David Lynch: A Life in Dreams & Shadows (1946-2025)
A tribute to filmmaker David Lynch (1946-2025), whose surreal and iconic works, such as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, inspired generations.

A tribute to filmmaker David Lynch (1946-2025), whose surreal and iconic works, such as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, inspired generations.
David Lynch has died. How do we make sense of those words?
An artist who forged a blazing career in the arts, David Lynch lived a life dedicated to the connection between the elements around us and the soul within. He was fiercely original and carefully studious. His films came from another place, but his love and his passion were connected to the world we know.
Francis Bacon, Jan Švankmajer, and Alain Resnais were some of the spirits his work communed with, yet his films were as American as cherry pie. You can trace cinema, painting, and video art histories through Lynch’s work, but an academic approach will never suffice. It’s all too ephemeral for that.
It’s also too sprawling and contradictory, hiding and changing and morphing, so that to go back and look at Blue Velvet (1986), for instance, one might see an entirely different film than the last time they saw it. His work, people say, cries out for interpretation—but it’s more like submission.
Inland Empire (2006), Lynch’s experimental psychological horror about a cursed film production, is just one example of the knots we tie ourselves in when we try to apply logic to his work; when we wrongly believe that every image presented to us has a direct and literal meaning to be decoded and beaten as if it’s a video game.
In “Part 7” of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), we watch someone sweep the floor of the Roadhouse bar. It’s an unbroken shot that lasts several minutes, with Booker T and The M.G.’s “Green Onions” playing on the soundtrack. The man sweeps, and sweeps and sweeps. It’s hypnotic, almost serene, a sequence that readjusts the speed of the viewer’s thoughts, and their pace. It’s video meditation, and it would seem wrongheaded to try and weigh it down with specific meaning. The meaning is in how it feels.
Lynch may have had his own meanings attached to his images. But more and more, his work seems to reveal itself as a cinema of texture and feeling. It is instinct, a reflexive response to a world of madness and beauty. That’s why, when Rodney Mitchum (a name that pays homage to the great Robert Mitchum, as Lynch’s love for old Hollywood was always present) says in an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return that “people are under a lot of stress these days”, it’s both funny and perfectly emblematic of Lynch’s perspective. He could sometimes be so to the point that it could be easy to miss the forest for the trees. He means it like it is, like it sounds.
He wasn’t interested in outsmarting audiences, but he could trick you with a deftness that felt like a punch to the gut. He could mesmerise you with illusion, lure you unknowingly into a dream, and then have it come tumbling down instantly. He could have his characters say “No hay banda” (“there is no band:) and you’d find yourself weeping as if realising a long-submerged truth. He could jolt you viciously, like when we hear the words “What year is this?” in Twin Peaks: The Return, with you as an awakening dreamer like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Without the comfort of knowing what is truth and what is dream, we realise there’s no difference. Life, to Lynch, is instead a Möbius strip of dreams and action. We spend our lives thinking about the latter, which overwhelms the former. When our dreams and thoughts have nowhere to go, we stop communicating with them. We become empty and cruel, we lose sight of our humanity. We stop caring about what’s in our hearts. If we don’t fix them, we’ll die.
What, for instance, is the journey of Alvin Straight in The Straight Story (1999) if not a dream wrangled into a rusted reality? Shapes, lines, machines, and great plains go by as Alvin makes the 240-mile cross-country journey on an old lawnmower to visit his ailing brother. The dark, endless void of Lost Highway (1997) is replaced with daylight and sunsets, starlight and bonfires. There is rain and roads that stretch to the ends of the earth. There are old junkyards, and silent meditations as the world turns under Alvin’s wheels.
The composer Angelo Badalamenti—perhaps Lynch’s most essential collaborator—fills the air with sweet recollections, the sound of ancient, weeping violins, and picked guitars that roll ever forward, tears and miles going by as Alvin’s memories follow closely behind on foot. Here, dreams aren’t tricks but desires and hopes, prayers that we might find a way to reconcile the needs of our souls with the requirements of the physical world. The Straight Story reveals something fundamental about Lynch’s approach to life and art: if we don’t offer ourselves up to a larger cause, then we will be stranded in isolation.
Though Lynch would hole himself up in his art studio spending most days painting or sculpting, his work was never solitary. His images, which often looked as if they’d been grown rather than painted, were often violent and rudimentary; he painted square blocks for houses and plastered on textures and tumorous shapes that bulged from his canvases. His words often appear in disjointed lettering across the work (‘Squeaky Flies in the Mud’, or ‘this man was shot 0.9502 seconds ago’), and the words often form the title of the piece.
Some names evoke American childhood: Billy, Suzie, and Pinkie. There are football games and gee-whizz 1950s uncanniness. There are decapitations and other dismemberings, a constant stream of childlike nightmares. In one, Mickey Mouse is being decapitated. In another, a man turns into an insect. Franz Kafka and Francis Bacon are present and accounted for as influences. Still, Lynch was also a person of simple pleasures: television, supermarkets, and rock n’ roll music are as essential to his oeuvre as Jean Cocteau or the Dalai Lama.
Few artists ever synthesised high art and pop culture like David Lynch. There’s not a trace of poserism or joking when, in one now-famous video, Lynch excitedly tells the cameraman he’s had “two cookies and a coke” for his breakfast. “That’s phenomenal”, Lynch adds.
There is vulnerability in him, and in his work—an innocence that makes the brutality of the violence even more concussing. For a daydreamer, Lynch had an impeccably sharp insight into how overwhelming modern life feels, and how violence destroys our perception of what can and can’t happen in life. When the abusive Leo attacks his girlfriend, Shelly, in Twin Peaks, or when the atomic bomb test blows apart the molecules and particles of the sky—when the air is on fire—in Twin Peaks: The Return, it feels as if we are witnesses to the first acts of violence in history.
They are like Stanley Kubrick’s prehistoric apes learning to kill each other with weapons in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These are original sins that swallow us up in their darkness. We are left incredulous and wondering if there will ever be light again. But there is always light. The goodness of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, the love between Lula and Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), and the strength of John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980)—these aren’t just victims (or occasional participants) of violence. They are light and spark in a darkening world. They might be special but they could be any of us. Lynch was in love with them.
He also loved trees, birds, coffee, cars, sex, Sunset Boulevard, cartoons, lightbulbs, and romance. He loved how it all felt, the electric surge beyond our senses. There’s a scene in Blue Velvet (1986) in which Sandy (Laura Dern) and Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) sit in her parked car outside a church. Jeffrey relates his distress over the violence he has seen. “Why are there people like Frank?”, he asks. Sandy responds by telling him of a dream she had, in which the world was dark because it had no robins. “There is trouble till the Robins come,” she finishes, suggesting that the light will always return.
Yet the scene isn’t about dreams, metaphor, what the kids have seen, or what they will see. It’s about the sensation of falling in love. It’s about the look in Jeffrey’s eye as he listens, the softening of his expression, of Sandy’s quiet ecstasy as she beholds her invisible prophecy. It’s about the realisation that beyond circumstance and control, there exists an intangible desire to be held, loved, kept safe, and to witness the return of the robins.
How can this world of love survive in a place of such cruelty as America—or any country for that matter? I don’t think David Lynch—or any of us—can fully answer that. His work is not about answers. It is not about solutions. It is about the contradictions of love and violence, of surviving the point at which oxygen, fuel, and spark each combine to create fire, vicious and beautiful.
His work overflows with love, and I think he somehow harnessed fire. He could conjure it into being, and find a way to guide us with it. He was both a teacher and a shaman, and his greatest lessons always required the acceptance of the Platonic saying: “I know that I know nothing”. His wisdom came with no pretension or self-importance. He seemed always to implicate himself in the human experience; he never sat smugly above it.
And there’s so much more: studio albums, short films, animated web series, weather reports, guest roles, books, and comic strips. He was multi-disciplinary and boundlessly inquisitive. How could anyone read his writing and not develop a voracious hunger for life? He never seemed to stop exploring, and it is infectious. Engaging with David Lynch’s work is not just about watching films; it is about questioning who and where ideas come from, of exploring the way they take root, and how they materialise in our lives. You could take any work of Lynch’s and explore a thousand different directions. You could find yourself in dark screening rooms or walking through the woods on a spring day. He was a cinema unto himself, but he was also a key to unlocking a world of art and ideas. Of unlocking a new perspective.
The night that he died, among the hundreds of posts about him across social media, I saw most frequently words along the lines of “he altered my brain chemistry.” I have certainly said that myself about him in the past. He shared his dreams with us, and as a result, we understood ours better. He made us think beyond the structures of linear, consequential thought and suggested there are other, better ways to live.
The fires that have recently ravaged Los Angeles may be slowly dying down, as the winds finally begin to weaken. A city of dreams—beautiful, poisonous, illogical dreams—smoulders under the palm trees. Somewhere in the twisting hills, sits silently a brutalist building that looks like a bunker sculpted from leftover concrete. Slashes across its front serve as windows. One wonders how any Californian sunlight could reach inside. Bill Pullman’s character lived there in the movie Lost Highway. David Lynch lived there in real life.
David Lynch has died. Those words struggle to tell the whole truth of it. They lack full meaning; they’re words of rubber, bouncing off their targets, and spiralling off above the telephone wires and into the blue. He’s gone, and the fires still burn. It’s as bizarre and ironic as the city he lived in. He may have found beauty in it, but I think he would rather have kept living and painting, surveying the day ahead through the narrow sliver of those slit-like windows. They may not have been beautiful windows, but they were beautiful to him. Inside, he would have had to make his own light.
And until the robins return, so will we…