by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
David Lynch is one of those filmmakers who has always just been there, even if you weren’t fully aware of it.
In the same way that every kid grew up with a VHS copy of Jurassic Park running into infinity, and everyone has seen at least twenty minutes of every Star Wars movie on TV, we have all lived in a world where David Lynch’s films have been there in the background.
Whether it was The Simpsons’ playful homages to Twin Peaks – in the process bewildering a generation of viewers far too young to have seen the show themselves – or the countless rip-offs and references to Lynch’s uniquely dreamy and horrifying style, it was hard to consume media in the 20th century without being subliminally aware of David Lynch.
As news breaks today in Australia of his passing, aged 78, it is pointless and practically meaningless to say that there will never be another like him.
Beyond his beautifully surreal style, depicting subject matter that blends the macabre with the comical – Lynch’s films were often startlingly funny – he leaves with us a philosophy that everyone can, and is entitled to, create.
“Even though it might not be taught in school,” Lynch said in a 2015 Q&A with David Stratton, “each and every one of us human beings has a field within us, a treasury within us … like an ocean of pure consciousness. Within each and every one of us is unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity.”
As a cinephile in his late-20s, I am firmly within the camp of film-lovers who can’t remember precisely when they saw their first Lynch. He has kind of always been there.
If I had to drop a pin in my celluloid education, it would be watching Mulholland Drive on a rented DVD in my bedroom, aged 16 – but I had already caught snippets of The Straight Story on TV several years before this.
See? Everyone, at one point or another, has been exposed to David Lynch before they even realise it.
Which is true of perhaps Lynch’s most significant contribution to modern culture, in a century of visual media he helped define: prestige television.
The norm today, of multi-hundred-million-dollar television series from just a handful of streaming giants, is a template that was set thirty-five years ago with the original broadcast of Twin Peaks.
Truly the first time that long-form narrative television became ‘event-viewing’, Twin Peaks brought a profound vein of Hollywood prestige to the stigma-addled medium of television. That an Oscar-nominated director – and one of such stature as David Lynch – could helm something as lowly as network television reoriented the way that commissioning executives looked at TV.
Lynch’s influence has continued to inspire and ignite the creativity of filmmakers and artists across the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. His fingerprint can be found on everything from soapy teen mysteries like Riverdale, and even his bizarre extended cameo as a bartender on The Cleveland Show.
Josh Taylor, a reporter for The Guardian, had an experience similar to many budding film fans upon discovering Lynch in his high school years.
“I became that insufferable teenager,” he says, “when I was introduced to Twin Peaks after renting it from the local video store. No-one else at school knew what it was but, for me, it opened up my whole world to the surreal possibilities of cinema – and changed my film tastes to the weird forever.”
Evan Cooper, meanwhile, a photographic artist based in Melbourne, took Lynch’s influence onboard in much more practical ways. It was Lynch’s reflexive attitudes toward in-the-moment creativity that influenced so much of his methodology as a photographer today.
“I once read,” he says, “that during the filming of a Twin Peaks scene set in a hospital, the overhead fluorescent lights flickered for no apparent reason. Lynch loved it so much he personally took on the role of flicking the light switch on and off.”
Lynch’s embrace of these random events within the filmmaking process, “and to let them become part of his vision,” is a practice that Evan strives to adopt within his own creative work.
“David Lynch taught me to never let things limit you, but to embrace what is happening and using it to explore your creativity.”
David Lynch’s philosophy for creation and creativity, and the wide-armed embrace of the fantastic random, was put best in his 2018 autobiography Room to Dream. Though he was describing the unexpected way in which he came to complete his 2001 masterwork Mulholland Drive, what he says of that film’s creation stands just as strongly as a mantra for life itself:
I don’t know how come it went like that but it went like that and now it’s there and it was meant to be this way.
— David Lynch
1946-2025
Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier is a freelance writer and classical music critic based in Melbourne.
