Sometimes you have to travel along a crowded and well-beaten path before you find your emergency exit and escape, to the lost and open highway.
Allow me to recount my favorite story ever about filmmaker David Lynch, perhaps apocryphal: Lynch submits his 1999 Disney-produced film The Straight Story to the ratings bureau of the Motion Picture Association of America and gets a call back, with a man saying they are going to give it a G rating.
Lynch pauses, and asks the man to repeat that again, slowly.
“Why?” responds the voice on the other end of the line.
“Because I’m never going to hear that again in my life.”
David Lynch died yesterday, January 16, of complications arising from emphysema. He was one of the greatest film directors of my lifetime, one whose elusive and shifting vision always seemed to stare right through you and into recesses where filmmakers don’t usually go. I have seen every single one of his movies at least once (and most several times), and they occupy a place in my heart shared by few if any other directors. But I am not a film critic. I do not know the language of cinema. (Armond White does, thankfully, so I commend his fine appreciation of Lynch to you.) I want to talk about the road not taken, the path that led Lynch to commit to being the relentlessly questing, instinctive visionary he was.
Because as hard as it is to believe, there was a time when David Lynch looked like he might comfortably become part of the Hollywood machine, directing off-kilter but acceptably mainstream big-budget movies. It is mildly disorienting to realize from the vantage point of 2025 that his career trajectory looked very different up through the mid-1980s: After several student short films made while raising his newborn daughter in blighted early ’70s Philadelphia, he cobbled together an experimental movie called Eraserhead over four years. Released to critical befuddlement, revulsion, and acclaim — a handy combination for a first-time director with serious artistic aspirations — it was roundly ignored by the public at large. (Its cultural renown is almost entirely retrospective.)
It was seen, however, by one very important moviegoer: Mel Brooks. The legendary comedian and director had a script he wanted to produce about the memorably deformed Victorian-era Englishman Joseph (John) Merrick and was casting about for a director. His assistant producers screened Eraserhead for him, and instead of being put off by its surrealism and occasional grotesquerie, Brooks was taken by both Lynch’s artistry and his affectlessly bleak sense of humor; he plucked him from obscurity to direct what became 1980’s The Elephant Man.
The film was an unmitigated triumph — an arrestingly thoughtful and hauntingly well-acted tale of empathy for the Other, with shades of moral ambivalence and Lynchian surrealism weaved around striking acting turns from Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and John Hurt (working under truly remarkable makeup). The film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Actor (for Hurt), Best Picture, and Best Director. As David Lynch’s first big break in the film industry, it could have gone no better: He was presented with an almost instantaneous, miraculous opportunity to transition from outsider to insider with his next project.
With all the critical plaudits and commercial success, Lynch decided it was now or never: time to grab for the brass ring and “go big.” He first took a meeting with George Lucas about the possibility of directing Return of the Jedi. (The mind boggles at the idea of David Lynch filming Ewoks, though I do sometimes wonder how soul-squickingly unnerving he would have made Jabba the Hutt.) Alas, it was not to be: He turned the gig down after getting a headache when Lucas took him to a restaurant where the only thing available on the menu was salad.
Instead he decided to film Dune. It was certainly not the only critically unpopular move in David Lynch’s career — he famously took out his own ad campaign for 1997’s Lost Highway featuring nothing but negative reviews, including “Two Thumbs Down” from Siskel & Ebert — but it was the only one he ever later admitted regretting. And thank God for it, because Dune was the film that forever altered the trajectory of David Lynch’s career, as well as modern art, immeasurably for better. His loss was cinema’s eternal gain.
The adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel — now eclipsed in most minds by Denis Villeneuve’s technically impressive but emotionally inert remake — was a legendary failure, and the only film in David Lynch’s career he could find nothing good whatsoever to say about in retrospect. (He is a bit too hard on it; the film is incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the plot, and it cannot be rationally defended as “good,” but its visual imagery — his phantasmagorical depiction of the Harkonnens in particular — is some of the most striking of Lynch’s career.) Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis was in serious financial straits, and the budget was cut. Lynch had limited creative control over editing and casting; although a few minor character actors (Everett McGill, Brad Dourif, Dean Stockwell, old friend Jack Nance, etc.) would return in later projects, it is interesting to note that he otherwise never worked with anyone else in the cast again.
With one critical exception, that is: the actor he cast to play the hero, Paul Atreides. Dune came very close to being a young Val Kilmer’s first-ever movie appearance until an unknown young man with no film credits and only local summer repertory theatre to his name stood for a screen test: Kyle MacLachlan. MacLachlan was Lynch’s greatest find as a director, a man born to play a Lynchian hero: wide-eyed and ingenuous, with a face that conveyed both intelligence and emotional openness — openness that could perhaps be subverted or corrupted.
After the failure of Dune, David Lynch was relegated back to the minor league of directors in terms of reputation and industry power. His “moment” had passed. Studios were no longer going to trust him with big budgets, at least not on his terms, and he realized it as the blessing in disguise it always was. His heart was never really into the idea of making big-budget blockbusters, with their studio and audience expectations. (From that day forward you will not find a single high-tech special-effects shot in a David Lynch movie or television show.) He wanted to pursue his own vision instead.
That would properly bring us to Lynch’s next film, Blue Velvet (1986), but the point is not to cover all of what comes next; the point is to note that Blue Velvet represents the true narrative beginning of Lynch’s career as the most successful avant-garde filmmaker in modern history. (This is not idle hyperbole; in both commercial and artistic terms, none rank higher and few even compete.) All else was prelude, and in fact prelude for a career Lynch chose to swerve happily away from, as he rolled himself over the berm and onto a lonelier path.
Set aside Blue Velvet’s immense formal merits; what matters is that it is here where Lynch first summons and focuses the singular creative force for which he is now celebrated. It is here where music becomes an integral part of his soundtracks, almost as important to conveying meaning as the equally vivid — yet narratively hazy — imagery he employs. It is here where Lynch begins to assemble his own “stable” of favorite actors: MacLachlan and Laura Dern became stars with this film and would end up among his most frequent collaborators.
Most important of all, it was Blue Velvet’s critical success — and pot-stirring controversy — that fortified Lynch in his pursuit of his own artistic desires. Lynch never really turned his back on the mainstream (his next pitch was to network television, after all, with the idea of setting a quirky detective series in the Pacific Northwest) but from now on he was never going to be lured into making anything except what interested him personally.
His reward for this artistic decision became ours: a series of classic films like Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive (running the gamut from pulp Americana to shockingly moving sincerity). Most of all, Lynch (working with co-creator Mark Frost) gave us the Twin Peaks universe, the purest expression of his creative worldview, and one that only unfurls slowly over hours: a late ’80s network television show, a feature film, and a sprawling cable miniseries that represents the capstone of his career.
Others will eulogize David Lynch’s artistic achievements better than I can ever hope to. I can only note here how much his work meant to me and how grateful I am for it, and how happy it made me. Which is a weird thing to say, I suppose; Lynch has a reputation as being fearsome or difficult, so it is hard for me to explain how the fundamental humanity, wit, and moral seriousness of his work always felt warmly reassuring even as it sometimes terrified me. What united it all was Lynch’s piercing emotional intelligence, his willingness to tell stories whose narrative logic was always half obscured by the thick fog of the dreaming subconscious. But all of that only came to the fore once his dreams of becoming an A-list blockbuster director fell to pieces. He became what he was only once he knew what he wanted to reject. It makes perfect sense, too: Sometimes you have to travel along a crowded and well-beaten path before you find your emergency exit and escape, to the lost and open highway.