David Lynch is dead: the director of “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive” was 78 years old

David Lynch, a painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence and uniquely skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen to encompass television, records, books, nightclubs, a range of organic coffee and its Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. , died. He was 78 years old.

His family announced the death on social media on Thursday, without providing details. In 2024, Mr. Lynch announced that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking and, as a result, all subsequent films would have to be made remotely.

Mr. Lynch was a visionary. His florid style and unsettling perspective were on full display in his first feature, the cult classic “Eraserhead,” released at Midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent until the failed blockbuster “Dune” (1984); his small-town erotic thriller “Blue Velvet” (1986) and its spiritual spinoff, the television series “Twin Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1990 and 1991; his widely acclaimed masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” (2001), a poisonous Valentine’s Day for Hollywood; and his enigmatic last feature film, “Inland Empire” (2006), which he shot on video himself.

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two very disparate artists of the 20th century whose work Mr. Lynch greatly admired and whose work could be said to have synthesized it, his name has become an adjective.

The Lynchian “is both easy to recognize and difficult to define,” wrote Dennis Lim in his monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place.” Directed by a man long devoted to the technique of transcendental meditation, Mr. Lynch’s films are characterized by their dreamlike images and meticulous sound design, as well as Manichean narratives that contrast exaggerated, even saccharine, innocence with a depraved evil.

Mr. Lynch’s style has often been described as surrealist, and indeed, with his unsettling juxtapositions, extravagant non-sequiturs and eroticized disturbance of the common, Lynchian has obvious affinities with classical surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If the classic surrealists celebrated the irrational and sought to liberate the fantastic from the everyday, Mr. Lynch used the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.