David Lynch: He was the master of the surreal

Rarely copied, never equaled: Director David Lynch (1946-2025), who knew how to capture surreal worlds on film like no other, has died at the age of 78. His family announced the filmmaker’s death: “He leaves a big hole in the world now that he is no longer with us. But, as he would say: ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole.'”

When the name David Lynch is mentioned in a group of film fans, two camps that are not particularly willing to compromise seem to form as if by magic. Some love Lynch’s surreal worlds and the extra dose of analysis that they demand from the audience. The others see his confused stories as nothing more than pretentious wannabe art cinema that thrives on its arbitrariness. Lynch was polarizing, there’s no question about that.

In the book “Lynch about Lynch” he described: “My childhood consisted of elegant single-family houses, avenues, the milkman, building castles in the garden, the hum of airplanes, blue skies, garden fences, green grass and cherry trees.” With his first feature film, Lynch seemed to negate all this childlike idyll as best he could. 1977’s “Eraserhead” came across as an ode to the abstract on a painstakingly saved budget of $20,000. Set in a post-apocalyptic world somewhere between nightmare and reality, it’s about deformed people and – as the title suggests – human heads that are turned into erasers.

With films like “Blue Velvet”, “Wild At Heart”, “Lost Highway” and his most famous, “Mulholland Drive”, Lynch continued his triumph as a master of surreality, with the former film probably being the most compelling. In it, Lynch unravels the supposed idyll of a small US town using a film noir look and reveals the dark, evil that always lurks in secret. Around six years later, “Twin Peaks” and again Kyle MacLachlan (65) in the lead role, a series that was visually and narratively very reminiscent of “Blue Velvet,” was to come to US television.

“Wild At Heart” with Nicolas Cage (61), on the other hand, was clearly a homage to the film “The Wizard of Oz”, from which Lynch made a kind of fairytale road movie. With “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch revealed his penchant for playing with the identities of his characters. Some characters appear to appear randomly in both films. Does this device represent daydreams, past lives, or something else entirely? As with many of his productions, there is no clear, linear plot in “Mulholland Drive” and there is a lot of room for interpretation.

But Lynch was not always dedicated to surreal cinema. His second film, “The Elephant Man,” was based on true events. It’s about the pitiful John Merrick (John Hurt), who is paraded as an elephant man at a fair due to a physical deformity. Only the surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) realizes that he is not a monster, but a friendly and intelligent man. “The Elephant Man” was nominated for eight Oscars, but failed to win any.

Lynch also told a true story in “The Straight Story.” In it, an older man sets off on a journey across the USA with his riding lawnmower to visit his sick brother. And the sci-fi opus “Dune” from 1984, based on the book of the same name by Frank Herbert (1920-1986), is also incredibly straightforward by Lynch’s standards. He later concentrated, among other things, on the short film genre, with which he began his career in 1966.

In the summer of 2024, Lynch, a lifelong smoker, made it public that he had been diagnosed with emphysema. The director, who was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, is said to have started making films at the tender age of eight. “Smoking was an important part of my life,” said Lynch. “I loved the smell and taste of tobacco. I loved lighting cigarettes. It was part of my existence as a painter and filmmaker.” Now, however, he has finally reaped what he sowed. As a smoker you are literally playing with fire.

David Lynch tried to quit smoking many times in his life, but never really succeeded. For him, the first cigarette was always like a one-way ticket to heaven, he said. And Lynch also bought his ticket to the side of other deceased film greats decades ago.