David Lynch (1946-2025): The Dreamer

Lynchian, a term that made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018, was always needed. Before we started using this term in ordinary language, there was no one word to describe the kind of feelings that David Lynch evoked through his films. Take for example, the opening scene of his neo-noir mystery thriller, the Blue Velvet (1986). The film opens with a sequence of the perfect sub-urban American dream—blue skies, red and yellow daisies in full bloom, smiling firefighters, happy school children being escorted across the road, a man watering his perfectly manicured garden. Till things turn acrid. The man falls to the ground following a near fatal health scare, his dog jumps on him nonchalantly lapping up the water from his hose, and the camera takes us into the underbelly of the grass lawn to reveal the wriggling insects that live under this seemingly perfect utopia. A quintessentially unsettling ‘Lynchian’ scenario that juxtaposes surreal, and often sinister elements, with the mundane, everyday things to create a dreamlike mystery. Commenting on his films in documentary The Perverts Guide to Cinema (2006, directed by Sophie Fiennes), noted philosopher Slavoj Žižek comments, “The beauty of Lynch, if you look closely, it’s never clear. Is it really the brutal real out there that disturbs us, or is it our fantasy?”

In a career spanning over 50 years, Lynch scaled the zenith of the avant-garde through films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Lost Highway (1999) and Mulholland Drive (2001). His films, with their dreamlike fragmented stories are an opportunity for audiences to transform themselves from observers to participants—filling in details as we go along the surreal ride. A ride that he constructed carefully through mastering every craft of his trade. The duality of characters in his stories, priority of mood over meaning in his production design, leaving clues in his plots through colour, creating mystery through partially revealed subjects and most of all, masterful sound. Perhaps no other filmmaker matches the attention to sound that we find in all of Lynch’s film where by placing abstract sounds over seemingly normal visuals, he unsettles the viewer. Lynch was credited as the sound designer in almost all his feature films and for over 18 hours of his network show, Twin Peaks (1990).

His final appearance on screen as John Ford in The Fabelmans (2022, directed by Steven Spielberg) will remain forever etched in the memory of those who followed his career. In his scene, he pushes a nervous, young Sammy Fabelman to look at the paintings in his room and to observe their horizon. He then remarks, “When the horizon is at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon is at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon is in the middle, it’s boring as fuck!” With the passing of David Lynch, we have lost one of the truly original and subversive visionaries of cinema. One who never placed his horizons anywhere near the middle.

American filmmakerDavid Lynch. deathEraserheadIn MemoriamLost HighwayMulholland DriveThe Elephant Man