The David Lynch Story: How the Inimitable "Twin Peaks" Director Embraced the Weird

He has been twisting reality for almost 40 years on the small and big screens.

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David Lynch, Photo: Getty Images
David Lynch, Photo: Getty Images
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

David Lynch once said that he was inspired to become a director when he heard a gust of wind while filming and saw the image moving on the screen.

This moment defined his obsession with "watching the painting move," but also his gift for the bizarre.

He has been twisting reality for almost 40 years on the small and big screens.

The famous 78-year-old American director, who died a few months after revealing his diagnosis of emphysema, became a contemporary face of the twisted, disturbing worlds that often hide in everyday society.

From the series Twin Peaks to films such as Blue velvet, Mulholland Drive i Inland Empire.

A self-proclaimed dreamer, Lynch rose to fame Eraserhead from 1977 - a disorienting horror, a commentary on male paranoia, set a multi-layered pattern that would run through his entire oeuvre.

Four decades later, he saw his style immortalized with an adjective in the Oxford Dictionary.

"Lynch-esque," as the term goes, combines "elements of the surreal and sinister with the banal."

A recognition that is perfectly fitting for the four-time Oscar-nominated director and recipient of this lifetime achievement award, whose personality was as larger than life as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on January 20, 1946.

The son of a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, 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 the magazine Rolling Stone In 1990, he said his mother "saved" him by encouraging him to draw on scraps of paper instead of using coloring books, in which "the whole idea is to stay within the contours."

This ethos also inspired his films, marked by a rebellious spirit that, he joked, lasted from the age of 14 to 30.

"People are rebellious for much longer today," he explained, "because we're designed to live longer."

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His youthful dissatisfaction with the tranquility of suburban life led him to suddenly yearn for "something unusual to happen," to question the artificiality of the family ideals of the fifties - a dark dream brought to life in his films and series.

Lynch's black-and-white debut feature film Erasing head he achieved that vision much more successfully than he had in an entire year at art school.

The film's key character descends into madness after becoming the father of a terrifying baby.

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Critics were confused, but the film's success on the midnight cinema scene led to Lynch's breakthrough, when an audience member suggested it to producer Mel Brooks.

Brooks entrusted Lynch with directing. The elephant man, where he was a co-writer of the film.

It starred future film icons - John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins - and the story of stigma became a huge hit, surpassing the original stage play.

Lynch was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay, among eight nominations, including Best Picture.

But if Hollywood thought it had found a new master of blockbusters, Factory snova quickly discovered that Lynch wasn't interested in playing it.

That was clear when his adaptation of the science fiction epic appeared in 1984. Dina.

Regarding the film with questionable special effects, costumes and rock star Sting smeared with baby oil, a critic Guardian Charles Bramesco wrote that Lynch's experiments left the franchise "radioactive for decades".

"I'm proud of everything except Dina," Lynch would later say in a YouTube interview, while elsewhere he admitted that she almost "ruined" his career.

Coffee, cherry pie and... Twin Peaks

The wounds, however, began to heal as he returned to his recognizable style, focusing on his fascination with the sordid underbelly of American life.

Blue velvet, with Kyle McLachlin from Dine, followed a young man from a small town who becomes embroiled in the underworld after he finds a severed ear.

Brutal and violent in parts, this film divided critics, but earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination.

"That's what America looks like to me," Lynch would later explain about the film in his book Lynch about Lynch.

"Life has a very innocent, naive dimension, but horror and disease are also present."

He won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the romantic film Wild at heart from 1990, starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe.

But Lynch's belief that American beauty and horror are two sides of the same coin, perfected in the television project Twin Peaks, which premiered that same year, was the work that would best define him.

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On paper, the disturbing drama explored suspicious events in an American lumber town following the murder of teenager Laura Palmer.

But viewers were truly captivated by what was offered to them on screen.

A dreamlike nightmare of characters like FBI agent Dale Cooper, again played by Kyle McLachlin, in the apparent harmony of pastoral America - with all the cherry pies and coffee - before peeking into the lives of the residents and their homes, where sexual abuse and murder lurked beneath the surface.

Nothing like this has ever been broadcast on American television before.

This ABC series won three Golden Globes in 1991, including Best Television Drama Series and Best Actor in a Television Series for McLachlin.

"Without Twin Peaks, and its expansion of television potential that resonated like a big bang, half of your favorite shows wouldn't exist," James Parker wrote for Atlantik.

The series, he added, "practically redefined television's contract with the audience."

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The fact that the series faltered in the second season, after the killer's identity was revealed, didn't change much.

Television was no longer a safe place, it was alive.

Ideas from the big screen and rich productions somehow managed to reach viewers' living rooms, even in an era when the big screen was still the sovereign ruler.

Viewers were taken back to Twin Peaks in 1992 in a feature-length prequel, Fire walks with me., but nothing could compare to the original series.

When the nation wondered "who killed Laura Palmer," the point was not just to solve the mystery, but to find refuge from the corrupt reality that society would rather ignore.

Lynch found his own darkness.

He would eventually return to the big screen to attack Hollywood's diabolical work of fame, glamour, deception and loss of identity, in films unofficially known as Los Angeles trilogy.

It all started with a movie. Lost Highway from 1997, and continued Boulevard of Stars from 2001, which was perhaps the closest to Twin Peaks in terms of aesthetics.

This psychological drama received good reviews, earning Lynch his third Academy Award nomination for Best Director and winning the Best Director award at Cannes.

In recent years, the film has also been praised for its queer themes, especially between the characters of Naomi Watts and Laura Herring, which questioned traditional Hollywood narratives of the time.

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It finally arrived. Inner realm from 2006, Lynch's last feature film, which proved to be as bizarre as ever, not sparing Hollywood star culture.

As Mike Manser told the BBC: “Lynch draws us into the story by promising us familiar, traditional genre thrills and mysteries as a safety net, and then the weirdness slowly starts to creep in.

"In the end, the mystery box is left wide open, revealing the darker, more sinister story that Lynch has been telling us all along."

Cult icon

In recent years, Lynch has had a cult status.

Twin Peaks: The Return, a new series set 25 years after the events of the original series, was directed in 2017 with much of the same cast.

At the same time, the series' legacy continues to live on, inspiring series such as True detective and the acclaimed horror video game from 2023. Alan Wake II.

Away from the cameras, Lynch admitted that he sometimes had trouble juggling the "troublesome business" of fatherhood with his own career.

He had four children - Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lulu - with ex-wives Peggy Reavy, Mary Fisk and Mary Sweeney, as well as with Emily Stoffel.

"I love all my children and we get along great, but in the early years, before you could develop a relationship with them through conversation, it was difficult," he told Waltz.

"Work comes first for me and I know I caused them suffering because of it. But at the same time, my love for those children is immense."

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Although Lynch never returned to directing feature films, in 2019 he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

He also had a cameo role in Steven Spielberg's 2022 semi-autobiographical film, Fejblman, playing director John Ford.

His artistic interests branched out more and more in the later stages of his life, from his initial passion for painting to music.

Just last year, he announced Cellophane Memories, album in Kristabel.

This followed on from his earlier work in making music videos for musicians such as Moby and Nine Inch Nails.

Speaking about his diagnosis of emphysema, he said he was in "great shape" and would "never retire."

He added that the diagnosis was "the price he had to pay" for his smoking habit, although he never regretted the enjoyment it gave him.

But his condition worsened within a few months.

In a November interview with Pipl, he said he needed oxygen to walk.

Yet his ideas live on, as unique as the way he described coming to them.

In a 2014 interview with musician Patti Smith for the BBC, he said that “ideas come to him in fragments.

"It's like a puzzle in another room - where all the pieces are together."

"But in my room, they're throwing those pieces at me one by one."

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