A Sense of Doubt blog post #3622 - David Lynch RIP
Weird.
Not as gutted as some I know, but this is a huge loss and far too soon.
“And the rain sets in, It's the angel-man, I'm deranged...”
We’re deeply saddened by the passing of David Lynch. Bowie himself cited Lynch’s work as an influence and who could forget seeing DB as FBI Special Agent Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DE5ksQbMYwq/?img_index=1
#RIPDavidLynch #TwinPeaks
RIP DAVID LYNCH
“And the rain sets in, It's the angel-man, I'm deranged...” *
We’re deeply saddened by the passing of David Lynch. You’ll be aware of his work through the incredible body of films he directed.
Bowie himself cited Lynch’s work as an influence and who could forget seeing DB as FBI Special Agent Phillip Jeffries, first introduced to viewers in Lynch’s 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, with further appearances by the special agent in Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces and Twin Peaks: The Return.
Here’s his family’s Facebook announcement...
+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
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.
+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +
“In heaven, everything is fine...”
* Our lyric quotation is from I’m Deranged, two different edits of which appeared on the soundtrack of Lynch’s Lost Highway.
#RIPDavidLynch #TwinPeaks
David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78
A visionary, his films included “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” He also brought his skewed view to the small screen with “Twin Peaks.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/movies/david-lynch-dead.html
David Lynch, a painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose
fame, influence and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the
movie screen to encompass television, records, books, nightclubs, a line of
organic coffee and his Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World
Peace, has died. He was 78.
His family announced the death on social media on Thursday, but
provided no details. In 2024, Mr. Lynch announced that he had developed
emphysema after years of smoking, and that as a result any subsequent films
would have to be directed remotely.
Mr. Lynch was a visionary. His florid style and unnerving
perspective emerged full-blown in his first feature, the cult film
“Eraserhead,” released at midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent
through the failed blockbuster “Dune” (1984); his small-town erotic thriller
“Blue Velvet” (1986) and its spiritual spinoff, the network TV series “Twin
Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1990 and 1991; his widely acknowledged masterpiece
“Mulholland Drive” (2001), a poisonous valentine to Hollywood; and his enigmatic
last feature, “Inland Empire” (2006), which he shot himself on video.
Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate
20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to
have synthesized, his name became an adjective.
The Lynchian “is at once easy to recognize and hard to
define,” Dennis Lim wrote in his monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another
Place.” Made by a man with a longtime devotion to the technique of
transcendental meditation, Mr. Lynch’s films were characterized by their
dreamlike imagery and punctilious sound design, as well as by Manichaean
narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved
evil.
Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed,
with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs and eroticized
derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic
surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than
programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to
liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a
shield to ward off the irrational.
Performative normality was evident in Mr. Lynch’s personal
presentation. His trademark sartorial style was a dress shirt worn without a
tie and buttoned at the top. For years, he regularly dined at and effusively
praised the Los Angeles fast-food restaurant Bob’s Big Boy. Distrustful of
language, viewing it as a limitation or even a hindrance to his art, he often
spoke in platitudes. Like those of Andy Warhol, Mr. Lynch’s interviews, at once
laconic and gee-whiz, were blandly withholding.
Mr. Lynch at his studio in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles in 2002. In 2024, he announced that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking.Monica Almeida/The New York Times
This baffling affect led Mel Brooks or his associate, Stuart
Cornfeld, both of whom facilitated Mr. Lynch’s first Hollywood feature, “The
Elephant Man” (1981), to label him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Perhaps in
response, Mr. Lynch chose to identify himself as “Eagle Scout, Missoula,
Montana.”
Defining His Style
The first child of Donald Lynch, a research scientist for
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and Edwina (Sundholm)
Lynch, David Keith Lynch was born on Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula but lived there
for only a short time. The family soon moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to
Spokane, Wash.
The deep timberlands of the Northwest left a profound
impression on Mr. Lynch, providing the settings for “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks”
and its 1992 movie prequel, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.”
Donald Lynch was transferred east; his family relocated
first to Durham, N.C., and then Alexandria, Va., where David attended high
school and became interested in painting. After graduation, he attended the
Corcoran School of Art in Washington and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston before entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966.
Philadelphia, then in a state of urban decay, was a
revelation. The city had “a great mood — factories, smoke, railroads, diners,
the strangest characters and the darkest night,” Mr. Lynch said in a 1997
interview. “I saw vivid images — plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids,
rags stuffed in broken windows.”
Mr. Lynch, whose morbid, faux-childlike canvases were made
under the spell of Francis Bacon, began incorporating film loops in his
paintings. Although he dropped out of art school in 1967, he remained in
Philadelphia for another three years, painting and making short films.
In 1970, he received an American Film Institute fellowship
and relocated to work on the feature project that would eventually become
“Eraserhead.” An unclassifiable movie that Mr. Lynch would always associate
with Philadelphia, “Eraserhead” concerned a depressed young woman and a
bewildered young man with a freakish coiffure cohabiting a hellish industrial
urban nowhere, their conjugal life rendered unbearable by the mewling of their
hideous mutant offspring (which resembled, but was never identified as, an
animated skinned rabbit).
Voluptuously drab, hallucinatory yet visceral, the movie was
confounding. Despite its nauseating special effects, “Eraserhead” seemed too
arty for the grindhouses of 42nd Street.
Supported by a word-of-mouth audience, “Eraserhead” played
the Cinema Village through the summer of 1978, then opened again at midnight a
few blocks away and a year later at the Waverly (the venue that incubated the
“Rocky Horror Picture Show” cult) where, adopted by a downtown audience, it
played for two years.
By then, Mr. Lynch had been discovered by Hollywood. Mel
Brooks engaged him to direct “The Elephant Man,” a movie based on the life of
Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who became a celebrity in late
19th-century London, for his company Brooksfilms. Although staid when compared
with “Eraserhead,” the film contained several passages — notably the waltz of
terror when Merrick is trapped and unmasked in a railway station urinal — that
gave Mr. Lynch free rein to display his gifts.
A commercial as well as a critical success, garnering eight
Oscar nominations, “The Elephant Man” resulted in a more elaborate commission.
Mr. Lynch was hired by the producer Dino De Laurentiis to adapt Frank Herbert’s
cult science fiction novel “Dune” after several earlier attempts fell through.
“Dune” was an influence on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but
if Mr. De Laurentiis expected another “Star Wars,” he was disappointed. With
its primordial, impressively nasty special effects, “Dune” (1984) was not a
Saturday afternoon kiddie show. Neither was it an art film.
“There are no traces of Mr. Lynch’s ‘Elephant Man,’” Janet
Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, “But the ghoulishness of his
‘Eraserhead’ shows up in the ooze and gore distinguishing many of the story’s
heavies.”
Although “Dune” was a commercial failure, Mr. De Laurentiis
bankrolled Mr. Lynch’s next film, “Blue Velvet.” Appearing midway through
President Ronald Reagan’s second term, “Blue Velvet” turned Reagan’s “Morning
in America” campaign inside out. A spellbinding blend of raw pathology and
Kabuki sweetness, the film, Mr. Lynch’s first personal project since
“Eraserhead,” ruthlessly exposed the depravity behind a picture-postcard facade
of malt shoppes, football fields and rec-room basements.
The heart of the film, which starred Isabella Rossellini,
Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and Mr. Lynch’s sometime alter ego Kyle MacLachlan,
is a 20-minute sex scene replete with voyeurism, rape, sadomasochism, implied
castration, all manner of verbal and physical abuse, elaborate fetishism, and a
ritualized kinkiness for which there is no name.
That same year, Mr. Lynch scored an even greater triumph
when he conquered network TV with “Twin Peaks,” a haunting, often bewildering
inquiry into the death of a high school homecoming queen. Even more than “Blue
Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” (made in collaboration with Mark Frost) seethed with
bizarre and, as in any Lynch film, bizarrely ordinary characters, including a
straight-arrow investigating F.B.I. agent (Mr. MacLachlan).
A near-instant sensation, “Twin Peaks” earned five Emmy
Award nominations for its first season. Its mystery was dispelled when the
killer’s identity was revealed a third of the way into the second season.
Nevertheless, the show staggered on, hemorrhaging viewers over its next 13
episodes.
After “Fire Walk With Me,” Mr. Lynch came perilously close
to self-parody with “Lost Highway” (1997), an earnestly trippy, tenderly
adolescent, strenuously sinister evocation of rockabilly badness written with
Barry Gifford, a film noir aficionado whose novel formed the basis for “Wild at
Heart.” Mr. Lynch then reversed course with a premise so shamelessly feel-good
it might have even embarrassed Steven Spielberg. “The Straight Story” (1999)
dramatized the true story of Alvin Straight (played by Richard Farnsworth), a
73-year-old Wisconsin man who piloted a John Deere lawn mower 240 miles (at
five miles per hour) to visit an estranged brother.
Crafting a Masterpiece
Two years later, Mr. Lynch returned to form with the erotic
thriller “Mulholland Drive.” Named the best film of 2001 by the New York Film
Critics Circle, “Mulholland Drive” was even praised by Lynch’s longtime
critical detractor, Roger Ebert. Widely regarded as Mr. Lynch’s masterpiece, it
finished eighth on the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all
time.
The idea of the movie industry as an occult conspiracy is
even more apparent in “Inland Empire” (2006), a movie that Manohla Dargis,
reviewing it for The New York Times, characterized as the earlier film’s “evil
twin.”
Indeed, willfully abstruse, “Inland Empire” all but refuses
to be a movie. Having compared the film medium to “a dinosaur in a tar pit,”
Mr. Lynch shot “Inland Empire” piecemeal on an amateur grade DV camcorder,
incorporated material from a web sitcom featuring rabbit puppets and a
70-minute interview with his star, Ms. Dern. Mr. Lynch’s most experimental film
since “Eraserhead,” “Inland Empire” meditated on the power of recording. A
blandly inscrutable movie as well as a homage to Ms. Dern, who is onscreen
throughout, “Inland Empire” has no logic apart from its movie-ness.
In 2014, Mr. Lynch’s alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, presented a full retrospective of his paintings, drawings, prints
and assemblages called “The Unified Field.” While allowing that Mr. Lynch’s
films were more realized than his graphic art, the critic Ken Josephson wrote
in The Times that “Lynch completists” would find the exhibition “a fascinating,
must-see show” noteworthy for revealing the influence of Francis Bacon.
Mr. Lynch was married four times, to Peggy (Lentz) Reavy,
Mary Fisk, Mary Sweeney and Emily Stofle, and had a child with each. In between
his marriages to Ms. Fisk and Ms. Sweeney, he had a lengthy relationship with
Ms. Rossellini. His daughter Jennifer Lynch is also a filmmaker.
A generational colleague of the so-called movie brats —
George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg — Mr. Lynch belonged to no
counterculture save his own. Hardly an ex-hippie, he was twice a guest at the
Reagan White House, although there is no evidence that the president, who
famously kept up with current Hollywood movies, screened “Blue Velvet” at Camp
David.
Even more than Mr. Lucas, whose first hit was “American
Graffiti,” Mr. Lynch had an abiding interest in the youth culture of his
adolescence, repeatedly playing on the gender stereotypes and using popular
music of the early 1960s. Rather than nostalgic, however, his approach was
radically defamiliarizing.
Mr. Lynch had his own sense of Hollywood. Where Mr. Lucas
remembered his first movie as the animated Disney feature “Cinderella” and Mr.
Spielberg declared that his was Cecil B. DeMille’s circus spectacular, “The
Greatest Show on Earth,” Mr. Lynch’s seminal movie was “Wait ’Til the Sun
Shines, Nellie,” a turgid 1952 melodrama described in The New York Times as “a
mawkishly sentimental tribute to the old-fashioned barbershop and to the
dubious felicities of living in an American small town.” The Big City was cast
as a fount of sin.
As Mr. Lynch never truly embraced Hollywood, so Hollywood
never truly embraced him. His films were regularly celebrated by critics’
groups and lionized in France, where, 11 years after his Palme d’Or for “Wild
at Heart,” he was named best director for “Mulholland Drive.” But although he
was nominated several times for an Oscar, he never received one.
After “The Elephant Man,” Mr. Lynch was asked by Mr. Lucas
to direct “Return of the Jedi.” Had he accepted the invitation, the “Star Wars”
saga might have ended there and then in a miasma of weirdness.
Mr. Lynch never made a conventional, crowd-pleasing
Hollywood movie. But in 2022, he agreed to a cameo in one: Mr. Spielberg’s
autobiographical feature “The Fabelmans,” where the enigmatic if not eldritch
Mr. Lynch was cast as John Ford, the maker of westerns and the grand old
curmudgeon of American cinema. It was a sentimental gesture that one can only
call Lynchian.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
A correction was made on
Jan. 17, 2025
:
An earlier version of this obituary misstated when the
television series “Twin Peaks,” created by Mr. Lynch and Mark Frost, was seen
on ABC. It was 1990 and 1991, not 1991 and 1992.
David Lynch, Twin Peaks co-creator and Mulholland Drive director, dies at 78
Lynch's distinct voice across projects like "Blue Velvet," "Eraserhead," and "Lost Highway" made him one of the defining American filmmakers of the 20th century.
David Lynch, the acclaimed filmmaker who blended dreamlike surrealism with mystery and melodrama in films like Mulholland Drive and television projects like Twin Peaks, has died at 78.
"It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch," the filmmaker's family shared on Facebook Thursday. "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."
A cause of death was not immediately available.
In August, Lynch announced that he had been diagnosed with emphysema in 2020 "from smoking for so long, and so I'm homebound whether I like it or not." However, he refused to let the diagnosis get in the way of his artistry, announcing, "I will never retire."
Lynch is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the monumental mystery series Twin Peaks alongside Mark Frost. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Director for The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, and won an Academy Honorary Award in 2019. His film Wild at Heart earned the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
Lynch’s unmistakable directorial voice gave a great sense of continuity across his body of work; his unique and constant fascination with dreamlike rhythms, character doppelgangers, ambient soundscapes, and the dark side of American culture has led critics and cinephiles to describe works with similar qualities as "Lynchian."
Born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, Lynch first studied as a painter at three different art schools on the East Coast. After experimenting with short filmmaking in Philadelphia, Lynch moved to Los Angeles with his first wife, Peggy, and eldest daughter, Jennifer, in the early 1970s so he could study at the American Film Institute Conservatory. He spent much of the 1970s working on his debut feature, Eraserhead, which released in 1977 and subsequently gained a cult following as a midnight movie.
Lynch received praise for his next feature film, the stylish black-and-white biography The Elephant Man. The film starred John Hurt as Joseph (John) Merrick, an English man with severe physical deformities who was largely shunned by society, and Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves, a doctor who befriended Merrick. The film earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
His next project was an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune in 1984. Though the film was a critical and financial failure, it also gained a cult following and marked Lynch’s first project with longtime collaborator Kyle MacLachlan.
Lynch and MacLachlan reteamed for 1986’s Blue Velvet, a graphic and occasionally surreal neo-noir that spawned controversy and critical acclaim. The film also starred Laura Dern, Dennis Hopper, and Isabella Rossellini.
1990 was a seminal year in Lynch’s career: his film Wild at Heart, starring Nicolas Cage and Dern, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his beloved television series Twin Peaks premiered on ABC. Lynch directed the pilot of the series, as well as an additional episode in the first season and four more episodes in the second, including the finale.
The series starred MacLachlan as Dale Cooper, an FBI agent who investigates the murder of high schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in a mysterious Washington town. Twin Peaks explored the dark side of Americana using elements of detective stories, soap operas, and horror, and Lynch himself appeared as the recurring character Gordon Cole. Though the series was canceled after its second season, Lynch explored its characters and mythos further with the 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me, as well as a Showtime revival in 2017.
Lynch made two more attempts at television with the sitcom On the Air and the HBO anthology Hotel Room before returning to feature filmmaking in 1997 with Lost Highway, an opaque noir thriller starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette that further solidified his unique directorial voice. His most uncharacteristic project, Disney’s G-rated The Straight Story, came two years later. The film followed the true story of an elderly Iowa man (Richard Farnsworth) who rode a lawnmower 300 miles to reunite with his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton).
The filmmaker returned to Cannes in 2001 with Mulholland Drive, a multilayered, surreal drama about Hollywood that many consider Lynch’s magnum opus. The film stars Naomi Watts as an aspiring actress and Laura Harring as an amnesiac who are both swept into a labyrinth of artifice, violence, mystery, and betrayal. The film earned Lynch his third nomination for Best Director at the Oscars, and he won the prize for Best Director at Cannes, alongside Joel Coen (who won for The Man Who Wasn’t There).
Lynch released his final feature film, Inland Empire, in 2006. The film, which stars Dern, Justin Theroux, and Jeremy Irons, is another meditation on Hollywood, blurring the lines between layers of fiction and dizzyingly captured with a digital camcorder.
It was over a decade until the filmmaker released his swansong, the 18-episode Showtime revival of Twin Peaks titled The Return, in 2017. Lynch directed every episode of the series, which reunited most of the original cast and brought other past collaborators like Dern and Watts into the fold. Lynch also reprised his role as Gordon Cole for the series. The Return was heralded as one of the best shows of the year, and certain journals like Cahiers du cinéma and Sight & Sound considered it among the best films of 2017 despite its length.
Lynch also made occasional acting appearances in other projects, including Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and 20 episodes of The Cleveland Show.
In his final interview with EW in 2022, Lynch discussed remastering Inland Empire and explained how the process made him hopeful for the future of filmmaking. “All the picture had a new life, and it was a great new life,” Lynch told EW. “It was a kind of a miracle to go from Sony BD150 quality to where it is now. It means that the future is gonna be fantastic for films, for cinema. It's amazing what is going on. The picture got way better. It got more focus and a deeper look. From what I first had to now: big, big, big beautiful change.”
A longtime advocate for Transcendental Meditation, the filmmaker oversaw the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace, which provided scholarships for young people seeking to learn about the practice. He also continued painting throughout his filmmaking career, produced multiple musical projects, and directed dozens of short films, music videos, and commercials.
Lynch is survived by his wife, Emily Stofle, and four children, including Jennifer Lynch, who directed films like Boxing Helena and Surveillance, as well as episodes of shows like The Walking Dead and American Horror Story.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2501.17 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3486 days ago & DAD = 142 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment