By Ethan Tarantella
I found out through an email.
It was strange how much the headline affected me — “David Lynch, avant-garde filmmaker, dies at 78.” Minutes before my class was supposed to start I went through a bout of denial, looking up other sources. Variety, NPR, CNN, NBC, Wikipedia. I couldn’t believe this was true.
It was.
Everything felt frozen around me, as if everything was put in perspective. Shock and sadness struck me. The only thing my body could do was audibly say out loud “No” in front of my class, leading to this exchange:
“What happened?”
“David Lynch died.”
“Who’s David Lynch?”
Hours later, as I was rewatching scenes from Lynch’s films and kept seeing countless Instagram stories about his passing, I started crying.
I have never felt this depressed over a celebrity death. Maybe it was the horrible coincidence that I was in the middle of rewatching “Twin Peaks” with my roommates, becoming more interested in seeing the rest of his work. Maybe it was because of the onslaught of bad news happening in 2025.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Audio major Avery Ransom was about to go to work when she found out via an Instagram story that said “Rest in Peace, David Lynch.”
“I kind of went through all five stages of grief within 15 minutes when I thought ‘No, that’s not real’,” Ransom said. “And then I was so upset and was just full on sobbing while I was getting dressed for work.”
Joshua Ray, a film critic for KMOV, remarks that the filmmaker’s passing “feels like a family member kind of loss” before going into a broadcast segment on Lynch.
Webster University’s Director of Public Relations Patrick Giblin recommended for The Journal to do an article on his passing. David Lynch’s death clearly means something to everyone, so what exactly was it?
To me, David Lynch was someone whose influence I would see all my life. Before I even started watching “Twin Peaks” in middle school, I saw shows that took notes from his surrealist style.
“Gravity Falls,” as confirmed by creator Alex Hirsch, was heavily inspired by Lynch’s hit show. Even other cartoon shows that students grew up with like “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” “Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated” and “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy” evoked imagery from Lynch’s work, including his 1980s cult classic adaptation of “Dune.” Hell, one of my favorite episodes of “Psych” as a kid was the “Twin Peaks” parody.
Later on, I would find out about his other iconic works: his horror films like “Eraserhead” and “Inland Empire”; his mystery thrillers “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Dr.”; his polarized-turned-acclaimed films “Wild at Heart,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “Lost Highway”; along with his dramas “The Elephant Man” and “The Straight Story.”
Throughout Lynch’s ten films, including shows like “Twin Peaks” and its legacy third season “The Return,” he establishes traits that make him an instantly recognizable filmmaker. A genre-blend of noir and surrealism. A dream-like atmosphere that leads to visuals like an alien-esque baby’s guts exploding from its body or a woman shrieking at a man randomly hiding behind her bed. Blinking lights, “A Woman in Trouble”, and an illogical story that leaves you confused, scared and yet comforted. That’s David Lynch, but also not.
You see, David Lynch is a man that went far to defy all expectations throughout his life. He can be labeled as a director so pretentious that he won’t bother to explain the meanings of his films in interviews or go on a rant about how people shouldn’t be watching movies on their “fucking telephones.” At the same time, many crew members and actors who worked with him all their lives, including editor Mary Sweeney, Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, call him one of the nicest people they ever met. For as artsy as he comes off, he played a recurring character in “The Cleveland Show.”
He was a man who would openly admit to “rescuing” five Woody Woodpecker dolls and then getting rid of them for “not being so nice” in a Telegraph interview, 40 years after the fact. David Lynch was someone who would run a For Your Consideration campaign for Laura Dern in “Inland Empire” with a giant sign and a cow. He’s the type of guy to spend the COVID-19 pandemic doing daily Los Angeles weather reports on his YouTube channel. David Lynch was a weirdo who made whatever he wanted, but it’s not like it was only for the sake of being weird.
“For those of us who found the American Dream riddled with more questions than answers, Lynch’s sideways interrogation of it often seemed to reflect a deeper truth than typical big screen mythologies,” Aaron AuBuchon, associate dean of the School of Communications, said.
All of his work focused on capturing the abstract nature of reality, showing the traumas of America in a style that evokes feeling instead of reason. This depiction has not only led to acclaim from critics for its subversive art, but also inspiration.
“I was pretty heavily inspired by ‘Inland Empire’ and just the way the camera creates this nightmarish feel,” Film major Nick Schanks said. “If I have an idea for something, I’ll usually draw inspiration from one of his projects. His body of work is very much ingrained into my creative process.”
Having fell in love with “Eraserhead” when starting college, Webster alum Jacob Lenhearth related with the confusing narratives of David Lynch. “His films come off as surrealist,” Lenhearth said. “But a lot of it has to do with your outview on the world, because the world is a little surreal. Things just happen with no explanation. So I just exist in this ever-changing world, and I try to take that and put it in my writing.”
Webster Film major Marshall Self has become a recent fan of Lynch after watching “Twin Peaks” over the summer. One of the reasons he connects with Lynch’s filmmaking is a recent OCD diagnosis.
“David Lynch has inspired me to look inwards at what I truly fear and what I would want to represent in my media,” Self said. “It very recently inspired me to want to make a short playing on the idea of OCD and intrusive thoughts and how that would affect somebody and play into how you see things in a certain way.”
Beyond film, Lynch’s work has helped in discovering identity.
“I watched ‘Twin Peaks’ in high school as I was figuring out that I was trans,” Ransom said. “So that definitely plays a role in my relationship with David Lynch.”
Citing “Mulholland Dr.” as one of his favorite films, critic Joshua Ray mentions that the film coincidentally came out at a time he came out as gay and would influence his thoughts on film criticism. He thought of Lynch as “deeply empathetic to the human experience.”
“I always tell people ‘Mulholland Dr.’ is one of the most important films in my life because it really showed me what film criticism can do,” Ray said. “But it runs much more deep than that and that film is about watching movies, the way you absorb movies, the way you interpret movies, like it is actually just about interpreting itself.”
David Lynch, no matter how strange he can get, has left a lasting impact on American cinema. His films have started many famous actors’ careers, led to a surge in national surrealist films and have been included in several “greatest films of all time” lists.
Besides his accomplishments, Lynch was an eccentric personality that has inspired kindness and comfort in a world as strange and malevolent as ours. His loss was felt because he felt like a man who, despite his old age, was gone way too soon.
A question I asked during my interviews with these subjects was what their favorite Lynch moment was. I got varied responses. For Lenhearth, it was the quotable “Pabst Blue Ribbon” line from “Blue Velvet,” a fun inside joke with his friends, as well as a scene in “Lost Highway” that he related to with his paranoia. For Ransom, any scene in “Twin Peaks” that showcases the sincere optimism of Dale Cooper. Schanks thought of the comedic uncanniness of David Lynch’s character Gordon Cole in “Twin Peaks.” Self thought of the Winkie’s diner scene in “Mulholland Dr.” — a “masterclass” in filmmaking as he put it — along with a heartful “Twin Peaks” scene of Julee Cruise singing “The Nightingale” in a bar.
As they gave me their answers, I found myself thinking about which moments from Lynch’s work were my favorites. Was it the Club Silencio sequence from “Mulholland Dr.”? The Trinity Test in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” quite possibly the greatest depiction of both the atomic bomb and American evil? Is it Dennis Hopper playing a nutjob in “Blue Velvet”? The Family dinner in “Eraserhead”? The Hollywood Walk of Fame part in “Inland Empire”?
A moment I keep thinking back on since his passing was the ending of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” specifically the last scene of Laura Palmer in the Red Room. In this moment, the brutally murdered teenager has to go through a series of realizations: she realizes she is dead, where she is and who is in the room with her.
As Dale Cooper stoically comforts her, she looks up at an angel and gives an expression as the blinking lights hit her face. A look of devastation, relief and horror. Paired with Angelo Badalamenti’s (also R.I.P) track “The Voice of Love”, the scene is a kaleidoscope of emotional complexity. There is melancholy, despair and a happiness that now the tortured high schooler is far from the people that ended up killing her, only to be in the realm of spirits that have caused her death.
No one but Lynch could create a scene like that. And now that he is gone, despite the large number of people he has inspired, the world feels emptier now that the man wouldn’t be around to help us cope with the reality he has left behind.
But as he stated in an August 2020 weather report, “I’m wearing dark glasses today, because I’m seeing the future… and the future is very bright.”
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