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Director David Lynch was born on this day in 1946 in Missoula, Montana. Lynch’s father was a research scientist with the US Department of Agriculture, which moved him around a good deal, thus Lynch grew up in the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and Northern Virginia. Lynch studied art and design at several schools. In addition to writing and directing films, he was a painter, sculptor, photographer, writer, and music composer/producer, as well as an inveterate tinkerer. I’ll deal only with his film and television work.

In 1970, Lynch moved to Los Angeles where he studied at the American Film Institute Conservatory. In 1972, he began working part-time on his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, funding it with an American Film Institute grant, a loan from his father, and even part-time work delivering newspapers. Eraserhead was finished in 1976, released in 1977, and became famous on the “midnight movie” circuit. Eraserhead is one of the weirdest films ever made, but it was the beginning, not the end of an illustrious career.

Mel Brooks, in particular, loved Eraserhead and agreed to produce Lynch’s next film, The Elephant Man, based on the true story of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who worked as a sideshow freak in Victorian England. Merrick was given refuge in a London hospital by Doctor Frederick Treves and became a cause célèbre of Victorian high society. Like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man was filmed in black in white, but with a much larger budget. Filming was done in London, with a largely English cast, including John Hurt as Merrick (his first name was changed from Joseph to John) and Anthony Hopkins as Doctor Treves. Although The Elephant Man has many of Lynch’s signature surrealistic touches, it is highly accessible and deeply moving. The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success, receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The success of The Elephant Man brought Lynch a flood of opportunities. George Lucas even offered Lynch The Return on the Jedi, which Lynch declined. It is just as well. Lynch could have killed the whole Star Wars franchise if his Return bombed as badly as his next project, his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, Dune.  Filmed in Mexico with an international cast and released in 1984, Dune was a critical and commercial disaster. Lynch did not have control of the final cut, and many good scenes were discarded. Lynch remained bitter about the experience for the rest of his life and refused all offers to do a director’s cut. Two more versions Dune have been made since, one by the Sci Fi Channel, the other by Denis Villeneuve (Part I, Part 2). But, for all its flaws, Lynch’s vision remains my favorite.

The flop of Dune led to the cancellation of any Dune sequels, so producer Dino De Laurentiis allowed Lynch to make Blue Velvet (1986). In some ways, Blue Velvet is the first true David Lynch film. Of course, Eraserhead is entirely Lynch’s vision, but its realization was hampered by extreme technical and financial constraints. The Elephant Man and Dune were other peoples’ stories. But Blue Velvet was entirely David Lynch’s vision, he had the budget and technical means to realize it fully, and he had control over the final cut. Blue Velvet was a huge critical success, did moderately well at the box office, and earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. It remains his masterpiece.

Lynch was most famous for Twin Peaks, his ABC television series with Mark Frost that ran in 1990 and 1991. Although Twin Peaks rapidly lost direction, Lynch’s pilot, as well as the first few episodes, are some of the best television ever made.

Lynch’s next film, 1990’s Wild at Heart  won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. I think it is superb, but the responses from American critics and audiences were tepid. After that, Lynch returned to Twin Peaks with a prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), which was also a critical and financial failure, although I think very highly of it.

Then Lynch worked on two unsuccessful television projects, both of which lasted only three episodes: On the Air (1992), produced with Mark Frost for ABC, and Hotel Room (1993), which was done for HBO.

In 1997, Lynch returned to movie theatres with Lost Highway, starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. Lost Highway is one of Lynch’s darkest and most surreal films. I think it is brilliant, but most critics didn’t get it, and the film was a commercial dud.

In 1999, Lynch surprised everyone by releasing a G-rated movie with Walt Disney, The Straight Story, based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly and independent Iowan who traveled 300 miles on a lawn mower to visit his stricken brother. The film has many “Lynchian” touches but remains warm-hearted and sentimental throughout. I would argue that all of Lynch’s films are life-affirming. But in The Straight Story, the obstacles the protagonist overcomes are nothing more horrifying than old age and mechanical breakdowns. Both hell and heaven are far away, although there are hints of both throughout. The Straight Story was a critical and commercial hit. It remains the only David Lynch movie you can show to your old mum.

The success of The Straight Story revived Lynch’s fortunes in Hollywood. ABC had Lynch shoot a new television pilot called Mulholland Drive.  When ABC dropped the project, Lynch reworked it into a feature film, released by Studio Canal. Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, and Justin Theroux, it returns to the non-linear storytelling and Stygian darkness of Lost Highway. But this time, the critics and audiences loved it. Mulholland Drive garnered Lynch the Best Director award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (an honor he shared with Joel Coen) and Best Director from the New York Film Critics Association. He was also nominated for the third time for the Academy Award for Best Director. In 2016, Mulholland Drive was named the best film of the 21st century in a BBC poll of film critics. In 2022, it was number 8 in the Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time. I think Mulholland Drive is a great film, but these accolades are, frankly, a bit silly.

Lynch’s last two major projects were Inland Empire (2006), a three-hour feature film, and Twin Peaks: The Return (2016), 18 one-hour episodes on Showtime. I wanted to like them and should give them both another chance, but I fear I will still think they are terrible. Many people dismiss films like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive as “meaningless.” I disagree. They have meanings. But Lynch likes to hide them. However, Inland Empire and Return have resisted my best attempts at interpretation. I don’t think they are engagingly hermetic, just boringly unintelligible. That wouldn’t be so terrible if they still managed to be entertaining. But I found them stultifyingly ill-paced and often sickeningly distasteful. I can only see them as a sad waste of nearly a quarter-century of a great artists’ life.

David Lynch is an artist of the Right for the same reasons that Flannery O’Connor is. Both Lynch and O’Connor are essentially mystics: Lynch a follower of Transcendental Meditation, O’Connor a Roman Catholic.  Both believed that good and evil are metaphysical forces. Both had a strong sense of finitude, which manifests in a sense of place: O’Connor’s South, Lynch’s logging towns and Los Angeles. This sense of finitude also issues in a deeply conservative skepticism about fundamental moral progress. Both reject the idea that we’ll simply progress our way out of evil. Both are lovers of mystery, and deploy the grotesque as a signature of both the secular ineradicability of evil and their hope for an ultimate triumph of the good. 

I never met David Lynch. But in 2000, I wanted to pitch an O’Connor film idea to him. Some of her short stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge deal with essentially the same character under different names. I thought they could be worked into episodes of a single life. But Lynch’s secretary replied that Mr. Lynch was at work on something else, which turned out to be Mulholland Drive. 

I took the pen name Trevor Lynch because David Lynch resonates with me more than any other filmmaker. Since the 1990s, I have been planning to write a book on him. Some of the ideas for that book were first sketched in these reviews and podcasts at Counter-Currents:

• Greg Johnson and John Morgan, “The Films of David Lynch,” Part 1 and Part 2
• Trevor Lynch, “Blue Velvet: The Lost Footage.”
• Trevor Lynch, “David Lynch’s Dune.“
• Trevor Lynch, “Death My Bride: David Lynch’s Lost Highway.“
• Trevor Lynch, “The Elephant Man.”
• Trevor Lynch, “Eraserhead: A Gnostic Anti-Sex Film.”
• Trevor Lynch, “Hotter than Georgia Asphalt: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.”
• Trevor Lynch, “Mulholland Drive.“
• Trevor Lynch, “Now It’s Dark: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.”
• Trevor Lynch, “The Straight Story.”
• Trevor Lynch, “Twin Peaks,” Russian translation here.
• Trevor Lynch, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.”