Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

The world-wide community of paperboys lost its most creative member last week.

David Lynch, acclaimed auteur director known for his surrealist style and affable personality, died at 78 on Jan. 16, his family announced. In 2024, Lynch said on X that he had been diagnosed with emphysema from a lifetime of smoking.

Lynch’s legacy stretched nearly 50 years, starting with his 1977 debut feature, “Eraserhead,” which he partly financed by delivering Wall Street Journal issues. Through the 1980s, he established a cult following with films like “The Elephant Man,” “Dune” and “Blue Velvet.”

In the early ‘90s, Lynch revolutionized television with the detective drama “Twin Peaks,” harkening the era of prestige TV later defined by “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad.” In the 2000s, his surrealist movie “Mulholland Drive” earned him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. His final feature, “Inland Empire,” came out in 2006, but Lynch remained active with shorts, paintings and other work, most notably 2017’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

Lily Zuckerman | Design Editor

Coffee, donuts, suave sunglasses, spiffy suits, lounge singers, social outcasts, amnesiacs and nightmares — these are just a few of Lynch’s favorite things. And Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in five of Lynch’s projects and paid tribute to him Sunday in a guest essay to The New York Times.

“I was willing to follow him anywhere because joining him on the journey of discovery, searching and finding together, was the whole point,” MacLachlan wrote. “I stepped out into the unknown because I knew (Lynch) was floating out there with me.”

Recurring cast members like MacLachlan and crew — like Angelo Badalamenti, who scored many of his films — were one of Lynch’s stylistic hallmarks. Subconsciousness was a favorite theme, as well as what David Tarleton, chair of Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts Film and Media Studies Department, called “the decay underneath the veneer of perfection.”

“(Lynch) was interested in the intersection between the subconscious and the conscious,” Tarleton said. “Letting his mind wander, and sort of living in a daydream, and then pulling the work out of that.”

Tarleton is “one of the six people who likes (Lynch’s) ‘Dune.’” “Blue Velvet” is another of his personal favorites.

“Blue Velvet” was the turning point in Lynch’s career, Tarleton said. If you compare “Eraserhead,” with its grotesque infant, or the adaptations of “The Elephant Man” and “Dune,” to Lynch’s later films, you’ll notice a pivot. Tarleton said after “Blue Velvet,” Lynch’s creative visions came to fruition.

Lynch pushed back against studios later in his career. Tarleton said that in “Twin Peaks” the mystery of Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed against Lynch’s wishes. Similarly, in “Mulholland Drive,” Justin Theroux’s character is a film director forced by mobsters to cast an actress that he expressly doesn’t want. Early on, with “Dune” and “Twin Peaks,” Lynch was bogged down by those kinds of conflicts.

“The older he got, the less willing he was to compromise,” Tarleton said. “But he was always busy. He was just less interested in feature filmmaking and all the compromises that entails.”

There are few artists whose names have become synonymous with their style. Like George Orwell and his stories of dystopia and oppressive governments, which can only be called “Orwellian.” Franz Kafka’s absurd, anxious modern stories are called “Kafkaesque.”

And Lynch is no exception. His ‘50s retro-nostalgia, with menace and decay lurking beneath the surface, dives into what Tarleton calls a “contrast of light and dark,” grotesque and beautiful. And he did it with a uniquely absurd sense of humor — all of that’s what defines “Lynchian.”

But his legacy isn’t defined solely by his filmmaking.

Lynch was a multi-facted artist. He painted and sculpted in addition to directing. He began practicing transcendental meditation in 1973 and continued throughout his life. He set up the David Lynch Foundation in 2005 with the goal of ensuring “that every child anywhere in the world who wanted to learn to meditate could do so.”

Steven Chanin, an SU alumnus and executive chairman of the David Lynch Foundation board, described transcendental meditation with a simple metaphor: your mind settles down to a quiet place, like the depths of the ocean. Silence. Waves die down. When you’re there, you experience yourself and your own nature.

To borrow a sports term, it’s like “being in the zone.” That’s the draw for people who practice it, like Lynch, who found his creativity through transcendental meditation, Chanin said.

The goals of the David Lynch Foundation kept expanding. The foundation monitored groups suffering from extreme stress and set up programs to help teach transcendental meditation to them. The foundation worked with inner-city school students initially, but expanded to survivors of domestic violence and first responders, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chanin’s practiced transcendental meditation since 1978. He first met Lynch in 2012, but got to know him personally on trips for the David Lynch Foundation, where he opened offices, screened Lynch’s films and spoke about transcendental meditation. The Lynch you might expect from the at-times grotesque nature of his films, Chanin says, was entirely different in real life — “quite stable,” he said.

“The films were an outlet. They were an expression of his creativity,” Chanin said. “There were the movies, and then there was David.”

Lynch was a celebrity with fame and acclaim. But Chanin knew him as a humble, down-to-earth person. Lynch didn’t demand special treatment. But of course, being David Lynch, people gave him that treatment anyway.

Courtesy of Steven Chanin

Steven Chanin, a Syracuse University alumnus and executive chairman of the David Lynch Foundation board, first met David Lynch in 2012. Chanin got to know Lynch personally on trips for the foundation, during which they opened offices, screened Lynch’s films and spoke about transcendental meditation.

When they visited Ukraine and Georgia in 2017 for two weeks, the presidential limo picked them up from the airport. Chanin noticed that people flocked to Lynch with questions during their trip.

“How could you be so successful? How did you make all these movies? How did you become such a great director? What’s the edge?” Chanin recounted.

Lynch’s answer was consistent: his mental stability and stillness, which he credited to transcendental meditation. It was a gospel he preached often.

And he’d preach that gospel to large groups of 1,500 to 2,000 people, Chanin said, even though Lynch wasn’t necessarily fond of public speaking. But when Lynch stepped on stage, he was as comfortable talking to the crowd about transcendental meditation as he might have been directing a film or painting.

It was another part of his indelible, memorable personality.

“You felt the presence of David Lynch when you were with him,” Chanin said. “The thing I remember most is being with him.”

Lynch’s films aren’t easy to hold in your hand. Watching and understanding them isn’t a given. But Chanin pointed out that while Lynch has died, his films will live on. David Lynch’s influence will be felt as long as people watch them, he said.

Lynch would love that sentiment. His words, from one of his weather reports in 2020, reflect his sentimentality and optimism.

“I’m wearing dark glasses today. Because the future is looking very bright.”

Published on January 22, 2025 at 11:34 pm