RIP David Lynch

News has sadly broken of the passing of legendary director, producer and occasional actor David Lynch, four days before what would have been his 79th birthday. A connoisseur of the strange and inexplicable, Lynch is best-known in genre circles for directing the first feature film version of Dune in 1984, and creating the deliciously strange television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017).

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch moved around a lot as a child, living in five different states in his formative years (including an inspirational stretch in Washington State). As a Boy Scout he was present at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961, on Lynch's 15th birthday. Early plans to be a painter fell through after a dispiriting trip to Europe, so he pivoted to film to support his young family.

His first short film was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), an "arty" but somewhat baffling short piece, setting the tone for his career. Several promising short films followed, and then his first full release, Eraserhead (1977). Lynch spent five years making the movie, remounting it every time he raised enough money to shoot a bit more material. The film proved polarising on the festival circuit, but it picked up a cult following after a wider release in 1977. Stanley Kubrick and Mel Brooks both highly rated it.

Such plaudits saw Lynch taken more seriously and producer Stuart Cornfeld agreed to help him fund his next project. After considering several scripts doing the rounds, Lynch chose The Elephant Man purely based on the title. The film, starring John Hurt as the deformed Joseph Merrick, was rapturously received and earned Lynch his first Academy Award nomination. George Lucas was a huge fan and offered Lynch the chance to direct the third Star Wars film, an idea Lynch found baffling and declined.

Perhaps appropriately, Lynch instead decided to join forces with novelist Frank Herbert on an adaptation of his 1965 novel Dune. Herbert had been furious when viewing Star Wars in 1977, finding many points of similarity between his novel and Lucas' film. Herbert considered legal action, but was advised to instead leverage the resulting sci-fi craze to get Dune on the screen instead. Despite production difficulties, Lynch enjoyed making the film and working with Herbert, and also considered the cast most impressive: a young actor he discovered, Kyle MacLachlan, became a frequent collaborator. However, Lynch fell out with the producers over the film's final cut (which bombed at the box office in 1984), and a later attempt to re-edit the film into a TV mini-series without his permission angered him.

Lynch returned to more of his traditional output with the intense, surreal and disturbing Blue Velvet (1986), also starring MacLachlan. The film was praised by Woody Allen and saw Lynch regain some of the kudos he'd lost with Dune.

Lynch then surprised many by deciding to move into television, helped by ex-Hill Street Blues producer Mark Frost. After developing a Marilyn Monroe biopic series, they hit on the idea of a murder mystery in the American north-west under the working title "Northwest Passage." ABC bought the project and it hit the screens in 1990 as Twin Peaks. Again starring MacLachlan, the show saw the FBI brought into investigate a puzzling murder in Twin Peaks, Washington. The mystery gripped not just the USA, but every country it was broadcast in, and "Who killed Laura Palmer?" because the single-most-asked question of 1990. The first, eight-episode season was acclaimed, as was its haunting soundtrack, but ABC wanted a full 22-episode second season, which stretched viewer interest past the breaking point. Aware they were losing the audience, ABC insisted on the killer being revealed early, to Lynch's immense frustration. Aware the show would not be returning, he ended the second season on a brutal cliffhanger that raised a whole load of new questions. Lynch returned to the series with a bizarre prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), that answered few questions and alienated many fans of the show.

Lynch returned to film, directing Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and The Straight Story (1999); the latter shocked audiences for being a relatively straightforward story with no sex or violence, though it did retain some of Lynch's surreal imagery.

Lynch again decided to work in television, developing a new project for ABC about a young woman who arrives in Los Angeles and gets mixed up with some strange local characters and another woman with amnesia. The pilot was half-finished when ABC decided to shelve it, but Lynch worked out a deal to turn it into a feature film. Mulholland Drive (2001) was a surprise hit when it launched, attracting wild critical praise and moderate commercial success. The film was praised for launching the career of Naomi Watts and enhancing the career of up-and-comer Justin Theroux. The film has several times topped polls to find the best film of the 21st Century (so far).

Lynch continued to work in film, releasing Inland Empire (2006), but admitted he had become pickier about projects. He collaborated with Werner Herzog on the latter's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) and with the band Nine Inch Nails on a 2013 music video ("Came Back Haunted"). To the surprise of some, he decided his next project would be a reprise of Twin Peaks, by producing, co-writing and directing 18 new episodes for Showtime. The third season of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 and received significant critical praise.

In 2022 Lynch did finally return to film, but in an acting role. He portrayed director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film The Fabelmans. New projects were definitively ruled out by his diagnosis with emphysema in 2024, which he blamed on his lifelong smoking habit.

David Lynch was very much one of a kind. An intense artist, he had a bemusing sense of humour and little interest in playing by other people's rules. His films are mostly unified by their strangeness, a mirror to the weirdness of life (both the everyday and the extraordinary). Although Dune is his only overtly science-fictional work, and Twin Peaks dabbles in fantasy, a lot of Lynch's other work taps into his fascination with quantum mechanics. Mulholland Drive, perhaps his most popular and well-regarded film, spins on a dime between two different versions of Los Angeles, with the same actors playing suddenly very different characters. Lost Highway and Inland Empire both employ similar devices.

Lynch could direct more conventionally, with The Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story and elements of Twin Peaks hinting at a more commercially-aware side, and many a Hollywood producer probably regretted Lynch not adopting a more conventional approach. But that was never in Lynch's style. He is survived by four children, and will very much be missed.

Dune (1984)

The known universe is ruled by the Emperor of the Imperium, Shaddam IV, who serves with the support of the Great Houses of the Landsraad. The growing popularity of House Atreides and its charismatic duke, Leto, spurs Shaddam to ally with the sworn enemies of the Atreides, the Harkonnens, and lure them into a trap by offering them the planet Arrakis - Dune - as a new fiefdom. Arrakis is the source of the spice melange, the most valuable substance known to exist, essential for the Spacing Guild to undertake FTL travel and for the prescient powers of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. But when the trap is sprung, the young scion of House Atreides, Paul, escapes into the desert with his mother and allies with the native Fremen, whom they start forming into an army.

Dune is science fiction's biggest-selling novel, and one of its most acclaimed. Frank Herbert's book, published in 1965, has become a taproot text of modern SFF, influencing everything from the original Star Wars to A Game of Thrones to The Wheel of Time and more. Unsurprisingly, this has made it a ripe prospect for adaptation to the screen. The first attempt, by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, failed in the 1970s due to budget concerns. A mini-series, released in 2000, was never more than functional. Denis Villeneuve's promising new film version is, at this time of writing, unreleased and its quality remains to be seen.

David Lynch's 1984 film version is the best-known adaptation to date and the most divisive. It's a curious film, made by a hugely talented and respected artist but one that was also made in thrall to commercial concerns that inhibited his creative freedom. It feels very much like the same problem that, a decade later, beset David Fincher's Alien 3. Both films emerge as interesting curiosity pieces, but beset by problems.

On the positive side of things, Lynch's film has incredible atmosphere and tone. The industrial gothic set design is impressive and many of the visual effects stand up, including the model work and the imposing sandworms (plus the still-freaky-as-hell Guild Navigator in the opening scene). The costume design is also sumptuous. Lynch is a painter on film, and there are many fantastically-framed shots. This is a film that does not lack for epic imagery.

The cast is also fantastic. For 1984 its cast was as stacked as the 2020 film's is today. Francesca Annis as Jessica, Jürgen Prochnow as Duke Leto, Max von Sydow as Liet-Kynes, Sean Young as Chani, Dean Stockwell as Dr. Yueh, a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, Freddie Jones as Thufir Hawat, Siân Phillips as Revered Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Brad Dourif as Piter De Vries, José Ferrer as the Emperor, Virginia Madsen as Princess Irulan, Kenneth McMillan as Baron Harkonnen, Linda Hunt as the Shadout Mapes and, of course, Sting as Feyd Rautha. It's a galaxy of stars, most of whom give their all. Particularly good is Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, who despite his relative inexperience at this point gives a solid performance and is able to nail both the lighter, more boyish qualities of Paul at the start of the film as well as his darker, more messianic tendencies which evolve as the story continues.

The film does have several key weaknesses. The most notable is pacing. Because the Dune universe is strange and dense, Lynch makes the key decision to spend the first half-hour of the film engaged in laborious exposition. This is completely at odds with his later films and TV shows, where any kind of exposition or context is often missing altogether, and one wonders if his experience with this film made him leery of making the same mistake again. It takes the film 25 minutes just to reach the first scene from the actual novel, all spent in setting up concepts like the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild and the mentats. On top of that we get an introductory speech by Princess Irulan (who otherwise has just one line of dialogue in the entire film) further expanding on the spice melange and the importance of Arrakis. I can't help but feel that maybe Frank Herbert had the right idea starting the action more in media res and explaining things as he went along.

This slow start to the film is something it never really recovers from. Lynch expands a lot of time on the Atreides arrival on Arrakis, the first meeting with Dr. Kynes, the first encounter with a sandworm and so on, so that it takes ninety minutes to get Paul and Jessica to their first meeting with the Fremen. From that point to the end of the movie is just forty-five minutes, so Dune backs in a colossal amount of exposition, characters and action into the same amount of time as a network TV procedural. It's mind-bogglingly rushed, and likely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read the book (and even book readers may find themselves bemused from time to time).

Later three-hour cuts of the film - done without David Lynch's approval, and he withdrew his name from them - tried to solve some of these problems by increasing the run time and introducing more exposition, voiceovers and title cards, as well as reinserting some cut scenes, but these don't really help overcome the fundamental pacing problems and may exacerbate them (viewers' mileage will vary, though).

This problem is annoying because there is much here to enjoy. Dune is visually powerful and weirdly interesting, with a stellar cast and excellent location filming in a real desert (a key weakness of the 2000 mini-series is that it had no location filming at all), as well as a great score. But the pacing makes the first half of the film too slow and the second half far too rushed, and too many key concepts from the book are explored only in a half-arsed kind of way. Lynch seems reluctant to remove extraneous book material that doesn't impact on the film, which is why we end up with a pointless Duncan Idaho (who, from a film-only perspective, feels redundant as a character) and the Shadout Mapes, who shows up to offer a warning that everyone already knows about and could have been cut with little loss.

The biggest problem - certainly the one Frank Herbert objected to the most - is the ending, which undercuts the thematic point of the novel and renders the story as an unironic run-through of the Hero's Journey, with Paul as the white saviour/chosen one figure who is going to right wrongs and deliver peace and justice. The novel, and much moreso its sequels, is about the danger of the myth of the "superman" and giving absolute power into the hands of a "hero," with no concern about how it might corrupt him. In this sense, the film fails to deliver the story from the novel, which is more of a warning than a celebration.

If you're already familiar with the Frank Herbert novel, David Lynch's Dune (***) is an interesting interpretation of the book and features much that's impressive. However, the film fails to honour the themes and ideas from the novel (and the ending undercuts them), it is paced poorly and is a little too scared to remove elements from the book that don't work on screen. The film in is an honourable, watchable and interesting failure, but a failure none the less. It is available now in the UK and USA.

TWIN PEAKS relaunch gets an airdate

Twin Peaks is returning to TV screens on 21 May, after a gap of more than a quarter of a century. Showtime will air 18 new episodes picking up on the events in the mysterious town of Twin Peaks, Washington.

The new season has been completely written by David Lynch and Mark Frost, who created the original series, and has been completely directed by Lynch. This is Lynch's first dramatic, scripted project since the movie Inland Empire in 2006: his only projects since then have been the short documentary Idem Paris (2013) and the music video "Came Back Hunted" for Nine Inch Nails (2013). Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor in fact has a guest role in the new Twin Peaks, alongside Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam. Original composer Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the show's infamous haunting theme music, is also returning.

The original show ran for two seasons and 30 episodes from April 1990 to June 1991. It opened with the murder of Laura Palmer, a young girl in the town of Twin Peaks, and FBI Agent Dale Cooper is called in to help investigate the crime. However, what initially appears to be a mundane if horrific crime rapidly expands to incorporate bizarre spirits and an other-dimensional location known as the Black Lodge. Cooper helps solve the crime - and other related cases in the town - by interpreting his dreams and communing with the spirit of Laura Palmer.

The first season was a titanic critical and commercial success, with massive ratings and critical acclaim, as well as appreciation for its tightly-serialised storytelling (highly unusual in 1990, when most shows were episodic with no long-running storylines). The second season, mostly helmed by other writers as Lynch and Frost took a back seat, was considerably less well-received, especially after the resolution of the Laura Palmer murder mystery halfway through the season and relatively few answers being given to the show's many questions. However, the ending to the season was better-received, especially the revelation that the Palmer murder was setting in motion a much bigger and darker storyline. Sadly, this was not enough to save the series from cancellation.

The series was, arguably, the first harbinger of today's big watercooler shows, and its mix of critical and commercial acclaim gradually giving way to disappointment would later be replicated in both The X-Files (which inherited David Duchovny, one of Twin Peaks' recurring castmembers and who is returning for the new show) and Lost. David Lynch himself frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the ending of the series and resurrected the franchise in 1992 for a prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me, which fills in Laura Palmer's backstory and hints at Agent Cooper's fate after the show's cliffhanger ending, as well as having David Bowie show up for no discernible reason. The movie was slated and bombed at the box office, but has seen a positive critical reassessment in more recent years.

Many of the surviving castmembers from the original series return, most crucially Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper. The 25-year gap since the original series will be acknowledged and will play a key plot point (helped by the ghost of Laura Palmer saying "See you in 25 years" in the final episode), and the Fire Walk With Me prequel movie will be considered canonical. Presumably the series will explain what happened to Cooper after the cliffhanger ending to the show's final episode, which appeared to show Cooper possessed by the murderous entity "Bob".

Twin Peaks has been a huge influence on everything from the aforementioned X-Files and Lost to more recent fare like Stranger Things and the Alan Wake video games.

Showtime have described the show as "the pure heroin version of David Lynch", which is both intriguing and terrifying. Whether the new Twin Peaks can resurrect the same kind of power as the original show remains to be seen, but we'll find out in May when it airs in the US and on Sky in the UK.

First footage from the new TWIN PEAKS

Showtime have unveiled the first material from the new Twin Peaks TV series.

This behind-the-scenes video sees the returning actors explaining how much fun the new series has been to make and, er, not a lot else. But given how secretive the project has been so far, that's perhaps to be expected.

The new Twin Peaks will air on Showtime in early-to-mid 2017. The series will consist of approximately eighteen episodes, although this is yet to be confirmed and could change in editing. David Lynch and Mark Frost have written the new series (after writing all of the original series and the Fire Walk With Me movie spin-off) and Lynch has directed the entire series.

It was also recently confirmed that the show's iconic composer Angelo Badalamenti will return to score the new series. It's unclear if the new show will use the original's haunting theme tune, but I'd say it's reasonably likely.