When David Lynch, the Academy Award–honored filmmaker, died in January 2025 at the age of 78, he was mourned as much for his famously companionable affect — his earnest countenance, slightly dorky manner, ungovernable hair, and buttoned-up-to-the-neck shirts — as he was for his work: the opaque, bizarre, and, above all, dark movies, including Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). In fact, the apparent mismatch between Lynch’s manner and his masterpieces was a source of both befuddlement and, eventually, postmodern-tinged approbation.
Mel Brooks — who, in his capacity not as a comic but as the discerning producer of Lynch’s first studio movie, The Elephant Man (1980) — called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” And New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, in her enthusiastic review of Blue Velvet, wrote that he was “the Frank Capra of dream logic.” Such characterizations are defined by their intentional, playful incongruity. By the end of his life, no one even attempted to resolve Lynch’s apparent contradictions; instead, everyone reveled in them. The seeming dichotomy was part of the joke: the guy who made all those oddball movies was, himself, wide-eyed and ordinary, and isn’t that funny? Arguably Lynch, too, leaned into his apparent ingenuousness, which was undoubtedly good for publicity.
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