David Lynch Dead: ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ director was 78

David Lynch, a painter-turned-avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence, and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the screen to include television, records, books, nightclubs, an organic coffee line, and his Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace , is dead. He was 78.

His family announced the death on social media Thursday, but did not provide any details. In 2024, Mr. Lynch that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking, and that all subsequent films would therefore have to be externally directed.

Mr. Lynch was a visionary. His florid style and unnerving perspective were fully introduced in his first feature film, the cult film “Eraserhead”, released at midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent through the failed blockbuster “Dune” (1984); his small-town erotic thriller “Blue Velvet” (1986) and its spiritual spinoff network television series, “Twin Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1991 and 1992; his acclaimed masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” (2001), a toxic Hollywood Valentine; and his enigmatic final feature, “Inland Empire” (2006), in which he shot himself video.

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two very different 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch greatly admired and could be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.

The Lynchian “is at once easy to recognize and difficult to define,” wrote Dennis Lim in his monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place.” Created by a man with a long-standing devotion to the technique of “transcendental meditation”, Mr. Lynch’s films are characterized by their dreamlike imagery and on-point sound design, as well as Manichean narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved evil.

Mr. Lynch’s style has often been described as surreal, and yes, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non-sequiturs and eroticized confusions of the ordinary, the Lynchian has clear affinities with classical surrealism. Mr. However, Lynch’s surrealism was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in everyday life, Mr. Lynch the ordinary as a shield to fend off the irrational.

Performative normality was evident in Mr. Lynch’s personal presentation. His trademark sartorial style was a shirt worn without a tie and a button-down top. For years, he regularly dined at and effusively praised the Los Angeles fast food restaurant Bob’s Big Boy. Distrustful of language, considering it a limitation or even an obstacle to his art, he often spoke in platitudes. Like Andy Warhol’s interviews, Mr. Lynch’s interviews, at once laconic and nerdy, mildly restrained.

This confusing influence caused Mel Brooks or his colleague, Stuart Cornfeld, both of whom facilitated Mr. Lynch’s first Hollywood film, “The Elephant Man” (1981), branded him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Perhaps in response, Mr. Lynch to identify himself as “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

A full obituary will be published soon.

Ash Wu contributed with reporting.