David Lynch^†

He was staring at a painting when it started to move. That image became his first film, a roughly one-minute loop called Six Men Getting Sick. Lynch trained as a painter and only wandered into cinema because static images bored him. Eraserhead took five years to finish and confused nearly everyone who saw it, but Stanley Kubrick screened it for the cast of The Shining to set the mood. That endorsement mattered. Blue Velvet proved he could make something genuinely disturbing inside the studio system. By 1990, Twin Peaks pulled 34 million viewers for its pilot, and Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Almost nobody else was doing both at the same time.

He made ten features in five decades and still generated his own adjective. "Lynchian" entered the vocabulary because almost nobody made anything that felt like his films. A 2016 BBC poll of 177 critics from 36 countries named Mulholland Drive the best film of the 21st century, the kind of consensus Lynch would've found suspicious. He came back for Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, more than 25 years after the original, and delivered something closer to an 18-hour art film than a prestige TV revival. He disclosed his emphysema, saying he couldn't walk across a room without running out of oxygen. He didn't apologize for the smoking.

Lynch started smoking at eight years old and never really stopped. He described the ideal creative life as "drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and paint, and that's it." He practiced Transcendental Meditation daily from 1973 onward and founded a nonprofit to bring it into schools. In the early 2000s, he reportedly paid $1 million for a "Millionaire's Enlightenment Course" with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, then proposed building seven structures to house 8,000 professional meditators at a cost of $7 billion. The coffee was always black.

When the Sunset fire swept through the Hollywood Hills on January 8, 2025, Lynch evacuated his home just off Mulholland Drive. Eight days later, he died at his daughter Jennifer's home in Los Angeles. His ashes rest at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Fans left flowers at Bob's Big Boy in Burbank and at Twede's Cafe in North Bend, Washington, the real-life Double R Diner from Twin Peaks.