David Lynch

American motion-picture director, noted for his eccentric, visually daring style. Several of Lynch’s works have become cult classics.

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana. He studied painting at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts but soon branched out into film and made a number of experimental shorts that combined color, animation, and live action. Two of his efforts, The Alphabet (1967) and The Grandmother (1970), won prizes at film festivals and gained him admission into the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles. The institute helped finance his first full-length feature, Eraserhead (1977), which he made as a student. A surreal, avant-garde, black-and-white art film, Eraserhead received hostile reviews from the mainstream press but became a hit with college students.
The popularity of Eraserhead led to an opportunity to direct and cowrite The Elephant Man (1980), a moving drama about a real-life 19th-century Englishman who suffered from physical deformities. Critics and audiences liked the picture,rift gold and Lynch earned Academy Award nominations for best director and best screenplay. He then directed Dune (1984), a costly science-fiction epic that failed with critics and at the box office.

Lynch’s next film was Blue Velvet (1986), which he wrote and directed. Regarded as Lynch’s masterpiece, Blue Velvet presents a nightmare version of small-town middle America by combining pleasant images such as picket fences and blooming flowers with disturbing ones such as a severed ear and corpses. Influenced in its style by Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the suspenseful creations of British director Alfred Hitchcock, the film drew critical praise and earned Lynch an Academy Award nomination for best director.

Bringing his vision of small-town American life to television in 1989, Lynch directed and cowrote Twin Peaks, a drama centered around the investigation of a murder. The show was a sensation, particularly with young, upscale urbanites,rift gold and it evolved into a series that lasted two seasons. Lynch directed several additional episodes, as well as Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a feature film set shortly before the events in the television series.

In 1990 Lynch made the feature film Wild at Heart, a violent love story about two young people on the road. The picture won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm, for best film) at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1997 Lynch’s film Lost Highway premiered. It conveys a sense of mystery and the main character’s psychosis through the use of dark lighting and surreal, dreamlike imagery.

Lynch took a more traditional approach to filmmaking with The Straight Story (1999). The movie chronicles a journey made by Alvin Straight, an elderly man from Iowa. Straight, who does not have a driver’s license, rides his lawn mower hundreds of miles to a town in Wisconsin to visit his ill, estranged brother.