David Lynch, 1946-2025

Photograph by Dylan Coulter

One of America’s most unique and influential filmmakers passed away today. From his late sixties student films through Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks, The Straight Story (1999) and Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch wrote and directed one of the most fascinating bodies of work in the history of cinema. These films contain scenes, images that will haunt the viewer long after the ending credits. Frightening images, oneiric images, images that have catalyzed the imaginations not just of filmmakers but of musicians and visual artists.

Along with Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, he is a member of an exclusive club of filmmakers whose names have become adjectives. If you describe a film as Lynchian, you are communicating a whole aesthetic in a single word. I don’t see the word dropping out of the film lexicon any time soon; from arthouse surrealism to horror, Lynch is part of cinema’s DNA. He is also undoubtedly part of television’s DNA, as the last quarter-century of prestige television exists on the ground broken by Twin Peaks.

Film and television represent only part of Lynch’s oeuvre; he was also a painter, an avant-garde musician, a furniture designer, a practitioner and advocate of Transcendental Meditation. And the author of Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a book I would highly recommend to any reader of this newsletter.

Instead of attempting to describe Lynch’s approach and impact as a filmmaker, I’d like to quote a passage from this book about the medium to which he devoted so much of his life.

Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it.

He will be missed but never forgotten.

In heaven, everything is fine.