Strange hugged the director of Twin Peaks

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

The moment defined his obsession with “seeing paintings in motion” but also his passion for jewelry, twisting reality on the small and big screen for almost 40 years.

The 78-year-old American director, who has died a month after announcing his emphysema diagnosis, became the contemporary face of the strange and disturbing worlds often hidden in everyday society – from the TV series Twin Peaks to films such as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. .

A dreamer himself, Lynch burst onto the midnight movie circuit with 1977’s Eraserhead. Disorienting terror, a commentary on male paranoia, set the layered template throughout his work.

Four decades later, he lived to see his style immortalized as an adjective in the Oxford dictionary. Lynchian, it readsIt blurs the “surrealistic or sinister elements with the mundane” – a praise bestowed upon the four-time Oscar nominee a lifetime achievement recipient whose character was as great as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. The son of a Department of Agriculture researcher, he spent much of his early life moving from state to state 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 instead of using coloring books, where “the whole idea is to stay between the lines.”

This ethos inspired his films, teasing him with a rebellious streak that lasted from the age of 14 to the age of 30.

Youthful frustration with the complacency of suburban life left him yearning for “something out of the ordinary to happen” to question the shallowness of 1950s family ideals – a dark dream brought to life by his films and shows.

Lynch’s black-and-white Eraserhead achieved this vision more successfully than his years in art school, with its main character descending into madness after fathering a terrifying child.

The critics were mixed, but the success of the overnight cinema led to a breakthrough when an audience member recommended it to Mel Brooks, who asked him to direct Elephant Man.

Co-written by Lynch, the film’s iconic cast, including John Hurt Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, turned the story of stigma into an emotional and critical success, surpassing the original play.

Lynch received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay, among his eight Best Picture nominations.

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

Questionable special effects, costumes and rock star Sting covered in baby oil, The Guardian’s Charles Bramesco He wrote that Lynch’s experiments left the franchise “radioactive for decades”. “I’m proud of everything except Dune,” Lynch would later say in a YouTube Q&A, while admitting that elsewhere he had almost “killed” his career.

The wounds began to heal, however, when he returned to doubling down on his signature style, putting his fascination with America’s dirty underbelly on display.

Blue Velvet, starring Dune’s Kyle MacLachlan, followed a small-town boy trapped underground after discovering a severed ear. Somewhat brutal and violent, it divided critics but won Lynch his second Academy Award for Best Director.

“This is America for me,” Lynch would describe the film in his book Lynch on Lynch. “There’s a very innocent and naive quality of life, and there’s also terror and illness.”

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, which he perfected in the television project Twin Peaks, released the same year, that came to define him.

In the paper, the disturbing drama explored the dark aftermath of the murder of teenage beauty queen Laura Palmer, played by Sheryl Lee, in the US lumber town.

But audiences were truly enthralled by what he offered on screen: a nightmare of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, again played by Kyle MacLachlan, in the apparent comfort of picket-fenced America – including cherry pie and coffee – before arriving without interruption. into living rooms, with a chilling undercurrent of sexual abuse and murder. It was something that had never been seen before on US television.

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

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

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

It mattered little after the second season revealed the killer. TV was no longer safe, it was alive in the guts – big screen ideas and production values ​​somehow finding their way into living rooms at a time when the silver screen ruled.

In 1992, audiences were brought back to Twin Peaks with a feature-length prequel, Fire Walk With Me, but nothing matched the original run.

The nation’s “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” when he asked, it wasn’t just about solving the mystery, but about finding refuge from the corrupt realities society would rather ignore. Lynch found his darkness.

He would eventually shift his focus to the big screen to attack Hollywood’s demonic machinations of fame, glamour, deceit and loss of identity in films unofficially known as his Los Angeles trilogy.

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

The psychological drama received rave reviews, earning Lynch his third Best Director Oscar nomination and a Best Director gong at Cannes. In recent years, it has also become known for its queer themes, notably Naomi Watt and Laura Harring’s characters, which challenged the traditional Hollywood narrative of the time.

The last was 2006’s Inland Empire, Lynch’s last feature film, which was as moving as ever, mercilessly exposing Hollywood star culture.

As Mike Muncer told BBC Arts’ Inside Cinema: “Lynch lures us in with the promise of traditional genre thrills and familiar mysteries as a safety net, before the weirdness starts to creep in.

“Finally, the mystery box opens, revealing the darker, more sinister story Lynch has been telling us all along.”

In his later years 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 show, with the same great cast.

At the same time, the show’s legacy lives on, inspiring dramas like True Detective and the 2023 Playstation survival horror game Alan Wake II.

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

He fathered four children – Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lula – with ex-wives Peggy Reavey, Mary Fisk and Mary Sweeney and wife Emily Stofle.

“I love all my children and we get along very well, but in the first years, before we have a relationship to talk to them, it’s hard.” he said to Sai. “The main thing is work, and I know that I have caused suffering because of it. But at the same time, I have a lot of love for children.”

Lynch never returned to feature directing to give the elusive Oscar another shot, in 2019 the Academy awarded him an honorary achievement statue. He also made a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 semi-autobiographical film The Fablemans. , playing filmmaker John Ford.

His artistic activities became increasingly diversified towards the end of his life, from his original passion for painting to music. Last year, he released Cellophane Memories, an album with Chrystabelle. This added to his previous work producing music videos for artists such as Moby and Nine Inch Nails.

When he was diagnosed with emphysema last summer, he said he was in “great shape” and would “never retire.”

He added that the diagnosis is the “price to be paid” for the habit of smoking, although he does not regret the pleasure it gave him.

But his condition worsened after a month. In a November interview with People magazine, Lynch said she needed oxygen to walk.

Yet his ideas live on, as unique as the unique way he described thinking about them.

Speaking to musician Patti Smith for BBC Newsnight in 2014, she said: “I get ideas in bits and pieces. It’s like there’s a puzzle in the other room, all the pieces are together.

“But in my room, they flip me one piece at a time.”