There Will Never Be Another David Lynch

David Lynch, one of the greatest and most influential visionaries of the American screen, has died at the age of 78. To say that his passing is an incalculable loss is no mere understatement: There was no one else like him, and there never will be again.

Across ten feature films, dozens of shorter works, musical projects, a separate career in fine art, and – most indelibly – three seasons of the TV show Twin Peaks, Lynch created such a uniquely potent, terrifying, and nevertheless empathetic visual universe that we have had to invent a word to describe it: "Lynchian," one of those terms someone can visualize before providing an exact definition. Indeed, Lynch has provided us with so many unforgettable images, some nightmarish, others reassuring: The deformed baby of Eraserhead, the white picket fence of Blue Velvet, the monster behind Winkie's Diner in Mulholland Drive, the red curtain and zigzagging floor pattern of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks.

Lynch is often called a surrealist, and indeed, his work grows out of dreams and the subconscious as much as it illustrates them. I remember watching his Inland Empire in a college film course, a movie that terrified and shocked me in part because I could find no analogue for its imagery. The texture of the film, its bleariness and fuguelike tone, is as close as I've come to experiencing a dream in waking life. Few are able to so clearly transmit the contents of their sleeping minds in the conscious world; Lynch managed to do it dozens of times, rewriting the visual language of cinema in the process.

His world grew out of an all-American postwar upbringing that most would consider idyllic. He was popular in school, an Eagle Scout who attended President Kennedy's inauguration. Yet he understood the darkness that lurked under the apple-pie, green-grass image of suburbia. Both Blue Velvet and the first seasons of Twin Peaks offer a deconstruction of small-town Americana, where horrific secrets and unimaginable wickedness lurk beneath the cheery facades of smiling townsfolk.

The America of Lynch's work is a poisoned landscape of nightmares, toxins, and buzzing electricity, where evil takes forms both inexplicable and identifiable. No one has better understood and transmitted the ambient dread of inhabiting the blighted atmospheres of this country. We dive into Hollywood backrooms in Mulholland Drive and encounter sinister figures like Killer Bob from Twin Peaks, the psychopath Frank Booth from Blue Velvet, and the menacing Mystery Man of Lost Highway. But perhaps his most disturbing and enlightening vision came in the now legendary eighth episode of his Twin Peaks: The Return, depicting the Trinity atomic bomb test as an original sin of American violence, unleashing pure malevolence across the land.

Of course, there are glimmers of good in this polluted realm. Just as iconic as these visions of horror in Lynch's stories are those that fight against the encroaching darkness, none more so than FBI Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks, a man who fights evil with transcendental meditation and a love of pie and a damn fine cup of coffee. Lynch himself also stepped in front of the camera, playing hearing-impaired FBI director Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks (famed for his catchphrase "Fix your hearts or die!"), and a handful of roles for other directors. In his final filmed appearance, Steven Spielberg cast him as John Ford for an unforgettable cameo in his semi-autobiographical The Fablemans.

In real life, Lynch himself became something of an iconic character thanks to his quirky personality and eternally sunny disposition. Stories have been traded about him for years, from his rescue of a team of Woody Woodpecker dolls ("These guys aren't just a bunch of goofballs, they know that there is plenty of suffering in the world") to his hilariously acerbic tirade against watching movies on the small screen: "It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real." During the COVID-19 pandemic, his YouTube weather reports were beloved by many as a means to cope with the bleakness of the time.

Lynch was richly and deservedly lauded for his achievements in his lifetime. He won the Palme d'Or for Wild at Heart and dozens more awards. Mulholland Drive was voted the eighth-best film of all time in 2022 by Sight & Sound, and a BBC poll named it the greatest film of the 21st Century in 2016. He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director but never won.

Twin Peaks also struck out at the Emmys, never converting any of its eight nods, but the show's impact outweighed any awards. It caused a national obsession over "Who killed Laura Palmer?" and spearheaded a revolution in adventurous TV that led to the medium's golden age a decade later. It also became a sensation in Japan, particularly its prequel film Fire Walk With Me. Many of Lynch's collaborators owe him their careers, including actors Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini, and composer Angelo Badalamenti. He leaves behind a legacy so monumental and enviable that it has touched all of us in some way; to list even a fraction of the artists and creators he influenced would take an eternity.

David Lynch's work is often marked with outpourings of grief and sadness, for Laura Palmer, the dead girl at the center of Twin Peaks, and for many others. Nothing could rival the sorrow that his passing has initiated among the countless lives he touched. He will be missed so profoundly, not only because of who he was, but because his work tells us that yes, darkness exists, not to be suffered, but to be conquered by love. I can't help but think of the words of Catherine Coulson, herself close to death, reprising the role of the Log Lady Margaret Lanterman in Twin Peaks: The Return: "You know about death; that it's just a change, not an end." The great artist is gone from this world, leaving his work behind for us to enjoy and enrich ourselves. He's in heaven, where everything is fine.