Filmmaker and singular artist David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, just days before today, what would be his 79th birthday.
You can read obituaries and remembrances from:
Variety also has a collection of remembrances from Steven Spielberg and others about Lynch and the Hard Times has an appropriately satirical take on Lynch’s passing.
As fate would have it, the first David Lynch film I saw was his least favorite, if for no other reason that he later claimed it was nearly the death of him. That is the glorious hot mess that is the 1984 film adaptation of Dune.
Though it’s resolutely not one of my favorite movies, it’s hard to understate the impact seeing the film in the theater way back then made on me (yes, I was one of the few). I was in from the beginning of Virginia Madsen’s floating head, I was fine with the exposition, I enjoyed the multiple characters whispering their inner thoughts (a storytelling device that evidently drives people insane), and I overall adored the world-building and production design that was so not Star Wars or Trek to that point. When I finally got around to reading the novel about a decade later, I understood why fans of the series probably hated it, but it was too late. By this time, I had watched the film version, including the TV cut that added in all sorts of deleted scenes and an even longer prologue, that the 1984 Dune will always have a special place in my heart. Not a heart plug, mind you: back off, Harkonnens.
Later still, I heard and read more about the process Lynch took to try and adapt the sandworm-sized novel –and indeed the whole series– and his ambition and insight into the source material sadly did not make it on screen… and his disgust at the unfinished project that did make it on screen becomes all the more understandable.
Nonetheless, his least favorite film inspired me to check out all his films from then on.
You’d think that my theater work, which includes playwrights like Jean Genet who scoff at the very idea of normalcy, would make me a lover of all things Lynchian. Indeed, I did spend one of his birthdays, also a presidential inauguration like this year, watching a Twin Peaks marathon with a bunch of theater folk. It was wonderful on multiple levels, not only because we took a break from watching to help one of the actors rehearse doing a spit take naturally (some of my training for dad jokes years before becoming a dad). We were all veterans of avant garde theater fare of various degrees of quality, so Lynch’s insurgent actions to blow up what network TV was at that time proved to be delightful… in a surreal kind of way.
However, my favorite Lynch film is, unconventionally, one of his more conventional: 1999’s The Straight Story. Lynch reportedly said “Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity” and surely the characters in Straight Story are dealing with an insane world as much as those dealing with Dennis Hopper’s gas-huffing Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. The pain, the love, the longing. It’s all there. And it’s based on a true story.
I find many a Lynch fan leads with a love of the off-kilter for off-kilter sake. But it’s the truthfulness within the off-kilter that appeals to me, hence The Straight Story resonating with me. In fact, if you haven’t seen any Lynch, you might want to start with that or 1980’s The Elephant Man, which is arguably his best received, most accessible work. Funny that both are docudramas.
In any case, the weirdness is waiting for you if you want to go further as are his weather reports from the pandemic, which were oddly soothing.