His nasal Midwestern cadence, earnest mien, and silver pompadour were as recognizable as Alfred Hitchcock’s voice, chins, and silhouette.
David Lynch’s onyx-dark but bizarrely comedic films were so recognizable that he joined the pantheon of greats before him: Hitchcockian. Bergman-esque. Fellini-esque. Spielbergian. Lynchian.
He died on January 15 at the age of 78 after evacuating his three-house compound in the Hollywood Hills, just below Mulholland Drive, at the smoldering edges of the Los Angeles County wildfires. A lifelong chain-smoker, Lynch’s death can likely be attributed to emphysema. Tragic but somehow fitting, the wood, the smoke, the horror, the innocence—all were just a few of his favorites things.
Lynch was the Pictionary of dichotomy, almost never displaying anything but manners and a kind of introverted charm off-camera. He was a listener, not a talker. While filming 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, he told Naomi Watts to just slap him for all his directional intensity. She couldn’t. He affectionately said, “Oh, sweetheart,” and hugged her.
He was a university-trained painter, singer, composer, nightclub designer, and cameo actor (especially as a hearing-impaired F.B.I. agent in his ABC series Twin Peaks), alternative-weekly cartoonist (“The Angriest Dog in the World”), and author. But he was best known as the director of Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, and its follow-up film, Fire Walk with Me.
I interviewed him three times, starting in 1990. At our last meeting, in 2012, he shared the things he couldn’t live without. At the top of the list was coffee; he once admitted to drinking nearly 20 cups a day. No wonder, in 2014, he started his own brand. He was a fixture at the Bob’s Big Boy diner in Burbank, and burned through an unconscionable number of American Spirit cigarettes.
His other loves: “A freedom to create ideas that flow, and my sweet wife, Emily [Stofle].” (She filed for divorce in 2023; Lynch left behind four children, including a 12-year-old daughter with Stofle.) He enjoyed finger painting. (“Go with your intuition—it’s action and reaction.”) He said the words “beautiful” and “wonderful” a lot. He expressed a “deep love” for his Swatch watch and “snapping-crisp bacon with two scrambled eggs.”
Anyone who followed Twin Peaks knew that donuts exerted a special hold on him. The same was true for Lynch’s alter ego, the optimistically curious Agent Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan. Off-camera, Lynch turned it into an -ism: “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.”
He had a good head of hair that couldn’t be ignored. He told me he didn’t really “paint the town red,” but when he did venture out, strangers always wanted to touch his hair: “Happens all the time.”
His signature style was to wear his dress shirt buttoned to the top without a necktie because, he explained, “for some reason my collarbone is very sensitive.” He didn’t like to feel the wind on it. And yet the sound of wind—all natural noises, really—turned him on, and played significant atmospheric roles in his movies.
Perhaps his affinity for the great outdoors—splitting pinewood offered a catharsis that endured—came from his father, a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. An Eagle Scout, Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, but also lived in other Americana cities such as Boise and Spokane, and they informed his work. (Blue Velvet was set in a quaint but sinister logging town; Twin Peaks was filmed in North Bend, Fall City, and Snoqualmie, in Washington State.)
Despite the sexually violent imagery in his films—a brutalized Isabella Rossellini running naked down a Main Street U.S.A., a prom queen raped and wrapped in plastic floating in a river—he became one of the country’s most predominant promoters of Transcendental Meditation. The David Lynch Foundation has long advocated for teaching it in elementary schools.
And despite disturbingly macabre films such as Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, he also made heartfelt weepers such as the acclaimed The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, about an elderly man driving a John Deere tractor across the country to see his dying brother. In a tragic Lynchian dénouement, Richard Farnsworth, who played Alvin Straight, shot himself a year after the film was released.
When I first met him face-to-face, in the Howard Hughes penthouse of the Chateau Marmont in 2011, where I interviewed him for The Wall Street Journal, I was intimidated. That changed quickly.
“Steve! You know we have something in common! I was a Journal man, too!” said Lynch, smiling big, when I shook his hand. He was promoting a limited-edition bottle design for Dom Pérignon, a money job to help fund his movie projects.
After college at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lynch moved to Hollywood in the 70s and delivered The Wall Street Journal to finance Eraserhead, his debut picture, which became a cult classic. He prided himself on his “throw,” chucking the papers so hard that they were “soaring with the speed of cars.”
In the past few years, he was heard more than seen. During the pandemic, Lynch spent two years forecasting the weather on a popular Los Angeles radio station. When his longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, died in 2022, Lynch skipped the forecast and intoned, “Weather report: no music.”
After revealing his life-debilitating emphysema in November 2024, he told a reporter: “Smoking was something that I absolutely loved, but in the end, it bit me.... Nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me.”
Last week, as the blazes raged around his compound, living and breathing finally became too much. Fire, walk with him.
David Lynch was born on January 20, 1946. He died on January 15
Steve Garbarino, the former editor at BlackBook magazine, began his career as a staff writer at The Times-Picayune. Once again New Orleans–based, he now contributes to The Wall Street Journal and New York and is the author of A Fitzgerald Companion
