Director (and actor, musician and artist) David Lynch, a magician of cinematic dreamscapes bordering on nightmare, a creator of images that burn into the backs of the eyelids, was himself an indelible figure. Most noticeable was his hair. Mr. Lynch’s luxuriant hairdo, a virile cockscomb, was richly thick, floating skyward in a cartoon cochlea and resembling Alfred Hitchcock’s profile or John Ford’s eye patch — inherently caricatured and so distinctive it almost deserved a zip code.
The hair, however, was just one aspect of a sharply etched visual personality, made all the more powerful because it was composed of basic elements. And cigarettes.
Characteristic of the personality of Mr. Lynch was smoking as a child (in some interviews he claimed to have picked up the habit at age 8), which may have contributed to his death on Thursday at age 78. He seemed to have been born looking for an ashtray.
Cigarettes are virtually unsurpassed among deadly props in the appeal they have exerted throughout film history. Yet few directors have handled them as compellingly on screen as Mr. Lynch, or been more seriously addicted to them in real life. Even after being diagnosed with emphysema in 2020, Mr. Lynch failed to give it up, as People noted in a 2024 interview with him. “I saw the writing on the wall and it said, ‘You’re going to die in a week if you don’t stop,’” Mr. Lynch told the publication in November.
Although he eventually quit, by then it was too late: homebound and unable to work on set, Mr. Lynch could barely walk across a room by then.
But before nicotine caught up with him – and against irrefutable medical evidence and logic – Mr. Lynch promotes the many ways a cigarette can be used to suggest mood, create atmosphere, accentuate dialogue, or etch space within a cinematic frame. The inherent danger of smoking, its seedy associations, and its outright filth all served as a counterpoint to the rest of a visual image that was, sartorially speaking, inoffensively dull to the point of being unremarkable.
“He always wore the same khaki pants every day,” says Italo Zucchelli, a former menswear designer for Calvin Klein, a friend of Mr. Lynch and, like him, a longtime follower of Transcendental Meditation, a serene spiritual practice that apparently is at odds. with the dark, often violent work of Mr. Lynch.
“He wore the same basic blazer and white shirt every day,” Mr. Zucchelli continued. “His look was very normal, very American, effortless and not at all sinister.”
It was as if Mr. Lynch made clear in his personal visual presentation that the most disturbing thoughts, baroque fantasies and extreme sensitivities are often enough hidden behind facades of bourgeois ordinariness.
“Look at ‘Dexter,’” Mr. Zucchelli said, referring to the Showtime crime drama. “The serial killer is the most ordinary man.” Consider the damaged souls in Mr. Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Eraserhead’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’. Demons, sinister doppelgängers and psycho killers were his people. Rarely did they look good. (Never mind that he himself is often characterized as friendly and laid-back.)
If fashion designers were primarily responding to Lynch’s cinematic vision of small-town America as a place at once reassuringly familiar and intensely strange, that makes sense. He was one of the directors who built characters directly through costumes.
In her rumpled layered tweed and outsized glasses (designed by Patricia Norris, in collaboration with Mr. Lynch), the curious Log Lady from “Twin Peaks” (played by Catherine E. Coulson) could have walked off the Prada runway. In their moth-eaten vests and oversized car coats, the affectless boy models of Raf Simons’ menswear show “Nightmares and Dreams” in fall 2016 were openly inspired by Mr. Lynch’s version of wholesome Americana that was already in the grip of entropy.
Little has ever been ordinary in so-called Lynchian universes, places defined by nuclear explosions (“Twin Peaks: The Return”); blood splattered (“Wild at Heart”); and a whimpering, deformed baby (“Eraserhead”). Surfaces cannot be trusted, a point made abundantly clear in the panning shot at the opening of “Blue Velvet,” in which a saturated sky frames a stark white suburban picket fence and long-stemmed red roses—a radioactive variety that would never can arise. have grown in every indoor garden.
All this, and the tragedy that soon follows, in some ways reflects Mr. Lynch’s astute understanding of the psychology of color. But more than that, the scene reveals his surgical gift for dissecting the threat that lies just beneath the skin.
