David Lynch: discovering beauty in so-called dark things

David Lynch, the iconic director and multifaceted artist, passed away a few days before his 79th birthday. He is known for the series "Twin Peaks" and the films "The Elephant Man", "Blue Velvet" and "Boulevard of Stars".

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David Lynch at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Photo: REUTERS
David Lynch at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Photo: REUTERS
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

David Lynch was a film director, actor, composer, painter, sculptor, cartoonist, and writer. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he was awarded numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2006 and an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 2019.

He was an artist with a unique, recognizable expression: his films and other works, often reminiscent of nightmares, depict the macabre and evoke chills. In an interview, he said: "Beauty is present even in so-called dark things."

A heavy smoker and a weirdo: For seven years, he drank the same chocolate milkshake—every day at the same time from the same spot in Los Angeles—because he believed it helped his creativity. For years, he posted videos of daily weather reports from Southern California. In the 2017 short film What Did Jack Do?, he played a detective interrogating a monkey.

He was also an unusual presence, almost as captivating and reserved as his films. He radiated a special peace that he attributed to transcendental meditation.

Childhood: A perfect world, ants on a cherry tree and a dark forest

David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. His father was a scientist working for the Department of Agriculture, and his mother was an English teacher. The well-off family of five children moved frequently, their parents were “loving” and “just,” and they had a happy childhood in the 1950s in the United States.

"My childhood was elegant houses, tree-lined streets, building forts in the yard, the sound of airplanes, blue skies, white picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. But the cherry tree was covered in resin, black and yellow, and millions of red ants. I discovered that if you look closely at this beautiful world, there are always red ants beneath the surface. Having grown up in a perfect world, everything else was a contrast," Lynch wrote.

He also recorded this event that shaped his specific worldview. One day, near his family home in the Pacific Northwest, he saw a beautiful, naked woman emerge from the woods, covered in blood and weeping.

"I saw a lot of strange things happening in the woods," Lynch told Rolling Stone. "And it seemed to me that people only tell you ten percent of what they know, and it's up to you to discover the other 90 percent."

Lynch with actresses Naomi Watts and Laura Ellen Haring
Lynch with actresses Naomi Watts and Laura Ellen Haring photo: REUTERS

He was in the Boy Scouts and as one of the best, he attended the inauguration of John F. Kennedy – on his 15th birthday.

First movie, first wife, first child

His artistic talent and love of exploring the world led him to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was studying and working as a graphic artist in 1966 when he made his first film, a four-minute short called Six People Vomit (Six Times). This and other works earned Lynch a place in the then-newly founded American Film Institute.

While studying, he met his classmate Peggy, whom he married in 1967. Lynch was only 22 when his daughter Jennifer was born. The three of them moved to Los Angeles in 1970, where the marriage fell apart after a few years - when he began working on his first feature film, Eraserhead, with little money.

Erazerhed and the Second Marriage

From the very beginning, his work focused on strange and marginal characters: Eraserhead is a black-and-white film about Henry, a quiet young man whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby and leaves it for him to care for. The depressing industrial landscape of Philadelphia, permeated with an eerie stillness, would become one of Lynch's hallmarks.

This now cult classic took five years to make, as Lynch kept running out of money. When the film was finally completed (1977), Lynch married for the second time, to Mary, the sister of his friend and colleague John Fisk. With Mary, he had a second child, a son, Austin.

Another Hollywood master, Stanley Kubrick, was at the first screening, expressing his admiration and later saying that it was the best film of all time for him. The film also impressed George Lucas, who was offered the role of director of the third part of the Star Wars trilogy (Return of the Jedi), but Lynch turned it down.

The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and World Fame

Lynch continued his penchant for depicting human deformities in The Elephant Men, a 1980 dramatization of the tragic life of Joseph Merrick in late 19th-century London. The international hit, starring an unrecognizable John Hurt in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as the doctor who befriends Merrick, earned eight Oscar nominations. Lynch was thrust into the Hollywood spotlight.

However, in 1984, a financial disaster struck – the film adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune. The second marriage also fell apart around that time…

Two years later, while he was ritually drinking milkshakes, Blue Velvet hit theaters. In the opening scenes, an investigator finds a severed ear lying on the neatly mowed lawn of one of a row of elegant houses with white picket fences.

Blue Velvet put Lynch back on his feet and marked the beginning of a five-year relationship with the film's star, Isabella Rossellini.

David Lynch
photo: REUTERS

Palme d'Or and Twin Peaks

The 1990s were extremely successful for Lynch: he won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1992 for his travelogue Wild at Heart and filmed the first season of Twin Peaks. The series won three Golden Globes, two Emmy Awards, and a Grammy for music. He had a son, his third child, with his collaborator Mary Sweeney in XNUMX.

The series is set in the fictional town of Twin Peaks in Washington, near the Canadian border, and the story begins with a simple mystery: young and beautiful Laura Palmer is found dead in a plastic bag pulled from a lake. However, the unusual everyday life begins to collapse, and the murder is buried under layers of mystery investigated by a charming agent. The continuation of the cult TV series that influenced many other authors followed in 2017.

The 1990s saw the production of both the typical Lynch film Lost Highway and the atypical The Straight Story, a gentle story about a man who drives a lawnmower across half of America to visit his sick brother.

In 2001, Lynch made another masterpiece, the neo-noir Mulholland Drive, and then Inland Empire (2006) – both films are dark depictions of Hollywood.

A man who wanted neither marriage nor children

He married for the fourth time in 2009, to actress Emili Stofl, with whom he had a daughter, his fourth child. The fourth divorce was also filed in 2023, and according to media reports, the process was not fully completed by the time of his death.

Lynch admitted that his obsession with work has made him an absentee father. "You have to be selfish. It's a horrible thing. I never really wanted to get married or have kids. One thing leads to another, and here we are," he said in 2018.

Steven Soderbergh, who told the Associated Press upon the news of Lynch's death that he was the proud owner of two tables made by Lynch (one of his many hobbies included furniture design), said that The Elephant Man was a perfect film.

"He's one of those directors who was extremely influential but impossible to imitate. People tried, but he had a unique algorithm that worked only for him. As nonlinear and illogical as his films seemed, they were clearly extremely organized in his mind."

When David Lichtenstein was asked to analyze his films, he usually avoided answering. He told The New York Times in 1995, "I like things that leave room for dreaming. A lot of mysteries are solved in the end, and that kills the dream."

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