Today, on January 16, 2025, we learned the absolutely heartbreaking news that David Lynch—the visionary director and writer behind Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and more—has passed away at the age of 78. Lynch had announced months prior that he was battling emphysema.
Celebrity deaths are a bizarre phenomenon. When you step away for a moment, it can feel bizarre to mourn for someone you’ve never met. But when I saw David Lynch had passed away, I audibly gasped and became misty-eyed. Of every person in the giant showbiz mechanism we call “Hollywood,” no one had a greater impact on my life and art than David Lynch.
A remarkable person
By all accounts, Lynch was one of the good ones. Eccentric, yes, but endearingly so. A David Lynch interview is only rivaled by a Werner Herzog interview for sheer level of entertainment. Perhaps most recently, Lynch delightfully went on and on about his love for Cheetos during an interview about The Fabelmans. (“If I do get them, I want a big bag. Because once you start… you need to have a lot before you could slow down and actually stop. Otherwise, with a small bag, then you’d be prowling for days to find more. It’s incredible flavor.”)
Or the time David Lynch told The Telegraph about the time he “saved” five large Woody Woodpecker plushies from a gas station, with the utmost seriousness. “I screech on the brakes, I do a U-turn, go back and I buy them and I save their lives. I named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan and they were my boys and they were in my office. They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice.”
The reporter then writes that Lynch looked “straight ahead [and said] with a grim finality: ‘They are not in my life anymore.’ “
Lynch had an incredible humanity, and that was shown outside of his film work, too. He set up the David Lynch Foundation in 2005 to create resources to teach Transcendental Meditation to children—and then at-risk populations like prison inmates, the homeless, and refugees.
A remarkable filmmaker
While David Lynch’s work is known for being “weird,” and at times containing sequences which are brutal or otherwise challenging to watch, there is an undeniable empathy for the human condition within all of them. One clip from Twin Peaks: The Return going viral today depicts a scene where Lynch’s character, Gordon Cole, is speaking with his transgender colleague Denise Bryson. “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die,” Lynch-as-Cole says emphatically.
Lynch’s work is known for making viewers sit in uncomfortable scenes which can last uncomfortably long—a skill that, in this age of phone addiction, we might all be losing. But the experience of sitting through that uncomfortableness, even if it doesn’t come to a neat conclusion, is valuable. It’s basically the human condition, after all—and Lynch knew that and felt it in his heart. That’s why the even the darkest of his works don’t feel cynical, and why his voice was so special.
Lynch’s integrity and himself-ness was so strong, he made a brief foray into a music career and it somehow worked. The titular track of Crazy Town Time feels just as quintessentially Lynchian as any of his films, and the music video is an effective seven-minute distillation of the vibe of his more unsettling work.
David Lynch was an incredible talent with an incredible voice. He was the most unique personality in Hollywood. He will be missed intensely.
Published: Jan 16, 2025 04:05 pm