The film director and auteur David Lynch passed away today at age 78, after retiring in 2024 due to health problems from being diagnosed with emphysema. His style of directing with surreal, dreamlike images became so iconic that any other filmmaker who was inspired by him was called "Lynchian." His body of work was expansive, in film, art, photography, and music. There will be many tributes to him, and he helped launch the careers of actors like Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Lara Flynn Boyle, Heather Graham, Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick, Sheryl Lee, Justin Theorux, and many others.
I had heard of Twin Peaks as a child, but was too young to watch it at the time. I had seen it for the first time in my freshman year of college in 2002-2003, when I paired up with a classmate for a school project to pick a piece of pop culture media and how it greatly influenced culture and society. He was a big fan of Twin Peaks, so I watched the show on DVD and liked it, though I didn't absorb everything in my viewing back then. I did like the Angelo Badalamenti score, the way the show had a moody, slow pace, an odd sense of humor, mixing soap opera drama with dreamlike images, and how the teenagers seemed to dress both like 1950s teenagers and 1990s teenagers at the same time. I especially liked the character of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), just found her captivating. In the project, we discussed how the show, though only on for two seasons, greatly influenced television and the mainstream audience being more open to seeing more out-there, unusual television shows, opening the door for shows like The X-Files, American Gothic, and Millennium, as well as prestige TV like The Sopranos (which occasionally went into surreal imagery), Six Feet Under, and, past the year of our project, shows with mystery like Lost.
I haven't seen the show since then, nor have I seen Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, but on Criterion, I did watch the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and thought it was sad and tragic and horrifying. It can be haunting and beautiful in some parts, but the whole tragedy of Laura Palmer being abused and used and murdered is very visceral and terrifying, and seemed to be overlooked when talking about horror films.
When I was 12, I watched Tank Girl on video, the 1995 comic book action hero film starring Lori Petty as a post-apocalyptic punk heroine in the desert, and while the movie was a major flop, I found it a lot of fun. One of the standouts in the movie was Jet Girl, a mechanic played by a then-unknown Naomi Watts. With dyed brown hair and glasses, she is made to look meeker next to Lori Petty's Rebecca/Tank Girl, but I quickly found her stunning and charismatic to watch onscreen. For several years after that, I never heard of her again, so I just assumed she wouldn't become a star, until I went to see Lynch's Mulholland Drive in theaters in 2001, and was mesmerized by his masterpiece of a film, assembled from an unsold TV pilot with more scenes added in. I had long forgotten about Watts by then, so it was a revelation when, midway through the film, I recognized Watts from Tank Girl, despite her now having blonde hair and no glasses. Watts was excellent in this star-making role, so great that, when her character shifts as one person to another, I had thought another actress had taken over. Watts would blow up as a A-List actress after this film, and continues to be a celebrated actor to this day.
I loved the sharp division of fantasy and reality in the film, the theme of characters with double identities, and how beautiful and painful the film felt. Afterwards, I had looked up an analysis of the film on Salon.com to understand it more, as Lynch has famously not explained the mysteries of his films, preferring to let his audiences come to their own interpretations.
One last memory is of watching The Elephant Man on TV with my brother many years ago. I didn't know that Lynch had directed the 1980 film, or that Mel Brooks had produced it. We had just watched it by chance, and I thought it was so gorgeous with its black and white cinematography and late 19th century setting, but that it was one of the saddest films I had ever seen, that the film just gutted me. I was touched by how Anne Bancroft's actress character showed such grace toward John Merrick (portrayed by John Hurt, and named Joseph Merrick in real life), giving him the dignity that he deserved as a man with a facial abnormality, for lack of a better term. Their scenes were incredibly touching, and the finale made me want to cry inside. Though David Lynch was known for "weird" films, he was also known for portraying humanity with a lot of nuance and understanding, especially for the more misunderstood characters, be they John Merrick, Laura Palmer, or Betty.
I had also enjoyed watching films like 1997's Lost Highway (especially for the soundtrack featuring Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, and Smashing Pumpkins) and 1990's Wild at Heart, and while I had seen Inland Empire (2006) in theaters and couldn't understand it well, I at least respected that Lynch and Laura Dern really went for a three-hour long movie that can be interpreted in its own way. David Lynch will be remembered as one of the most influential film auteurs in recent history, and his passing is truly a loss to the arts and culture.