David Lynch is dead. And yet, saying that out loud feels almost fraudulent, like describing a cloud as dead or a dream as expired. How can someone who seemed so fundamentally unmoored from the banal mechanics of existence actually cease? David Lynch dying is like someone pulling a fire alarm in a dreamscape—it doesn’t feel real, but you can’t ignore it, either.
What Lynch gave us was something more than movies, more than art. He gave us an excavation of our subconscious. He invited us to live in a world where the edges didn’t quite match up, where the idyllic glow of a diner sign at midnight coexisted with the existential terror of whatever was happening just out of frame. He made it clear that there were no clean breaks between the beautiful and the grotesque. Life was—and is—both.
To watch a David Lynch film was to engage in an act of existential wrestling. You weren’t supposed to get it—because to “get it” would be to reduce it, to miss the point entirely. Watching Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive wasn’t about understanding the narrative; it was about letting it rearrange the architecture of your brain. It was about realizing that fear and wonder are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is probably sitting in the pocket of a guy who’s simultaneously whispering and screaming.
Lynch didn’t just create; he built places we could visit in our heads. He made towns like Twin Peaks and environments like Club Silencio that felt more vivid than actual places we’d been. And he didn’t stop at film—he painted, he made music, he gave us weather reports. He was an artist in the purest sense, someone who never felt confined by what an artist was “supposed” to do.
And now he’s gone—or at least that’s what we’re told. But Lynch was never just a person. He was an aesthetic, a philosophy, a glitch in the matrix that we welcomed rather than feared. And glitches don’t die; they reverberate.
So, here’s to David Lynch—the man who made the ordinary unsettling and the unsettling ordinary. The man who saw the darkness and the light and refused to compartmentalize. The man who turned a ceiling fan into a harbinger of doom and made a severed ear in a field feel poetic. He’s gone now, but his work remains—a permanent invitation to explore the weird, the beautiful, and the ineffable.
Or, as Lynch might say: “Fix yourself a damn fine cup of coffee and keep going.”