David Lynch

David Keith Lynch was born at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, on January 20, 1946 to English-language tutor Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm) and USDA research scientist Donald Walton Lynch. Two of his mother's grandparents were Swedish-speaking Finns who settled in the U.S. in the 19th century. Lynch was also of German descent through his mother, as well as of English, Irish and Scottish descent through his father. He recalled of his father, "He would drive me through the woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads, through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very tall and shafts of sunlight come down and in the mountain streams the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods." He was raised Presbyterian.

The family often moved around according to where the USDA assigned Lynch's father. When Lynch was two months old, they moved to Sandpoint, Idaho, where his brother John was born two years later; they then moved to Spokane, Washington, where his sister Martha was born. The family subsequently lived in Durham, North Carolina; Boise, Idaho; and Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch adjusted to this transitory early life with relative ease, noting that he usually had no difficulty making friends when he attended a new school.

Lynch said of his early life, "I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school... for me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude." He joined the Boy Scouts, and despite later saying that he joined only so he "could quit and put it behind me", he rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. He befriended Toby Keeler, whose father Bushnell was a painter. Bushnell gave Lynch a copy of Robert Henri's book The Art Spirit (1923), which inspired Lynch to dedicate himself to "the art life".

At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Lynch did not excel academically and had little interest in schoolwork, but was popular with other students. After leaving, he decided that he wanted to study painting in college, which he began at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. In 1964, he transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his roommate was future musician Peter Wolf. He dropped out after a year, later saying he "was not inspired at all in that place". He then traveled around Europe with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies; the two hoped to train at the school of Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. But upon reaching Salzburg, they found that Kokoschka was not available; having planned to spend three years in Europe, they found themselves disillusioned and returned to the U.S. after just two weeks.

1967–1977: Early career and feature debut

Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia. Because his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he stayed with his friend Toby Keeler for a while. He decided to move to Philadelphia and enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, after advice from Fisk, who was already enrolled there. He preferred this college to his previous school in Boston, saying, "In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." He recalled that Philadelphia had "a great mood—factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters and the darkest night. I saw vivid images—plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows." He was influenced by the Irish painter Francis Bacon. In Philadelphia, Lynch began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, whom he married in 1967. The next year, their daughter Jennifer was born. Peggy later said Lynch "definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant." As a family, they moved to Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood, where they bought a 12-room house for the relatively low price of $3,500 (equivalent to $33,800 in 2025) due to the area's high crime and poverty rates. Lynch later said:

We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street... We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in... The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.

Meanwhile, to help support his family, Lynch took a job printing engravings. At the Pennsylvania Academy, Lynch made his first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he began discussing creating animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone and purchased the cheapest 16mm camera he could find. Taking one of the academy's abandoned upper rooms as a workspace, he spent $150, which at the time he felt was a lot of money, to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Calling the film "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played it on a loop at the academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint-first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1,000 (equivalent to $9,300 in 2025) to create a film installation in his home. Spending $478 of that on the second-hand Bolex camera "of [his] dreams", Lynch produced a new animated short but, upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was a blurred, frameless print. He later said, "So I called up [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."

With his leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment with a mix of animation and live action, producing the four-minute short The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images of horses before dying at the end by hemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorder to record the sound of Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch found particularly effective. Later describing what had inspired him, Lynch said, "Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started 'The Alphabet' going. The rest of it was just subconscious."

Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to filmmakers who could support their application with a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to submit a copy of The Alphabet along with a script he had written for a new short film, The Grandmother, that would be almost entirely live action. The institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5,000 out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the additional $2,200. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother featured a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell wrote, "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".

Lynch left the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after three semesters and in 1970 moved with his wife and daughter to Los Angeles, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place he later called "completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great... you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing." He began writing a script for a proposed work, Gardenback, that had "unfolded from this painting I'd done". In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add more dialogue, which he reluctantly agreed to do. All the interference on his Gardenback project made him fed up with the Conservatory and led him to quit after returning to start his second year and being put in first-year classes. AFI dean Frank Daniel asked Lynch to reconsider, believing that he was one of the school's best students. Lynch agreed on the condition that he could create a project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was "wrecked", he set out on a new film, Eraserhead.

Eraserhead was planned to be about 42 minutes long (it ended up being 89 minutes), its script was only 21 pages, and Lynch was able to create the film without interference. He recalled its origin: "My original image was of a man's head bouncing on the ground, being picked up by a boy and taken to a pencil factory. I don't know where it came from." Filming began on May 29, 1972, at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team (which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes, and sound designer Alan Splet) to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets, as well as a food room and a bathroom. The AFI gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the film, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, it was unable to give him more. Lynch was then supported by a loan from his father and money that he earned from a paper route that he took up, delivering The Wall Street Journal. Not long into Eraserhead's production, Lynch and Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and he began living full-time on set. In 1977, Lynch married Jack Fisk's sister Mary Fisk. In 1973, Lynch's sister suggested he try Transcendental Meditation. It proved a revelation, and Lynch said he had never "missed a session since: twenty minutes, twice a day."

Due to financial problems, the filming of Eraserhead was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again. During one such break in 1974, Lynch made The Amputee, a one-shot film about two minutes long. He proposed that he make The Amputee to present to AFI to test two different types of film stock.

Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976. Lynch said that not a single reviewer of the film understood it as he intended. Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of Henry (Jack Nance), a quiet young man, living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. It was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, and Lynch has called it "my Philadelphia Story". Lynch tried to get it entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but while some reviewers liked it, others felt it was awful, and it was not selected for screening. Reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. Barenholtz was very supportive of the movie, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977. Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, and was later called one of the most important midnight movies of the 1970s, along with Night of the Living Dead, El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Harder They Come. Stanley Kubrick said it was one of his all-time favorite films.

Marriages, relationships, and children

Lynch had several long-term relationships. In January 1968, he married Peggy Reavey, with whom he had one child, Jennifer Lynch, a film director. They filed for divorce in 1974. In June 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, with whom he had one child, Austin Jack Lynch, in 1982. They separated in 1985 and divorced in 1987. Lynch had a relationship with actress Isabella Rossellini and lived with her between 1986 and 1991. In 1992, he and his editor Mary Sweeney had a son, Riley Sweeney Lynch. Sweeney also worked as Lynch's producer and co-wrote and produced The Straight Story. The two married in May 2006, but filed for divorce that June. In 2009, Lynch married actress Emily Stofle, who appeared in his 2006 film Inland Empire as well as the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. The couple had one child, Lula Boginia Lynch, in 2012. Stofle filed for divorce in 2023. A divorce settlement agreement was reached on December 20, 2024, but the court had not issued a final divorce decree at the time of Lynch's death.

Transcendental Meditation

Lynch advocated Transcendental Meditation as a spiritual practice. He was initiated into Transcendental Meditation in July 1973, and practiced the technique consistently thereafter. Lynch said he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement, for the first time in 1975 at the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center in Los Angeles. He became close with the Maharishi during a month-long "Millionaire's Enlightenment Course" held in 2003, the fee for which was $1 million.

In July 2005, Lynch launched the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace, established to help finance scholarships for students in middle and high schools who are interested in learning Transcendental Meditation and to fund research on the technique and its effects on learning. Together with John Hagelin and Fred Travis, a brain researcher from Maharishi University of Management (MUM), Lynch promoted his vision on college campuses with a tour that began in September 2005. Lynch was on MUM's board of trustees and hosted an annual "David Lynch Weekend for World Peace and Meditation" there, beginning in 2005. The foundation has also funded meditation lessons for veterans and other "at-risk" populations.

Lynch was working for the building and establishment of seven buildings in which 8,000 salaried people would practice advanced meditation techniques, "pumping peace for the world". He estimated the cost at US$7 billion. As of December 2005, he had spent $400,000 of his money and raised $1 million in donations. In December 2006, The New York Times reported that he continued to have that goal. Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish (2006) discusses Transcendental Meditation's effect on his creative process. Lynch attended the Maharishi's funeral in India in 2008. He told a reporter, "In life, he revolutionized the lives of millions of people.... In 20, 50, 500 years there will be millions of people who will know and understand what the Maharishi has done." In 2009, Lynch went to India to film interviews with people who knew the Maharishi as part of a biographical documentary.

In 2009, Lynch organized a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall for the David Lynch Foundation. On April 4, 2009, the "Change Begins Within" concert featured Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Donovan, Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder, Moby, Bettye LaVette, Ben Harper, and Mike Love. David Wants to Fly is a 2010 documentary by German filmmaker David Sieveking "that follows the path of his professional idol, David Lynch, into the world of Transcendental Meditation (TM)". At the end of the film, Sieveking becomes disillusioned with the TM movement.

An independent project starring Lynch called Beyond The Noise: My Transcendental Meditation Journey, directed by Dana Farley, who has severe dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, was shown at film festivals in 2011, including the Marbella Film Festival. Filmmaker Kevin Sean Michaels is one of the producers. In 2013, Lynch wrote: "Transcendental Meditation leads to a beautiful, peaceful revolution. A change from suffering and negativity to happiness and a life more and more free of any problems."

In a 2019 interview by British artist Alexander de Cadenet, Lynch said: "Here's an experience that utilizes the full brain. That's what it's for. It's for enlightenment, for higher states of consciousness, culminating in the highest state of unity consciousness." In April 2022, Lynch announced a $500 million transcendental meditation world peace initiative to fund transcendental meditation for 30,000 college students. In September 2024, Lynch made his last published broadcast speech at Meditate America 2024. He discussed the Beatles' (particularly John Lennon's) practice of TM during their visit to India in 1968 and played a cover of "Across the Universe".

Political and public views

Lynch was present with other Boy Scouts outside the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's 15th birthday. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lynch was the first in his school to hear of it, as he was working on a display case rather than attending class.

In 2009, Lynch signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski who, while traveling to a film festival, was detained based on his 1977 arrest for alleged sexual abuse. The petition argued the arrest would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no one can know the effects". In 2025, Lynch's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, said her father regretted signing the petition after she confronted him about it.

Lynch said he was "not a political person" and knew little about politics. Describing his political philosophy in 2006, he said, "at that time [the 1990s], I thought of myself as a libertarian. I believed in next to zero government. And I still would lean toward no government and not so many rules, except for traffic lights and things like this. I really believe in traffic regulations." He continued: "I'm a Democrat now. And I've always been a Democrat, really. But I don't like the Democrats a lot, either, because I'm a smoker, and I think a lot of the Democrats have come up with these rules for non-smoking." He said he voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election; in the 2000 presidential election he endorsed the Natural Law Party's candidate John Hagelin, an advocate for Transcendental Meditation. In the 2012 presidential election he said he would vote for Democratic incumbent Barack Obama.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Lynch endorsed Bernie Sanders, whom he described as "for the people". He voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson in the general election. In a June 2018 interview with The Guardian, Lynch said that Donald Trump could go down as "one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the [country] so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way." He added: "Our so-called leaders can't take the country forward, can't get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this." The interviewer clarified that "while Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might." At a rally later that month, Trump read out sections of the interview, and seemed to quote a Breitbart write-up of the comments that said Lynch "now appears to believe that Trump may have been the right choice". Lynch later wrote on Facebook that his words were taken out of context, saying that Trump would "not have a chance to go down in history as a great president" if he continued on the course of "causing suffering and division" and advising him to "treat all the people as you would like to be treated".

In one of his weather report videos in 2020, Lynch expressed support for Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd. In a 2022 weather report, he condemned the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and addressed Russian president Vladimir Putin directly, telling him there was "no room for this kind of absurdity anymore" and that Putin would reap what he had sown, lifetime after lifetime.

Industrial Symphony No. 1

While Twin Peaks was in production, the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Lynch and Badalamenti to create a theatrical piece to be performed twice in 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. The result was Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, which starred frequent Lynch collaborators Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage, and Michael J. Anderson and contained five songs sung by Julee Cruise. Lynch produced a 50-minute video of the performance in 1990.