This article appeared in a special January 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Courtesy of Janus Films

The groundswell of grief that followed David Lynch’s death on January 15 caught me off guard, as I suspect it did many others, in its sheer reach and intensity. For a few days, it seemed that everyone had a heartfelt tribute to offer, a life-altering encounter to share. In the stunned messages of mutual condolence I exchanged with friends and colleagues (including, to my surprise, with several filmmakers whose work bears little outward resemblance to Lynch’s), I intuited that we were mourning not just a major artist but something larger and more amorphous. The eras that Lynch exemplified, the relationship with art that he embodied—with his passing, these were gone as well. Why did he mean so much, to so many?

This was the very question I wrestled with a decade or so ago when I wrote a book on Lynch, which I came to think of less as a critical biography than as an anatomy of a sensibility. It was a sensibility at once elusive and ubiquitous, a way of seeing and sensing that applied to entire categories of experience and yet suggested something possibly different to each of us. No wonder this loss feels so profound. As with all things Lynchian, it was personal. Working in an industrial art form, within the commercial formats of the narrative feature and the television serial, Lynch was never less than fully himself. His films give the impression of being dredged from his unconscious, and they seek to activate something in ours: there is no way to take them except personally.

Allow me then, as other eulogists have done, to get personal: Lynch was, for me, a constant companion and inexhaustible subject. He was responsible for many of the most indelible viewing experiences of my life, starting with a seismic teenage encounter with Blue Velvet (1986) that imparted an insight I still hold dear: it is often more exciting not to understand a work of art in its entirety. Fruitful incompletion can be more gratifying than seamless comprehension (it might even have helped that the pan-and-scan VHS was missing well over a third of the image). While in graduate school, I finagled my way into a press screening of Lost Highway (1997), and came out convinced it was a towering work, only to see the film summarily dismissed and panned—an early and valuable lesson in the pervasiveness of critical groupthink. (Some prominent exceptions aside, contemporaneous reviewers routinely got Lynch wrong, as did the industry that often viewed him with condescension and suspicion. Short of raves, the distributor of Lost Highway emblazoned a Siskel & Ebert slam—“Two Thumbs Down!”—on the ads.) Emerging dazed and delirious from a screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) at Cannes, I did something I have never done before or since: I got right back in line to watch the film again. On assignment to interview Lynch for Inland Empire (2006), I was fortunate enough to see it in his private screening room at his Hollywood Hills compound (also the Madison residence in Lost Highway), a collision of circumstances so overwhelmingly eerie I believed for a moment that the film—its source a glowing QuickTime file in my peripheral vision—was itself malevolent, in keeping with its nightmarish insinuation that stories are vectors of transmission, forces that haunt.

Lynch took a famously firm stance against interpretation, insisting that words do violence to his films. For some, his refusal to elucidate was a contemptuous affectation, but it has always struck me as a mark of his generosity. It is impossible in any case to explain away the power of his strongest work, and the decades-old cottage industry of Lynch studies only underscores this point. Partly for this reason, I was wary of the prospect of teaching courses on Lynch, fearing it an even more futile endeavor than writing about him. But on the two occasions that I have done so in recent years, at different universities, these strange, baffling, confrontational films proved to be remarkably useful and expansive pedagogical objects. They teach you how to watch them. In unusually overt ways, Lynch’s movies compel attention to form and affect; you can’t help noticing how cinematic language is being deployed to engender their effects. They open doors to classical Hollywood (Billy Wilder, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger), to the historical avant-garde (Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie), to the contemporary vanguard (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lucrecia Martel, Bertrand Bonello), to film noir and melodrama, surrealism and postmodernism, Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon, H.P. Lovecraft and Roberto Bolaño, and much more besides. I was initially hesitant to engage with Lynch in a classroom context in the age of the trigger warning. But reencountering the films through fresh eyes and ears, I soon recognized that the discomfort and confusion they induce are ripe for reconfiguring as generative states, and precisely what makes the work thrilling, not least as the culture continues to lose its taste for complexity and capacity for ambivalence.

As Lynch advanced into his seventies, barely a year went by without whispers circulating of a new film, rumors indistinguishable from wishful thinking. We should be thankful, as it stands, for the miraculous parting gift that was Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the most immense and shattering of last testaments, a culmination and summation that deepened every aspect of the Lynchian project, in the process cementing his status as the great artist of the American imaginary. While no one would mistake Lynch for a social realist, he was attuned to the world at its subliminal frequencies. He advanced a notion of ideas existing independently of the artist, waiting to be reeled in like big fish. The work is oneiric and interior, to be sure, which accounts for the preponderance of psychoanalytic frameworks among Lynch scholars. But as in his weather reports—forecasting one more day of beautiful blue skies from the window of his studio—he was always looking out there, to the world we all share.

It was not by accident that Lynch made an era-defining work for every era in which he was active: Eraserhead (1977), a quintessential midnight movie; Blue Velvet, an emblematic Reagan-age text; Lost Highway, a repository of premillennial apocalyptic angst; Mulholland Drive, a definitive eulogy for old Hollywood, for celluloid, for movies as we knew them; Inland Empire, a dispatch from the bowels of the new digital realm. The Return, as many of us likely recall with hallucinatory clarity, unfolded across the first summer of the first Trump presidency, a fever dream of dread and dissociation tailor-made for a cruel season of calamitous breakdown that has since hardened into place, our draining new normal.

Which brings me to the grim timing of Lynch’s passing—as wildfires were ravaging the city he memorialized in some of his greatest films, and days before the second Trump inauguration, which took place on what would have been Lynch’s 79th birthday. Now it’s dark, in the immortal words of the psychotic Frank Booth—really fucking dark—and it is unmooring not to have Lynch around to help us feel our way through the darkness. Lynch was fearless, and utterly unselfconscious, when it came to tackling the biggest, vaguest, most all-consuming themes, the most primal and least articulable; he approached them more seriously and sincerely than many others could, with curiosity, wonder, and a healthy dose of sick humor. It was easy to mistake him for a conservative because of his preference for seemingly Manichaean narratives that pit the light against the darkness, innocence against depravity, but in Lynch’s rendering, somehow both cartoonish and sophisticated, good and evil were rarely fixed coordinates.

The Lynchian speaks so viscerally to our moment because it is a fundamentally phobic sensibility. “Fear is the mind-killer,” the Dune (1984) line goes, a mantra fit for meditation. The fear in Lynch’s films—as evident in the myriad ruptures and cleavages, the multiplying alter egos and planes of existence—resides in the omnipresent possibility of things falling apart, which happens now to be our daily state of affairs. But as we know from so many pivotal sequences—Jeffrey’s reckoning in the Blue Velvet closet, the Club Silencio epiphany in Mulholland Drive, Laura Palmer’s recurring realization of her abuser’s identity—the Lynchian is also a particular strain of epistemological horror, rooted in the discovery of knowledge that opens up under both the characters and the viewers like an abyss.

And what knowledge is harder to bear than that of death. The fact and the meaning of death have loomed large in Lynch’s work from the start. It figures within an almost childlike spiritual cosmology in his early films. Asked what happens at the end of Eraserhead, Lynch once said: “Henry goes to heaven” (where, as the Lady in the Radiator has assured us, everything is fine). “Nothing will die,” says Merrick’s mother as The Elephant Man (1980) concludes, quoting Tennyson. A narrative enterprise that spans 48 episodes of television and one feature film over a quarter century, Twin Peaks was Lynch’s most sustained interrogation of death, from the pilot’s stunning round-robin of lachrymose grief to the impossibly moving long goodbyes of The Return, populated with an abundance of lined faces and frail bodies no longer with us, Lynch’s own now included.

Countless artists have sought in their work to confront or to deny death, and Lynch did both, in ways that transcended the sentimental commonplace. He was committed to making us feel the shape of absence, the slow and deranging time of bereavement, and he rejected narrative closure as the worst kind of death—one that left no possibility of a lingering afterlife. There is a sense in which Lynch has been preparing us for this moment all along. We will be taking the measure of this loss for some time. For now, we can be grateful that he knew in his bones that art stands a better chance than we all do against mortal rules.

Dennis Lim is the artistic director of the New York Film Festival and the author of Tale of Cinema (2022) and David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015).