Legendary Filmmaker David Lynch Is Dead

Director David Lynch, the filmmaker behind classics including Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and TV's Twin Peaks, has died at age 78, reports Variety and TMZ. No cause of death was immediately given, but Lynch announced last year that he had emphysema.

• "There's a big hole in the world now that he's no longer with us," his family said in a Facebook post. "But, as he would say, 'Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'"
• Lynch's works "melded elements of horror, film noir, the whodunit and classical European surrealism," writes Chris Morris at Variety. In the Washington Post, Harrison Smith writes that Lynch "bridged the mainstream and avant-garde, exploring the sinister recesses of the human psyche—and the mysteries behind America's white picket fences—with an unsettling blend of melodrama, whimsy and nightmarish horror."

• Lynch received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2019, on top of four nominations: for directing Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and The Elephant Man, and for also co-writing the latter. See his entire filmography at IMDB, which includes his acclaimed 1997 debut Eraserhead.
• Lynch didn't like discussing the meanings of his eclectic movies: "I like things that leave some room to dream," he told the New York Times in 1995. "A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that kills the dream."

(More David Lynch stories.)