David Lynch 1946 -2025

The maverick American surrealist film director sustained a successful mainstream career while also probing the bizarre, the radical and the experimental

- Peter Bradshaw

No director ever interpreted the American Dream with more artless innocence than David Lynch. It could be the title of any of his films. He saw that if the US dreamed of safety and prosperity and the suburban drive and the picket fence, it also dreamed of the opposite: of escape, danger, adventure, sex and death. And the two collided and opened up chasms and sinkholes in the lost highway to happiness.

Lynch, who has died aged 78, was a filmmaker who found portals to alternative existences and truffled in them like they were erogenous zones, moist orifices of existential possibility. He was the great American surrealist, but his vision was so distinctive that he became something other than that: a great fabulist, a great anti-narrative dissenter.

Lynch was unique, in that he took a tradition of experimentalism in movies such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's Meshes of the Afternoon and brought it into the commercial mainstream, mixing it with pulp noir, soap opera, camp comedy, erotic thriller and supernatural horror.

"Lynchian" could as well mean mainstream or even conservative. Lynch himself was not joking when he talked about his pride at being an Eagle scout in his boyhood.