Lynch was a Missoula, Montana, native who moved around often with his family as a child and would feel most at home away from the classroom, free to explore his fascination with the world. Lynch’s mother was an English teacher and his father a research scientist with the US Agriculture Department. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest before the family settled in Virginia. Lynch’s childhood was by all accounts free of trauma.
“David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things,” a childhood friend is quoted as saying in Room To Dream, a 2018 book by Lynch and Kristine McKenna. “That’s one of the mysteries of David.”
He praised his parents as “loving” and “fair” in his memoir, though he also recalled formative memories that shaped his sensibility.
One day near his family’s Pacific Northwest home, Lynch recalled seeing a beautiful, naked woman emerge from the woods bloodied and weeping.
“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods,” Lynch told Rolling Stone. “And it just seemed to me that people only told you 10 per cent of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other 90 per cent.”
He had an early gift for visual arts and a passion for travel and discovery. He dropped out of several colleges before enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning a decade-long apprenticeship as a maker of short movies. He was working as a printmaker in 1966 when he made his first film, a four-minute short named Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). That and other work landed Lynch a place at the then-nascent American Film Institute.
There, he began working on what would become his 1977 feature debut, Eraserhead. The film, featuring Jack Nance with high-rising hair to rival the Bride of Frankenstein, took four years to make and debuted in theatres at midnight. It took nearly as long to develop a cult following and the interest of Hollywood. Stanley Kubrick became an advocate and George Lucas approached him about directing a Star Wars film. Another fan was Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s next movie, The Elephant Man.
“He is very sensitive, and he really understands human nature,” Lynch told Bomb magazine of Brooks. “Otherwise he couldn’t do those great comedies. I guess Eraserhead spoke to him, and off we went.”
The Elephant Man, about Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who became a circus attraction in 19th century Europe, earned eight Oscar nominations. Producer Dino De Laurentiis then hired Lynch to director a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The film was a flop with critics and audiences – Lynch described producers’ trims and tweaks in post-production as “a nightmare” – but, still, the movie attracted a cult following over the years.
After that came 1986’s Blue Velvet, starring Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and McLachlan. Kicked off by the Bobby Vinton song, the detective story that twists its way to Hopper’s oxygen-mask maniac, peeled back the superficial veneer of Reagan-era America.
“There are things lurking in the world and within us that we have to deal with,” Lynch told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “You can evade them for a while, for a long time maybe, but if you face them and name them, they start losing their power. Once you name the enemy, you can deal with it a lot better.”
In 1990, Lynch debuted both the Palme d’Or-winning Wild At Heart, with Nicolas Cage and Dern, and the radical TV series Twin Peaks. The show, a surreal sensation about the mysterious death of high-school homecoming queen Laura Palmer, was a sensation, earning five Emmy nominations for its first season.
Twin Peaks, which Lynch created with writer Mark Frost, remains one of the most enigmatic and singularly director-driven series to ever find a wide American audience on television. It clung to Lynch, too, who returned to it with the 1992 prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and a 2017 series.
