David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78

David Lynch, a painter turned avant-garde filmmaker whose fame, influence and distinctively skewed worldview extended far beyond the movie screen to encompass TV, records, books, nightclubs, a line of organic coffee and his Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has died. He was 78.

His family announced the death on social media on Thursday, but provided no details. In 2024, Mr. Lynch announced that he had developed emphysema after years of smoking, and that as a result any subsequent films would have to be directed remotely.

Mr. Lynch was a visionary. His florid style and unnerving perspective was introduced full-blown in his first feature, the cult film “Eraserhead,” released at midnight in 1977. His approach remained consistent through the failed blockbuster “Dune” (1984); his small-town erotic thriller “Blue Velvet” (1986) and its spiritual spinoff the network TV series, “Twin Peaks,” broadcast by ABC in 1991 and 1992; his acknowledged masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” (2001), a poisonous valentine to Hollywood; and his enigmatic last feature, “Inland Empire” (2006), which he shot himself on video.

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.

The Lynchian “is at once easy to recognize and hard to define,” wrote Dennis Lim in his monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place.” Made by a man with a longtime devotion to the technique of “transcendental meditation,” Mr. Lynch’s films were characterized by their dreamlike imagery and punctilious sound design, as well as Manichaean narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved evil.

Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs, and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.

Performative normality was evident in Mr. Lynch’s personal presentation. His trademark sartorial style was a dress shirt worn without a tie and buttoned up top. For years, he regularly dined at and effusively praised the Los Angeles fast-food restaurant Bob’s Big Boy. Distrustful of language, viewing it as a limitation or even a hindrance to his art, he often spoke in platitudes. Like those of Andy Warhol, Mr. Lynch’s interviews, at once laconic and gee-whiz, were blandly withholding.

This baffling affect led Mel Brooks or his associate, Stuart Cornfeld, both of whom facilitated Mr. Lynch’s first Hollywood feature, “The Elephant Man” (1981), to label him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Perhaps in response, Mr. Lynch chose to identify himself as “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

A full obituary will be published soon.

Ash Wu contributed reporting.