On the Passing of David Lynch
For two and a half years, David Lynch delivered a daily weather report on his YouTube channel. In the final video, posted on December 16th, 2022, Lynch opens the routine report shaking his phone camera while delightfully proclaiming, “If you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” He wears sunglasses, yet reports that the weather in Los Angeles is cloudy and about 50 degrees. Most days, he gazes out the window in the upper-left hand corner of the video, carefully observes the sky outside, and declares another sunny day in Los Angeles.
David Lynch passed away on Thursday, January 16th, 2025. He was diagnosed with emphysema that kept him housebound for the last years of his life. In an interview with Sight and Sound in August 2024, he attributed his condition to smoking cigarettes since his early childhood in Idaho. Lynch approached his daily habit with the same earnest and congenial candor of his daily weather reports, stating “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”
Lynch’s earnestness never faltered. It is his most defining trait, both as an artist and a public figure. It rendered him uncompromising in the direction of his films and television shows. It also meant intense gratitude for the smallest joys of his personal life. Lynch surrounded himself with an ensemble of devoted collaborators, including actors Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan and composer Angelo Badalamenti. He devoted fifty years to promoting the spiritual practice of Transcendental Meditation. Much like how he approached his daily weather reports with the same conviction as his cigarette habit, Lynch’s earnesty was never conditional. The commitment to honesty in his work never hinged on good or evil. His works are defined by their sinister, perverse, and menacing plots contrasted against the sublime backdrops of American life: the every-town of Twin Peaks (1990–1991), the living rooms of suburban North Carolina in Blue Velvet (1986), and the pruned boulevards of Los Angeles in Mulholland Drive (2001). Earnestness meant depicting the sincerity of characters and the depraved evil that could be lurking behind their neighbors’ front door. No matter how experimental or absurdly deemed, David Lynch’s stories never told anything but the truth.
“It was a mixture of heaven and hell, Philadelphia.”
David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946. His father, Donald Lynch, worked for the USDA, and his mother, Edwina, was an English tutor and teacher. Donald Lynch’s job moved the family regularly, from Montana to Idaho, Washington, North Carolina, and Virginia by the time David was fourteen. Although content with family life, David took to comedically boyish rebellions: he built fireworks and pipe bombs with his friends, and took up playing bongos at a nightclub, earning himself the nickname “Bongo Dave.” Lynch was also a dedicated Boy Scout who contributed its lessons of preparedness and do-it-yourself to his artistry.
Lynch channeled his penchance for small destructions into his art. He attended, and dropped out of, the art schools at Tufts University and George Washington University before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In a 2014 interview, Lynch cited his time in Philadelphia as the biggest influence on his work: “There is something about the mood [in Philadelphia]. The fear, insanity, corruption, filth, despair, violence in the air was so beautiful to me . . . every building was black, soot-covered. And every building had a mood and it was before graffiti so it was very pure, very filthy, but it had a beautiful mood.” Lynch lived in the Fairmount neighborhood, which at the time was subject to an exodus of businesses leaving industrial warehouses and abandoned factories in their wake as crime moved into the leftover spaces. “There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world,” he said in 1987. “It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet.”
Lynch’s insistence on finding worth in a wasteland inspired his debut feature film Eraserhead (1977). Nowhere in the Eraserhead wasteland is safe from new horrors: the protagonist, Henry Spencer, lives in fear of what lurks in the darker shadows of his city, and of the severely deformed child inside his home. Lynch’s signature ghastly sound design echoes what he told the New York Times about Philadelphia in 1986: “It was like sitting next to a power station with a radio and getting nothing but static.”
There is a lot to hate about living in Philadelphia, and there is no good done in minimizing the horrors encountered daily. The corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues in the northeast corner of the city is the epicenter of the opioid crisis. Violence and blight burn through poor neighborhoods and seep into wealthier ones as fear. Eraserhead refuses to dull these horrors. Lynch’s uncompromising desire to make an earnest and honest film inspired by the grotesqueness of Philadelphia haunts Eraserhead like reality does a nightmare. His anxieties of what lies outside and inside the front door of his Fairmount home are laid barren across a black-and-white hellscape.
“I prefer accidents and mistakes”
It is easy to contrast dark against light; it is easy to juxtapose the darkness of Lynch’s films against their innocent settings. Lynch’s obsession with investigating the ugliest cracks in these perfect facades started in his childhood: “[my childhood] was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it was supposed to be,” he said in 2008. “But then on the cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions and millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and it’s all red ants.”
In Blue Velvet, made nearly a decade after Eraserhead, Kyle MacLachlan plays a college student caught behind the closed doors and dinner parties of Lumberton, North Carolina, revealing a criminal underbelly rife with drugs and sexual slavery. Blue Velvet refined the ugliness of Eraserhead, shoving it just under the surface of conversations at parties and bicycle routes of paperboys rather than fully encompassing the physical world. Thus began Lynch’s investigation of life in suburbia; however, it would be disingenuous to characterize his investigation as a critique of suburban life. Lynch does not find his evils in suburbia as a means of undermining the ideals of beauty and neighborly kindness that he puts forward. Nor does he use suburbia simply as an ironic setting for dark-and-light contradiction. Lynch refuses to ignore the sinister possibilities of closed doors, no matter how nice the shutters and front lawn look; his acknowledgement of what lingers in these cracks is honest.
And yet, evil throughout Lynch’s projects is countered by a wholehearted belief in the goodness of suburban life. Evil in suburbia is both a festering, permanent wound, yet something that can be treated through the goodness of his characters. He stated, “People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you’re in love with, but you know she’s not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.” It is a constant struggle than Lynch knew can never be won, but can be fought through the compassion and values of characters battered by the complications of life.
Lynch moved to Los Angeles to film Eraserhead at the AFI Conservatory. By the time Blue Velvet was released, he established himself as a disjointed bridge between commercially viable filmmaking and the surrealist avant garde. The premiere of Twin Peaks in 1990 on ABC solidified this status, and brought his urgent and earnest understanding of evil to the American mainstream. Criticism of Lynch’s films and Twin Peaks often took a moralist high ground, proclaiming his work “pretentious,” “violent,” and “sick,” wholly willing to assign scorn to Lynch and his films rather than consider his critique of evil. Twin Peaks utterly rebuffed these judgements. When Special Agent Dale Cooper enters the town of Twin Peaks, Washington to investigate the murder of troubled homecoming queen Laura Palmer, he is greeted by an eccentric array of deeply nuanced characters: Sarah Palmer, feverishly mourning the loss of her daughter; Bobby Briggs, a troublemaker incapable of harming those he loves; the kind yet hardened Sheriff Truman; and an ensemble of eccentrics including the clairvoyant Log Lady, and Lucy, the ditzy, loving police station secretary. All of these characters fall susceptible into the grasping hands of evil, depicted artistically through the representation of the spirit Bob and the Red Room, and literally through the corrosive means of drugs, rape, and murder. In Twin Peaks, Lynch’s belief in American life and values is fully on display. Cups of coffee and cherry pie are shared in the communal gathering of the Double R Diner. Romance buds in the police station and high school. Work and the routine of daily life continue as Cooper’s investigation deepens. The personal bonds forged on goodness in Twin Peaks keep the townspeople afloat from the murkier waters beneath them.
Most of David Lynch’s posts online are preceded by the words “Dear Friends.” Every post could be a harbinger of good news or kind fortune to his followers. His twangy voice and tufted swath of white hair charmed fans entranced by the less positive complications of his work. Later in his career, he leaned further into the most surreal elements of his work. In 2017, he rebooted a prematurely cancelled Twin Peaks in the eighteen-part series Twin Peaks: The Return. Netflix released his short film What Did Jack Do? in 2020, documenting Lynch interrogating a monkey who may have committed a murder. While both were panned for their cryptic, absurd direction, these final projects were noted as a wink and nod to fans of his style, regardless of commercial reception. Lynch refused to elaborate on his creative process for The Return, telling Deadline: “Ideas came, and this is what they presented.”
“I like L.A. because of the light.”
Lynch used fire as a cleansing power in Twin Peaks and the companion film Fire Walk With Me (1992), among other works, as an unbiased destructor of good and evil. The same cannot be said about the homes and livelihoods decimated in the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles last week. The Palisades and Eaton fires burned the same suburban homes that Lynch interrogated in Mulholland Drive to the ground, destroying whatever could have lingered inside. Lynch was forced to evacuate as the city that he so closely loved and condemned burned around him. Dateline reported that his health sharply declined following the evacuation.
David Lynch’s death is the loss of a uniquely American artist. He was eager, honest, and determined to tell the truth about America. Lynch never shied away from the ugliest, most gruesome aspects of everyday life, no matter how controversial or repugnent. He also never compromised his artistic style in light of critique or commercial favor. He held faith in the goodness of the towns and cities that shaped his obsession with evil and its effects. His urgent, wholehearted earnestness defined every film, painting, photograph, weather report, post, and action in an unregrettable life.
Lynch’s family broke the news of his death in a post, stating, “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.’” The weather in Los Angeles on Thursday was warm and sunny as the fires still burned. Unexpected snowfall dusted Philadelphia. The sun set, and the moon rose. And now—if you can believe it—it’s a Friday, once again.
Audrey Lee is the author of the forthcoming short story collection American Girlfriend (2025). Her fiction has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, SWAMP, and Wax Nine, among others. She graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with degrees in creative writing and American studies, and now lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More of her work can be found on her website. She invites you to follow her on Twitter/X.
Featured image: David Lynch in photo (2014) by Alessandro via Flickr.
