On January 16, 2025, one of the greatest directors of the last century left us, the “visionary” David Lynch. But he was not just a director: he was also a screenwriter, producer, artist, musician and winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 (without forgetting that in 2019 he received a Oscar winner honorary). Known for his unique, dreamlike and surreal style, he has profoundly influenced cinema and television, exploring themes such as the subconscious, the mystery and the border between reality and dreamsusing disturbing images, non-linear narratives and disturbing atmospheres. Among his best-known films we find Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive And Lost Highway.
Even NASA made a point of greeting the American director, sharing a photo of a black hole on its X profile accompanied by the phrase: “Don’t think too much about the hole, but focus on the donut”. This phrase, pronounced by the famous director during an interview, has become emblematic of his creative approach: an invitation not to get lost in details that could generate anxiety or confusion, but to consider the totality and value of the whole.
Lynch’s youth, always over the top
Born January 20, 1946 in Missoula, IN Montanaas a child he traveled a lot due to his father’s work, who was a researcher for the US Department of Agriculture. This way of life, however, as he said in some interviews, did not weigh on him at all, because he had always made friends easily. What he didn’t like, if anything, was going to school, which he believed was “a crime against young people” that deprived them of freedom.
Always interested in painting, he decided to study it in college. He began studying at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, but after a year he left because there was nothing to inspire him there: everything was rigid and square, and did not encourage him to give vent to creativity. After a very short trip to Europe with a friend – made with the aim of meeting the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschkawhom they later did not meet – he returned to Virginia, and shortly thereafter moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There Lynch made his first short film with a 16mm camera that he paid very little for, Six Men Getting Sick (six times). Together with some friends from the academy he occupied an abandoned room in the academy, and in all he paid 150 dollars, which seemed absurd to him at the time, but which was the investment that would form the basis for everything that came to follow.
In fact, without that 60-second short film shown at the Academy’s annual end-of-year exhibition, he would not have won the heart of one of his classmates, H. Barton Wassermanwho was very rich and offered him a considerable sum to create a cinema installation in his home. The thing didn’t work out, but Wasserman didn’t withdraw the offer, and with the money Lynch experimented and gave life to The Alphabet (1968), in which a woman recited the alphabet over a series of pictures of horses before bleeding to death in her bed. For the audio, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorder which made the protagonist’s crying very distorted and anguished. The effect, deeply desired by the director, was very effective and struck the people who watched the short film.
The journey deep into his unconscious continued in a sketchy manner, like his studies: in 1970 he moved to Los Angeles to study film directing at AFI Conservatory. There he wrote a screenplay, but the interference of professors and classmates who recommended changes stressed him to the point that he dropped out of the course. The dean of the conservatory, desperate, had him summoned and asked him to stay, because he was one of the best students. Lynch was convinced, but on one condition: no one would ever stick their nose into his screenplays again.
The journey into cinema: his best-known works
Once back among his companions, he began to write a new screenplay – 21 pages long – named after Eraserhead. In 1972, after obtaining a loan of 10,000 dollars from the AFI, shooting of the film began (interrupted several times due to lack of money, so much so that his father had to help him), shot in black and white. Lynch told the story of a quiet young man living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose partner gives birth to a disabled child who entrusts her totally to him. In 1976, the film was finally finished, and the director tried to have it participate in the Cannes Film Festival, but without success: the critics considered it horrible and unpresentable. However, not everyone thought so, and in America it was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It was soon released in several theaters, and became popular among midnight movies. To his great surprise, little by little the project that he had almost ended up considering a failure was taking off, and even Stanley Kubrick he complimented it, stating that it was one of his favorite films.
Then it was the turn of the unforgettable The Elephant Mana black and white surrealist film that tells the true story of Joseph Merricka man known in Victorian London for his severe deformity and who after leaving the sideshow theater was taken into the care of a well-known London surgeon. The strong and at the same time delicate way of telling this story earned Lynch great acclaim from critics and the public, and remains a milestone of cinema. It earned him 8 Oscar nominations and never-before-seen fame, which he brought George Lucas to ask him to direct the third film of the Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Lynch refused without a second thought, because he didn’t want to impose his vision on Lucas’s, but it wasn’t long before another producer asked him to direct an epic science fiction film: in the 1980s, in fact Dino de Laurentiis asked him to create the film adaptation for the novel by Frank Herbert which made many science fiction fans fall in love, Dunes.
Lynch accepted this time, and the film was released in 1984, but it was deeply disappointed: If he would always declare himself dissatisfied, claiming that if he could go back in time he would never have accepted the project since he had not had creative control over the work. In short, it wasn’t his thing, and this lack of freedom of expression it was also reflected in the film, which was a real flop at the box office.

In 1986 it was the turn of the iconic (and beloved by many of his fans) noir psychological thriller Blue Velvetwhich explores the dark sides of human nature and the seemingly quiet American suburbs. The protagonist is Jeffrey Beaumont, a young man who discovers a severed human ear and is drawn into a world of secrets, violence and perversions, embodied by the film’s disturbing villain, Frank Booth. In the film Lynch contrasts the duality between the apparent innocence of the town of Lumberton and the corruption that hides beneath the surface, and in doing so he chooses suggestive and disturbing images, mixed with eroticism and surrealism. The film earned Lynch his second nomination for best director at the Oscars, and was a huge success with US film critics.
With the 90s Lynch opens a new chapter, meeting the television producer Mark Frost. One day, while they were talking in the cafeteria, they imagined a corpse being dragged by the waves onto the shore of a lake in a remote town, and there one of the most well-known and iconic television series of those years began to take shape: The Secrets of Twin Peaks. The protagonist of the series is FBI agent Dale Cooper, who investigates the death of student Laura Palmer, ending up revealing the secrets of numerous locals. Lynch directs the first seven episodes, appearing in some as an actor, as FBI agent Gordon Cole. The series had three seasons, but Lynch was particularly fond of only the first and, in part, the second, because then the screenwriters and directors of the subsequent episodes had a hand and changed Lynch’s overall vision of the series, which however directed the very last episode.
In those years Lynch also dedicated himself to other things: in 1990 he adapted Barry Gifford’s novel into a film Wild at Heart. We are talking about a truly surreal and wild film in which love, romance and violence intertwine in an explosive and sometimes grotesque way, with references to the Wizard of Oz and a visceral aesthetic that evokes intense and immediate reactions. The story tells of Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, two lovers on the run from her manipulative mother, who persecutes them with the help of criminals and a private investigator. Anyone who has seen it knows it: it is a film full of iconic moments, with powerful evocative music and almost exaggerated performances, where freedom and survival in chaos reign supreme. The film won the Palme d’Or in Cannesbut the critics remained divided, and the public was no exception: for some it was a film that was far too “weird”.
Lynch then returned to his Twin Peaks for a film – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – with dark and disturbing tones, in which the director explores the last days of Laura Palmer, revealing the traumas, secrets and horror that preceded her death. When it was released in theaters the film was a commercial failure, but over time there were critics who rehabilitated it, even calling it his “masterpiece”.
In 1997 it was the time of the psychological and surreal thriller Lost Highway (1997), which explores themes of identity, guilt and distorted reality. The story follows the life of Fred Madison, a musician accused of murder, who inexplicably transforms into a young mechanic, Pete Dayton, while in prison. The film develops in a non-linear, mixing structure violence, eroticism and mysterywith enigmatic characters and disturbing, high-tension situations in a dark aesthetic setting and evocative music. Despite the commitment and dedication, this too was a commercial failure, and critics were divided.

Among the many other projects that followed, however, there was one that certainly definitively consecrated David Lynch: we are talking about the dreamlike film Mulholland Drive (2001), which intertwines dream and reality in an ambiguous and disturbing Los Angeles. The plot follows Betty, an aspiring actress, and Rita, a woman with amnesia, as they try to unravel an intricate mystery linked to Rita’s true identity. In this film Lynch explores desire and disillusionment, enclosing everything in a deeply hypnotic and enigmatic atmosphere.
For many years the director no longer worked in cinema because he was very ill: in fact, he suffered from a pulmonary emphysema who didn’t allow him to be on set. Despite this, he has always kept an eye on the window of contemporary cinema.
Because he is defined as the “visionary” director par excellence
David Lynch is considered a visionary for his unique and innovative approach to cinema and visual art, which distinguishes him as one of the most original directors of his era. Dark, deep aesthetics, sharp colors and unconventional shots, sometimes fragmentary and ambiguous, are the core of his cinematographic art.
Lynch has never been attracted to superficiality: the themes of his films are complex and universal (such as identity, the subconscious, desire, guilt and latent evil under the appearance of normality), and to express them challenges the observer’s gaze, making him compare it with hidden and uncomfortable realities.
Lynch was without a doubt a multifaceted artist, involved not only in directing but also in screenwriting, music, painting and sculpture. This is his eclecticism it is omnipresent in his films, which combine images, sounds and narration into an immersive and unique experience, and encompasses all of his cinematography.
