David Lynch, the surrealist artist who plumbed the darkness lurking underneath American normalcy in the landmark television series “Twin Peaks” and the dreamlike films “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” has died.
He was 78.
Lynch’s family confirmed his death in a post on his official Facebook page. They did not specify a cause of death.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the post said. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time.”
“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us,” Lynch’s family added. “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 a career spanning nearly half a century, Lynch established himself as one of the most stylistically distinctive and thematically daring voices in American entertainment, introducing audiences to images and ideas typically associated with avant-garde art.
He was revered by cinephiles across generations, producing work that was feverishly analyzed and debated. He fearlessly broke narrative conventions in hallucinatory experimental films like “Lost Highway and “Inland Empire.”
Lynch’s key preoccupation was the strangeness and insanity underneath the surface of America’s white-picket-fence ideal, though he also dabbled in science fiction (1984’s “Dune”) and made one G-rated road movie (1999’s “The Straight Story”).
“Twin Peaks” (1990-91) was a revolutionary series and an uncanny blend of genres: serialized murder mystery, metaphysical horror story and prime-time soap opera. It was unlike anything on television before or since.
“Blue Velvet” (1986), a noir that plays out like a night terror, cemented Lynch as one of the essential American filmmakers of his era, becoming a timeless classic despite — or perhaps because of — its dark exploration of corruption and abuse.
“Mulholland Drive” (2001), originally conceived as a television series, attracted a cult following and quickly became one of the first midnight movies of the 21st century. When the British magazine Sight and Sound asked critics to name the greatest films of all time in 2022, “Mulholland Drive” came in eighth.
In recent years, Lynch was less of a visible presence on screens. “Inland Empire,” his final feature film, debuted in theaters nearly 20 years ago. He returned to the world of “Twin Peaks” in 2017 with an 18-part limited series on Showtime that cast a spell over admirers and new fans alike.
David Keith Lynch was born on Jan. 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. In his early years, he dreamed of becoming a painter and, following high school, he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
He later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he created his first film: a 60-second animation titled “Six Men Getting Sick.”
In the early 1970s, when Hollywood was starting to embrace the energy and chaos of the counterculture, Lynch enrolled at what is now known as the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles.
It’s there that Lynch started working on his first feature-length project: “Eraserhead,” a black-and-white odyssey about an unsettled man (played by Jack Nance) who is forced to take care of a deformed child in an alienating industrial cityscape.
“Eraserhead” landed in theaters in March 1977 and divided audiences: some viewers and critics found it repulsive, while others were entranced. The film is now regarded as a seminal independent film.
Lynch’s next project was made for a major studio, Paramount Pictures, but was no less unusual. “The Elephant Man” was loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a physically deformed British artist who was exhibited at London “freak shows” under the stage name that gives Lynch’s movie its title.
“The Elephant Man” was a critical favorite and a modest commercial success, providing an early example of Lynch’s preternatural talent for making an iconoclastic art-house sensibility intriguing to mainstream American audiences.
This is a breaking news story. Please refresh for updates.
This post was originally published on here
