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RIP to one of my favorite filmmakers.
Oh that’s really sad. A favourite director of mine.
Eraserhead - my mind is still trying to make sense of it
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It's OK to just not care for things. Sometimes those things will be good. It's still OK to not care for them.

It's also OK to like bad things. I like lots of bad things.

"Fear and anguish of parenthood" as a movie?
This is incredibly sad news. I guess I'm rewatching "Mulholland Drive" tonight
Lynch's was still my favorite version of Dune despite flaws.
Yep, no contest. Compared to the sterile, boring, brooding Villeneuve version - a tone that worked well in Blade Runner 2049 however - it's so much more entertaining and interesting.
I liked the first one from Villeneuve because for the most part it stuck to the story but the second one veered off into its own story.

I know its nerdy but I absolutely hate when movies of classic books think the story needs to be changed (I'm looking at you, Peter Jackson).

I'm still reserving judgement.

In a vacuum I don't love the changes he made to Part 2 but I can also see how they will make it flow much better into Part 3 than Dune > Dune Messiah ever did (that always felt disjointed to me); as well as make that story more compelling.

I wish just for once these directors had simply made the movie of the book and damn the consequences of what Hollywood thinks audiences want. The movies that directors such as Peter Jackson make are brilliantly done - if only the story wasn't hacked. And that's not even addressing the worst of the travesties such as Radagast the Brown being covered in bird shit and the dwarves in The Hobbit being a bunch of circus clowns.
Its often not directors defining pacing and length of the result, but producer/studio. A lot of bitter conflicts came up from this.
This is the the most famous, if not the only instance of Lynch giving up control of the final edit. He seemed angry about the way it turned out.
What works in books often doesn't work on screen and vice versa. They are different media.
Agreed. The difference between a book and a film is that they are completely different things. You can't just graft a story from one directly onto another and expect results.
> What works in books often doesn't work on screen and vice versa. They are different media.

Not really. The biggest issue is time. As far as i noticed, one needs 2 hours of movie for 100 pages of a book. Anything below this (fitting 400 pages in 2 hours) is art. That's why Lynch's version is better.

Exactly

For example, 2001 was a great movie but Clarke's worst book imo because he collaborated with Kubrick to write it for for big screen.

It's not about what they "think audience want" it's about what film directors know works for visual storytelling as opposed to written storytelling.
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I've tried to avoid spoilers below, but there are some minor ones for anyone reading who has never read Dune Messiah.

I've read Dune at least a dozen times and followed up with Dune Messiah a few times. Sometimes I get that feeling of disjointedness. At its most extreme, Paul feels like a total stranger. (Stilgar might as well be a different characters; we see a changed character, but not the change.) Sometimes it feels like the books flows nicely despite the time jump. My best guess is that it depends on what aspects I've been most focused on while reading.

I'm reserving judgment as well, but one part is really stuck in my craw. Although I felt like Villeneuve's Chani was generally stronger I felt the last scene made her look like a child and my first thought was that it was a weak attempt to set up a particular relationship for Part 3.

> but I can also see how they will make it flow much better into Part 3 than Dune > Dune Messiah

Lynch could have made a Dune Messiah. Villeneuve is not able to express the mysticism.

I appreciated the change to make Chani fill a role like Sherif Ali in the film Lawrence Of Arabia (the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, if not the film, is plainly a huge influence on Herbert's Dune, and it's probably impossible for a director to film so much as a scene set in the desert without thinking of Lean's film).

So much of Dune takes place inside people's heads that it's basically unfilmable if you don't make some changes. Plus, even with five hours of film, you're going to be cutting whole scenes from the book whether you want to or not. Lynch's solution was to make it a more straightforward hero's journey—and given the length of his film, and no expectation of sequels, I can't really blame him. Villeneuve had more space and so could tell a darker and more foreboding story, closer to the original, but still needed to externalize some of that internal struggle and foreshadowing, for which he used, especially, Chani.

[EDIT] Oh and as for this:

> I know its nerdy but I absolutely hate when movies of classic books think the story needs to be changed

Every now and then such a deviation ends up being excellent as its own way, while still benefitting from the connection to the original and being better as an "adaptation" than an independent property. Verhoeven's Starship Troopers would be one of the more extreme examples of this kind of outcome. A gentler one might be Kubrick's The Shining.

Good adaptation is inherently transformative, despite nerd disgruntlement.

Perhaps in a few years AI will have progressed to the point people can spin up their own literal version and see this for themselves.

Lynch had the cojones to show a guild navigator
Just be sure to watch the longer, two-parts version; it's bewildering how much the ending was butchered, and changed, in the theatrical one
They re-released it in theaters when the new Dune came out. I was one of four people at my viewing!
I thought I was the only one who preferred David Lynch's Dune. I'm glad to find out I'm not alone. I explain to people that it depends on if you're a bigger David Lynch fan or a Frank Herbert fan. I have nothing against Herbert, but I guess there's something about Lynch's work that speaks to me, even a movie like Dune that he himself hated.
I am Herbert "fan". I think Lynch captured better the religious part, the mysticism of Dune. Without this, Dune is just another first person shooter.
I love Lynch and Dune, but his Dune was a cult film but not a good adaption. I mean the cat milking scene is absolutely a wtf.

Villeneuve version is the superior adaptation.

I really like the original Dune. While uncommon I think that hearing what people thought worked well. I also like the visuals, like the guild navigator or the disgusting baron.

That said I appreciate the new films too, in different ways. It looked amazing watching it in the IMAX theater, and I liked how the visions were presented. Not perfect films though, especially I think casting fewer big stars could have helped. I almost got distracted by the familiar faces.

Here's a non-facebook link for anyone who refuses to use that site:

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/david-lynch-dead-director...

Thank you. I was hesitating to post the facebook source but back when I submitted there was no other coverage.
Ok, we'll use that above, since it has so much more information. (Submitted url was https://www.facebook.com/davidlynchofficial/posts/it-is-with....)

Another relevant link people may want to look at:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/david-ly...

Looks like NYT haven't published their full obituary yet.

Sad news, he was a genius creator - I like to think about him as Salvador Dali of our times. For sure his works will be remembered.
Rest in peace to a one-of-a-kind creative genius. Strangely I just rewatched Inland Empire last night for the first time since seeing it in the theater, so this is hitting extra hard.

In addition to his incredible film/television work, I'd like to give a shout-out to his other forms of artistic expression which often got less attention. His musical output captured the same unique vibe as his films, for example his album Crazy Clown Time is almost certainly best enjoyed in a smoky room with syncopated strobe lights and patterned flooring. His mixed-media paintings and sculpture were also impressively unsettling.

For Lynch his most important work was promoting his foundation

Here's a nationally televised discussion he had with the President of Ukraine about teaching 100,000 veterans to meditate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf7-mErKWlc

.

His final public appearance was a video he sent to a fundraiser for his foundation last year:

https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1fg3npu/david_l...

______

* May everyone be happy.

May everyone be free of disease.

May auspiciousness be seen everywhere.

May suffering belong to no-one.

Peace.

Jai guru dev

________

During Covid I started watching his daily weather update, even though I didn’t live in LA. Virtually every day was the same. Very clear. Very still.

I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative. He always left so much unsaid and open to interpretation, just like life. They are movies designed to make the viewer feel a certain way, rather than literally what’s in the screen. He was one of the few directors that I thought of as making weird things that I would enjoy (most of the time), but how could anyone else?

“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

It took me a little while to be convinced that he was actually reporting the weather as it was like at his home rather than saying the same thing every day. But, no, he was really reporting the weather and the weather is really just always like that in LA.
"Los Angeles, every day, hot and sunny, today, hot and sunny, tomorrow, hot and, for the rest of the… hot and sunny, every single day, hot and sunny. And they love it. 'Isn’t great, every day, hot and sunny?' What are you, a @$%^& lizard?"

- Bill Hicks

I've been in LA for 14 years, and I always say LA has great weather in the same way a mall has good weather. It's never unpleasant and is always "perfect", but at some point you miss the feeling of breeze and slight variations and it feels like you're breathing air from a can.
I’m in Seattle and during the summer heat, the city dries and sometimes ends up with smokey haze from wildfires.

Then comes that random rainy day at the end of the heatwave, gives the city a shower it needs and the fresh smell is unbeatable.

I’m not sure what heaven smells like, but if I had to guess it’s like the air after summer rain in my city.

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I mean we get wind. But that usually comes right before fire.
Hah yeah plus it always feels sinister. We don't get nice breezes.
That is funny, when I see David I see Bill and vice versa.
I was also under the impression that sometimes his weather report was more like a him stating how he was feeling that morning
LA weather is either "coastal low clouds will burn off by late morning, it'll be a lovely day", StormWatch(TM), or Santa Ana winds.

There's no other options :P

Reminds me of his comic strip. Same pictures every time, just different words.
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.

His movies are not supposed to be "got" completely. They are surrealist. They have the logic of dreams. Or nightmares. There are things in them that won't ever make literal sense.

Any film school graduate can string together some random images and call it "surreal", and mostly those would be boring. but Lynch was a master: in his films, all too often, just as your conscious mind was going "wait, what?" some subconscious voice would be nodding "yes, that fits".

I want to push back on the surreal end slightly. It's true that his movies are extremely resistant to analysis, and it's true that much of his imagery is de-facto surreal. But his movies still have narratives assembled from humans in concrete situations with concrete problems and easily understandable actions and reactions. In other words, you can enjoy his movies as an experience at relative face-value in a way many other forms of surreal art resist.

Some more than others, perhaps—the man produced Dune and Eraserhead pretty damn close together, and Eraserhead is not generally considered an easy movie to watch. But the man was never afraid or dismissive of giving us straightforwardly enjoyable cinema, even if we can't easily articulate why!

Sort of. The plot is not always clear, but what is always clear is how you are supposed to feel in each scene.
Yes! I tell people to focus on the emotions that come up when they watch his stuff, and to focus less on trying to piece everything together.
Eraserhead is about the fear of being a new father.
As a father that was much more obvious than when I saw it for the first time at 16 ;-)
Perhaps more to the point, the fear that parenthood will destroy "the art life".
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.

The plots of his movies are often more concrete than people expect. I'm not saying a movie like Mulholland Drive is easy to follow, but it does have a legible plot. Feel free to read the wiki or something if you are not sure who some character is or what they are doing.

If you are just letting the experience wash over you, you may be missing some plot points that are not meant to be mysterious.

Obviously his movies are weird and not entirely legible, but don't assume everything in them is meant to be inscrutable.

I wasn’t implying that there was no narrative, just that his movies were so much more than just the narrative. And often things that seemed perplexing were just things he thought were interesting or beautiful so he put them there for no other reason.

That’s, in my opinion, where some of the intractability comes from: is this bug buzzing around a ceiling light meaningful to the plot or just something he saw one day and wanted others to experience as well. Every once in a while he’d give a tell, often unintentionally, while talking about something else. But most of the time he let things into the world without explanation.

Mulholland drives plot isn’t even that hard to follow once you figure out the twist. You can definitely go crazy deep with the symbolism though
All of the comments about how hard Mullholland Drive was to follow are making me wonder if I missed something. I watched it a couple of times when it was in the theater and enjoyed it, but I don't remember being all that confused. Certainly not like Twin Peaks confused. I guess now is as good a time as any to rewatch it.
in my experience, this is just a very individual thing, warying from person to person. i watch a lot of movies on my own, and when i watch movies with others, i'm sometimes very surprised how much troube some people have understanding a movie.

i mean, Inception is one of those movies which is a tiny bit more difficult to understand, but i've watched it with people who had zero clue what was going on.

enough trashing other people - i loved watching Memento, but i must confess that i should watch it again, as i didn't really understand the full story while watching it.

then there are movies like tenet which just feel complicated as a gimmick, reminding me of the rick&morty copypasta, "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand X"

in summary, some people are good with abstract thinking and understanding, others are not.

> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.

I actually found "Mulholland Drive" to be incredibly accessible for a Lynch movie. Twin Peaks remains an absolute (and highly fascinating) enigma to me, especially the third season, but "Mulholland Drive" always felt like an enigma with a satisfying solution.

He used to do those on the LA radio station Indie 103. He would call into Joe Escalante’s morning show and do the weather.
His work isn't for everyone, but I feel like for those who connect with it, it feels intensely personal
How sad. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (the IMO under-appreciated pilot), and yes his Dune even though he didn't like it are some of my favourite movies of all time. RIP
100% for his Dune

Hopefully it will get reappraised, now

One of the most brilliant failures of move history
Blue Velvet and Elephant Man. Discover them or help someone else discover them.
Of course I know them (actually watched Elephant Man as a kid on the big screen!). Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive just sting harder as unspeakable reflection on who we pretend to be to ourselves vs how we might look in the eyes of a cruel society IMO if my interpretation isn't totally nuts. I think I'm going to watch MD right now in memoriam!
We discovered a cut that was about three hours that people who hadn’t read the book seemed to understand. Had a different intro and flowed better.

I’ve seen three versions of this movie. The theatrical and the longest one both sucked for anyone not a Herbert fan. I thought the longest was the director’s cut but he never did one. Perhaps it was the TV movie cut. But I don’t know what the “good” one was called.

My best guess is that you're thinking of the Spicediver edit, a fan edit which runs about three hours, and is highly regarded.
Do you know when this was made? The version I am thinking of existed at least as early as 1995, possibly 1993. Someone else hosted us so that removes a lot of the clues I would normally use to figure out when exactly it happened.
This page on IMDB has all the "legitimate" versions I'm aware of, but I'm sure there are unauthorized cuts out there:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/alternateversions/

A non-theatrical "director's cut" is a Mandela Effect moment for me. I don't know what I watched. It wasn't the TV version, because that was the first version I watched. I can only guess that it was a common mistake to call some version "the director's cut" among viewers (or maybe just my friends) in the past.

The list I've linked to certainly wasn't illuminating for me, but maybe it will be for you.

Interesting. I understand he wasn't satisfied with the introductory narrative and other non-cinematic means of storytelling. But I love how the movie focuses on inner dialog to approach the novel and how decidedly non-techie, for sci-fi of all things, the movie was at the time, believably telling the story of a post-tech society that had room for style and decadence. And the Dune remake pays tribute to it.

I was also in awe how time travel was depicted by music; might help that the cheesy guild navigator scene operating the spacecraft wasn't shown (or was it? I didn't notice it when I first viewed it, and I like to think that's one of those scenes David Lynch would've rather left out).

I camped out in line on Hollywood Blvd for several hours to be in the first public screening of Dune at the Chinese Theater. So I know I saw the release print and to my then college-aged perceptions, I didn't really connect with it. I didn't think it was bad but I didn't think it was good either.

I blame this on the muddled mess that was the release edit and how misleadingly the film was promoted by the studio. I was a huge fan of pop sci-fi like Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner and the advertising set a very different audience expectation than what the film delivered. Unfortunately, that experience kind of tainted Lynch's Dune for me.

I didn't really begin to appreciate Lynch as a great filmmaker until Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both of which I loved. Someone linked a 'highly-regarded' three hour fan edit of Lynch's Dune which I've bookmarked to check out.

> and yes his Dune even though he didn't like it

His Dune was the only one close to the book and the atmosphere of the book.

Sad to hear. Personally I think I've only seen Mulholland Drive before, but long time ago. I enjoy surreal movies in general, so kind of weird I haven't seen more of Lynch's work. What personal favorites do other HNers have, of what he'd done?
Twin Peaks is the best TV show ever made
The first season is a masterpiece. Second season goes off the rails and loses direction fairly early on
But it's very much redeemed by the third season, which is every bit as good as the first season, albeit rather different in tone.
Part 8 of season 3 left a deep impression on me. I still think about it regularly.
"This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within."

(I had to check if that was part 8 - but of course it is.)

Last few episodes are great again, and then we got Fire Walk With Me which is awesome. Also check out the feature-length The Missing Pieces composed of scenes cut from Fire Walk, if you haven't.

Frankly I find even the "bad" stretch of S2 better than more than half of allegedly-good TV, anyway.

I agree, although on rewatches I have fast-forwarded through a lot of the James scenes in S2.
James-hate is common even among the more devoted fans of the show, I think.

https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/why-we-hate-james-hurl...

I think about the "Watching Twin Peaks" comic around 2/3 down that page pretty much every time he's on screen. "Ugh yes please go," indeed.

Oddly, I liked him in The Return.

I really only dislike his scenes with Evelyn to be honest, it's one of the few subplots that just bores the hell out of me.
Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart are my two personal favorites. And as stated before, Twin Peaks is one of the greatest shows ever made.
If you enjoy surreal movies then definitely Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. Just don't watch them with your kids. (Or parents...)

They are not 'normal', which is something I always admired about David Lynch. He had a very personal style and vision, and stuck with it.

Random anecdote along those lines: I got along great with my manager at my first full-time job, but was surprised when he mentioned one day that he wasn't interested in independent film at all. As an indie film lover myself, I asked him why.

He grew up in a very straight-laced conservative community, and he said that he and his friends tried to watch an independent film once, but they all found the film was far too disturbing. So after that he never tried again.

I asked what film they watched, and he answered Blue Velvet, and suddenly his perspective made a lot more sense to me!

My best Mullholland Drive experience: A couple of years ago a local arthouse cinema showed the movie again. It was brilliant, just like I remembered it.

After the showing, the projectionist came into the room and apologized for the confusing movie: "I must have mixed up the reels..."

She didn't.

I love Lost Highway. But, you have to watch the whole thing confused. Then have someone explain what's happening in the last scene. Then watch the whole thing again amazed. Also, the soundtrack was one of the first produced by Trent Reznor --long before he made a hobby of collecting Oscars.

And, I grew up watching Lynch's Dune over and over until it made sense :P

The soundtrack to Lost Highway is one of my top albums, all categories. Equally as fascinating, weird, violent and beautiful as the film itself. The tracks are masterfully sequenced, often blend into each other and form a complete work in itself.

It has long been my testbed for gapless playback on various hardware and software, often to my disappointment. (I'm not sure the experience is even available on streaming platforms, where things are normally playlists of disparate blobs of data, where perhaps "this track is not available in your region".)

As well as soundtracks, Lynch is a huge figure in sound design generally. He is a pioneer and master of several techniques that have entered the standard repertoire now, like foreshadowing, looming, use of rhythmic leitmotifs. A very creative pioneer. Will be missed. RIP.
To me that was his movie that made most sense. It seems a perfect allegorical depiction of what it means to have bad conscience.
Inland Empire is my favorite film of his, followed by the Twin Peaks movie, but I'm not sure the movie stands on its own without the TV show.
The Straight Story is not at all surreal, but rather simple and heart-warming, and somehow still somewhat weird.
I recommend starting at the beginning with Eraserhead. He hasn't made anything I would classify as less than brilliant.
Shit. I wasn't expecting him to die anytime soon, so this came as a surprise.

RIP

He had to retire due to emphysema.

The work of his Foundation continues (as though anyone here takes it seriously).

I wasn't keeping up with his personal life, so it makes more sense now considering his illness. I still find it crazy how he remained a smoker for basically all his life even after it was proven to be awful for your health.
One of the few mainstream Directors capable of producing an "emotional experience" rather than a strict narrative. If you've found his movies baffling, or non-sensical try to approach them with this mindset.
Blue Velvet. Twin Peaks. Lost Highway..

No words, just a feeling somewhere between waking and dreaming.

During the pandemic David Lynch released a daily weather video in which he reported what the weather was at his home in Los Angeles.

First video was May 11, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krIj6eLF4mU

Last video was December 16, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l21GFyOO8Ug

He also released a daily video in which he drew a bingo number. I can't really imagine any other major director doing something like that in their late 70s.

Actually he started this back in 2005
As part of his pre-YouTube digital media website along other works like Rabbits
HIs final video was sent to his foundation's fundraiser last year because he couldn't attend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1fg3npu/david_l...

These were the very last words he spoke:

______

May everyone be happy.

May everyone be free of disease.

May auspiciousness be seen everywhere.

May suffering belong to no-one.

Peace.

Jai guru dev

________

Love Twin Peaks. Puget Sound resident here. I can see the big driftwood log Laura Palmer was found next to from my window.
Twin Peaks was delightfully weird. It was the sole reason I bought a TV, believe it or not.
Another nice thing about Twin Peaks is it inspired Chris Carter's X-files and the early X-files seasons have that same dreary feel to them Twin Peaks did.
X-Files was another amazing show. A must-watch for my kids, when they come of age for it.
Aside from, obviously, David Duchovny, more than a handful of the regular Twin Peaks cast showed up in the X Files. Shapes ft. Michael Horse and Humbug ft. Michael J. Anderson are two particularly great early episodes.
Don S. Davis played Maj. Garland Briggs in Twin Peaks and Captain William Scully, Dana Scully's father in the X-files first season (and in one or two later cameos). In both he plays a stuffy high ranking military officer which is quite amusing.
RIP Don S. Davis, aka 90 TV's best military dad.
I made the pilgrimage to Snoqualmie and North Bend multiple times. David Lynch has always been my inspiration.
A lot of beautiful scenery, and the locations themselves are like characters in the show.
“Beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way…”
Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Never tripped out harder than watching Blue Velvet one lonely night.

Also Twin Peaks, so trippy.

A true legend RIP

Sad day for film fans and a sad day for Phillip Morris stockholders.
Do you think the LA wildfires and poor air quality accelerated his death? He had emfysemia
Probably didn't help, but the man had been smoking since he was 8 years old and was at the point where he needed supplemental oxygen just to walk.
I would guess it probably triggered a crisis. He did an interview last year? where he talked about how bad his health was and his smoking. I read he had to be evacuated but I'm not certain it's true. That would have been a major stressor on him.
One of the greats
Mulholland Drive is one of my all-time favorites. A genius director!
Yes for me it's a tie between Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. I also prefer Mulholland drive.

The news makes me sad, I feel like I've lost a friend, even though I never met Lynch.