Iconoclastic director David Lynch, who with his darkly surreal films brought the avant-garde shrieking and scratching into the mainstream, has died at the age of seventy-eight. His family announced his death via a social media post but did not give a cause. Lynch, who began smoking at the age of eight, had been diagnosed with emphysema in 2020. A towering figure in the world of cinema, he changed the face of filmed narrative fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century with movies like Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986) and the noirish ABC television series Twin Peaks (1990–91), which at its own peak brought an off-kilter, intellectually challenging storyline and polished cinematography into the same 15 million American homes where the soap opera Dynasty, its time-slot predecessor, had previously ruled. “Lynch’s great subject is instability and displacement: what happens when the ground disappears from beneath your feet, when you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time,” wrote Greil Marcus in 2006. ‘“I like the nowhere part of America,’ he has said, but in his films nowhere is where you find it, or make it.”
David Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. His mother was an English tutor, and his father was a forestry research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, who frequently left his son alone in nature while he made his rounds. ‘It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods,” Lynch told Time in 1990. “There were odd, mysterious things. That’s the kind of world I grew up in.” Owing to the nature of his father’s job, Lynch experienced a peripatetic childhood as the family moved around among Idaho, Washington, Virginia, and North Carolina. Disinterested in school, the young Lynch focused on scouting, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout, of which he remained immensely proud, and on painting. In 1966, he enrolled in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; while studying there, he made his first experimental short film, Six Men Getting Sick.