David Lynch, who was called “America’s first surrealist filmmaker” by actor Dennis Hopper, died in Los Angeles at age 78 on Jan. 16, four days shy of his 79th birthday. Known for films such as Mulholland Drive (2001), he gained a new audience during the COVID pandemic as the internet’s favorite weatherman, streaming daily reports from “Here in sunny L.A.” on his YouTube channel.
Whether it was filmmaking, painting, writing, music, carpentry or fast food, his passions were boundless. On his journey through a world that is “wild at heart and weird on top,” to quote his film Wild At Heart (1990), the director’s life, like his career, was filled with wild twists and turns, and the road for achieving his artistic visions never went down a straight path, even winding its way through the Hawkeye State.
‘Born in Missoula, Montana. Eagle Scout’
Lynch was born on Jan. 20, 1946 in Missoula, Montana. His father’s work as a USDA scientist moved the family around the country to Boise, Idaho, Spokane, Washington, Durham, North Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia, where he attended high school. An Eagle Scout, Lynch was a seemingly clean-cut kid, a kind of poster child for conservative America in the Eisenhower era.
“Growing up, David Lynch had an almost blissfully happy childhood — something you would never expect from the tortured visions of childhood and parenthood that appear in every one of his films,” according Scott Knickelbine, author of the unauthorized Welcome to Twin Peaks. “But the sensitive boy did begin to realize that there was a darker reality behind the bland surroundings he grew up in.”
As a young man, Lynch’s primary interest was painting, attending weekend classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. After high school, he went to the Boston Museum School for a year. With his friend and frequent collaborator, Jack Fisk, he went to Salzburg, Austria, to study painting in 1965. The planned three-year trip ended after 15 days. He said, “It was all so beautiful, so clean, that I became very worried, because I didn’t feel like it was giving me something for painting.”
Later that year, Lynch attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia. He and his then-wife Peggy, also a painter, moved into a 12-room house in an industrial area. Lynch told Newsweek he was fascinated with the body bags hanging outside the morgue across the street. “The bags had a big zipper and they shot water into the bags with big hoses. With the zipper open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like these big smiles. I called them the smiling bags of death.”
Lynch’s first foray into filmmaking was a continuous loop of six animated figures projected onto a sculpted screen, a “moving painting,” appropriately called Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), at an exhibit in 1966. H. Barton Wasserman, a patron of the arts, commissioned Lynch for a similar work, giving him $2,000. Lynch in turn created The Alphabet, inspired by a story Peggy told him about her niece having a nightmare that caused her to chant her A-B-Cs while asleep.
The Alphabet wasn’t quite what Wasserman had in mind, but the film earned Lynch an independent filmmakers’ grant from the American Film Institute in 1968, allowing him produce The Grandmother. He was invited to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at AFI, so he and his family headed west to Los Angeles.
The Stables genius
At AFI, Lynch, along with a dedicated group of friends, made his debut feature-length film, Eraserhead, “A Dream of Dark and Troubling Things.” Hatched into the world in 1977, the film was inspired by Lynch’s impressions of living in the “City of Brotherly Love,” Philadelphia.
“Philadelphia, to me, is a city that’s really filled with fear,” Lynch said in a 1979 interview for the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s sort of a decaying, violent, fearful place. I was living there, and I’m sure a lot of that influenced Eraserhead.”
Behind AFI, there was a series of abandoned stalls and car garages with hydraulic lifts ominously dubbed by Lynch “The Stables.” With the exception of exterior shots in downtown L.A., the film was primarily shot here at night between 1 a.m. and dawn.
“No one ever went down there,” Lynch said in a 2001 documentary on Eraserhead. “It was like a mini soundstage.”
After seeing Eraserhead, a hit on the midnight movie circuit, producer Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks) asked Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980), based on the life of Joseph Merrick (“John” in the film). The accolades Lynch garnered for this heartwrenching portrait led to him adapting Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune for the silver screen. Though Dune (1984) would gain a cult following, it was a commercial and critical “failure” during its 1984 release, Lynch’s vision for the film hampered by studio executives seeking a mainstream hit.
His career rebounded in 1986 with Blue Velvet, which he described as “The Hardy Boys go to Hell.” The auteur was nominated for another Academy Award for Best Director, his second after The Elephant Man. In Blue Velvet and the unproduced screenplay for Ronnie Rocket, you can see the seeds planted that would blossom into one of his most popular creations.
Twin Peaks (1990-1991), co-created with Mark Frost for ABC, was promoted as a primetime soap opera. The murder of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer, whose body washes ashore “wrapped in plastic,” drew millions of eyes into the dark worlds lurking beneath the idyllic town.
Angelo Badalamenti’s hypnotic score featured songs hauntingly performed by singer Julee Cruise, who was born in Creston, Iowa and attended Drake University. The series was still on the air when Lynch directed Wild At Heart (1990), based on Barry Gifford’s novel, winning the coveted Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also filmed a VHS home video exclusive, Industrial Symphony No.1 (1990).
The ’90s, like the ’80s, had their personal and professional ups and downs.
Along with Ronnie Rocket, Lynch had written or co-written a number of unproduced screenplays. One was a comedy to star Steve Martin called One Saliva Bubble, which Lynch co-wrote with Frost, as well a film about Marilyn Monroe based on Anthony Summers’ book The Goddess. He co-wrote Dream of the Bovine with Robert Engels, who worked on Twin Peaks and its prequel film Fire Walk With Me (1992), described by Engels as “three guys who used to be cows, living in Van Nuys [California] and trying to assimilate their lives.”
Other projects that got off the ground, but did not successfully take flight, was the comedy series On the Air for ABC. He also co-created the cable anthology series Hotel Room, and kept busy directing music videos, commercials and shorts, along with other creative outlets to channel his untamed energy. In 1997, Lost Highway, a collaboration between Lynch and Gifford, was released to negative reviews and box office receipts. His next feature would forever link his name to Iowa.
The Straight Story
The seed for The Straight Story (1999) was planted in co-screenwriter Mary Sweeney’s mind when she saw a human interest story in the New York Times: “Brother Love Powers a Lawn Mower Trek,” published on Aug. 25, 1994. The article details the Midwestern odyssey of 73-year-old Alvin Straight, who drove 240 miles from Laurens, Iowa to visit his ailing 80-year-old brother, Henry, in Mount Zion, Wisconsin.
The curious news item struck a nerve with Sweeney, a film editor born in Madison, Wisconsin and married to Lynch from a year in the ’00s. She and Lynch spent some of their summers in Madison. Two years after Alvin Straight’s death in 1996, Sweeney obtained the rights to his life story in February 1998.
Originally, Lynch had “zero interest” in directing the film.
“I’d heard about it because Mary Sweeney was my girlfriend and had been talking about it for three years,” Lynch said at a 2009 AFI forum. “She and her childhood friend John Roach wrote the script, and I read it, and I fell in love with it. I think it was the emotion in that script. Emotion is an abstraction, and I wanted to see if I could get that emotion to come out of the film.”
Shooting commenced in September.
Laurens has a population fewer than 1,300 people, and like a lot of small towns, the most prominent landmark is the water tower bearing its name. As Lynch recalled in Paul A. Wood’s book Weirdsville U.S.A., “It’s a very small town. There’s just this one main street, and there are several similar areas off of it, but it’s very small.”
In The Straight Story, we meet the ruggedly independent farmworker Alvin Straight, played by Richard Farnsworth, whose failing hips force him to walk using a pair of canes. Due to his poor eyesight, he is denied a driver’s license. His daughter Rose, played by Sissy Spacek, lives with him and builds birdhouses. She speaks with a stutter, but “has a mind like a bear trap.” Spacek, who is married to Jack Fisk, had known Lynch since the days of Eraserhead, working as a production assistant.
The scene in which Alvin and his daughter Rose sit next to each other while watching a lightning storm through the window illustrates Lynch’s magic. The phone rings. They receive news that Alvin’s brother, changed from Henry to “Lyle” in the film, had a stroke. The brothers haven’t spoken to each other in 10 years.
“My brother and I said some unforgivable things when we last saw each other,” Alvin somberly recalls, comparing their falling out to the story of Cain and Abel.
Wanting to “sit under the stars” with his brother like they did when they were kids in Montana, Alvin decides he’s going on the road one last time.
Alvin’s journey has a rocky start when his red lawnmower breaks down, forcing him back to town. Lynch has a talent for building suspense with unexpected humor — Alvin calmly walks through the kitchen with a rifle, heads to the backyard, takes aim and puts the machine “out to pasture.” He then buys a green ’66 John Deere lawnmower, hitches a trailer with his camping provisions, and hits the trail again.
Filmed along the actual route traveled by the real Alvin Straight, we see an Iowa (or “I-O-WAY,” as he calls it) that is intimately familiar, with tractors chugging along endless fields, RAGBRAI bicyclists and even a Casey’s gas station. When we enter the homes, backyards, bars and hardware stores, they look real, like they’ve been lived in. Lynch’s hawk-like eye for detail went beyond what can be seen in the frame.
As always, Lynch is fluent in the absurd; at one point, Alvin feasts on the meat of a roadkill deer while “watched” by a herd of plastic decoy deer.
“It is important to deliver certain emotional messages, but not to make them literal, then the audience arrive there for themselves, and they feel it for themselves,” co-screenwriter John Roach said. “The minute you name it, you kill it.”
During Alvin’s odyssey, we discover the memories and tragedies beneath his weathered exterior, and the hope still twinkling in his eyes. Recounting his military service, he says, “I fought in the trenches of World War II. Why should I be afraid of a cornfield?”
The conversations and their rhythms always strike an authentic chord — simple truths, delivered without sermonizing, as when Alvin tells some young partygoers, “The worst part about getting old is remembering when you were young,” to lighthearted jabs about Wisconsin as “a real party place” filled with “cheddar heads.”
As grounded in reality as The Straight Story is, this Iowa seems as far away and as mysterious as the places you only see in dreams.
The film was distributed in the U.S. by the Disney Corporation, premiering at the May 1999 Cannes Film Festival. Stranger than the Disney emblem near Lynch’s name, the film was awarded a “G” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
If placed in the wrong hands, the film could have reduced the locals to corny caricatures, and drench the narrative in saccharine sentimentality. Fortunately, Lynch was at the helm, and we are given a timeless story of the human heart, in which a man can reach for the stars while his feet remain on the ground.
“It’s falling in love with ideas, and the beautiful process of translating those ideas to film,” Lynch said in the 2009 interview. “It’s also about going into another world and experiencing that. That’s what it’s like going into a theater. It’s best, at least for me, to not know anything about the film, and the lights go down, the curtains open, and you enter another world. It’s so beautiful.”
Lynch’s final feature-length film, Inland Empire, was also his first to be entirely shot on digital camcorders instead of celluloid. Even after filming on The Straight Story had wrapped and Lynch returned to Los Angeles, he never really left Iowa.
A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, he started the David Lynch Foundation in 2005, which has center in Fairfield, Iowa. He was a frequent visitor, and always a welcome guest into this strange corner of the world.
In 2019, Lynch was awarded an honorary Academy Award. He thanked the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and “to all the people who helped me along the road.”
From your fans and friends in Iowa: Good night, David.
A shorter version of this article was published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.