nominee (for The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God), played Catherine Martell on Twin Peaks. She died in 2023 and in one of her final interviews, she told us: “David Lynch is so open, and doesn’t want to cut off the possibility of new ideas. He leaves everything open, just like life is. Perhaps he doesn’t want to label things, or predict what’s going to happen. He just sort of goes along with the new experience, and collects ideas as he goes.”

Twin Peaks’ ratings declined after Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed and ABC unwisely cancelled the show after only two seasons. Undeterred, Lynch reassembled most of the cast for the 1992 prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which chronicled the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life. Its sprawling cast also included musicians David Bowie and Chris Isaak.

Lost Highway and The Straight Story (based on the true story of a man who drove his lawnmower across Iowa and Wisconsin) rounded out Lynch’s ’90s. His final two films were 2001’s acclaimed Mulholland Dr. (which started out as a failed TV pilot for ABC before it was turned into a theatrical feature film that helped launch the Hollywood career of Naomi Watts) and 2006’s three-hour long Inland Empire. In 2017 he got to go back to the world of Twin Peaks with the Showtime limited series Twin Peaks: The Return, which was well-received by critics, with Vulture naming it the best TV series of the entire 2010s, and brought back much of the original cast.

Lynch was also a painter, designer, actor, musician, and practicer/advocate for Transcendental Meditation (launching the David Lynch Foundation). He released several solo albums (including 2011’s Crazy Crown Time, which featured Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O on one song), produced Julee Cruise’s first two albums, collaborated with Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse on the Dark Night of the Soul album in 2010, and put out an album recorded with Angelo Badalamenti (who composed the music for Twin Peaks and many of Lynch’s films). Lynch’s most recent album, Cellophane Memories, came out just last year and was another LP with his longtime musical collaborator Chrystabell.

David Lynch was a true auteur. His films were filled with dreamlike imagery and logic and were unmistakably his, so much so that his influential aesthetic was dubbed Lynchian, although few could truly replicate his style, which often veered from sincere to sinister to surreal in the same scene. As Michael Horse, who played Deputy Sheriff Tommy “Hawk” Hill in Twin Peaks, told us in our article on the show, Lynch was “like Jimmy Stewart with Salvador Dali’s intestines.”

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