David Lynch, visionary filmmaker behind 'Twin Peaks' and 'Mulholland Drive,' dies at 78

David Lynch, the filmmaker celebrated for his uniquely dark and dreamlike vision in such movies as “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and the TV series “Twin Peaks,” has died just days before his 79th birthday.

His family announced the death in a Facebook post on Thursday.

"There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole,’” the family's post read. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

The cause of death and location was not immediately available. Last summer, Lynch had revealed to Sight and Sound that he was diagnosed with emphysema and would not be leaving his home because of fears of contracting the coronavirus or “even a cold.”

“I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not,” Lynch said, adding he didn’t expect to make another film.

“I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it,” Lynch said. “I wouldn’t like that so much.”

Lynch broke through in the 1970s with the surreal “Eraserhead” and rarely failed to startle and inspire audiences, peers and critics in the following decades. His notable releases ranged from the neo-noir “Mulholland Drive” to the skewed gothic of “Blue Velvet” to the eclectic and eccentric “Twin Peaks,” which won three Golden Globes, two Emmys and even a Grammy for its theme music. Pauline Kael, the film critic, called Lynch “the first populist surrealist — a Frank Capra of dream logic.”

“‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Elephant Man’ defined him as a singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade,” director Steven Spielberg said in a statement. Spielberg noted that he had cast Lynch as director John Ford in his 2022 film “The Fabelmans.”

“It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David’s own movies,” Spielberg said. “The world is going to miss such an original and unique voice.”

“Lynchian” became a style of its own, yet one that ultimately belonged only to him. Lynch’s films pulled disturbing, surrealistic mysteries and unsettling noir nightmares out of ordinary life. In the opening scenes of “Blue Velvet,” among suburban homes and picket fences, an investigator finds a severed ear lying in a manicured lawn.

Steven Soderbergh, who told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was a proud owner of two end tables crafted by Lynch (his numerous hobbies included furniture design), called the biographical drama “Elephant Man” a perfect film.

“He’s one of those filmmakers who was influential but impossible to imitate. People would try but he had one kind of algorithm that worked for him and you attempted to recreate it at your peril,” Soderbergh told the AP. “As non-linear and illogical as they often seemed, they were clearly highly organized in his mind.”

Lynch, who was married four times and had four children, never won a competitive Academy Award. He received nominations for directing “The Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and, in 2019, was presented an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

“To the Academy and everyone who helped me along the way, thanks,” he said in characteristically off-beat remarks. “You have a very nice face. Good night.”

Actors regularly appearing in his movies included Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts and Richard Farnsworth. McLachlan, who starred in “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks,” said Lynch “was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.”

“I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met,” McLachlan said on Instagram. “David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human.”

Aside from furniture making and painting, Lynch was a coffee maker, composer, sculptor and cartoonist. He exuded a Zen peacefulness he attributed to Transcendental Meditation, which his David Lynch Foundation promoted. In the 2017 short film “What Did Jack Do?” he played a detective interrogating a monkey. He regularly ate at, and espoused the joys of, the Los Angeles fast-food restaurant Bob’s Big Boy.

Lynch was himself a singular presence, almost as beguiling and deadpan as his own films. For years, he posted videos of daily weather reports from Southern California. When asked for analysis of his films, Lynch typically demurred.

“I like things that leave some room to dream,” he told the New York Times in 1995. “A lot of mysteries are sewn up at the end, and that kills the dream.”

Lynch was a Missoula, Montana, native who moved around often with his family as a child and would feel most at home away from the classroom, free to explore his fascination with the world. Lynch’s mother was an English teacher and his father a research scientist with the U.S. Agriculture Department. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest before the family settled in Virginia. Lynch’s childhood was by all accounts free of trauma.

“David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things,” a childhood friend is quoted as saying in “Room to Dream,” a 2018 book by Lynch and Kristine McKenna. “That’s one of the mysteries of David.”

He praised his parents as “loving” and “fair” in his memoir, though he also recalled formative memories that shaped his sensibility.

One day near his family’s Pacific Northwest home, Lynch recalled seeing a beautiful, naked woman emerge from the woods bloodied and weeping.

“I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods,” Lynch told Rolling Stone. “And it just seemed to me that people only told you 10% of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other 90%.”

He had an early gift for visual arts and a passion for travel and discovery. He dropped out of several colleges before enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning a decade-long apprenticeship as a maker of short movies. He was working as a printmaker in 1966 when he made his first film, a four-minute short named “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times).” That and other work landed Lynch a place at the then-nascent American Film Institute.

There, he began working on what would become his 1977 feature debut, “Eraserhead.” The film, featuring Jack Nance with high-rising hair to rival the Bride of Frankenstein, took four years to make and debuted in theaters at midnight. It took nearly as long to develop a cult following and the interest of Hollywood. Stanley Kubrick became an advocate and George Lucas approached him about directing a “Star Wars” film. Another fan was Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch's next movie, “The Elephant Man.”

“He is very sensitive, and he really understands human nature,” Lynch told Bomb magazine of Brooks. “Otherwise he couldn’t do those great comedies. I guess ‘Eraserhead’ spoke to him, and off we went.”

“The Elephant Man,” about Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who became a circus attraction in 19th century Europe, earned eight Oscar nominations. Producer Dino De Laurentiis then hired Lynch to director a big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” The film was a flop with critics and audiences — Lynch described producers' trims and tweaks in post-production as “a nightmare” — but, still, the movie attracted a cult following over the years.

After that came 1986's “Blue Velvet,” starring Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern and McLachlan. Kicked off by the Bobby Vinton song, the detective story that twists its way to Hopper's oxygen-mask maniac, peeled back the superficial veneer of Reagan-era America.

“There are things lurking in the world and within us that we have to deal with,” Lynch told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “You can evade them for a while, for a long time maybe, but if you face them and name them, they start losing their power. Once you name the enemy, you can deal with it a lot better.”

In 1990, Lynch debuted both the Palme d'Or-winning “Wild at Heart,” with Nicolas Cage and Dern, and the radical TV series “Twin Peaks.” The show, a surreal sensation about the mysterious death of high-school homecoming queen Laura Palmer, was a sensation, earning five Emmy nominations for its first season.

“Twin Peaks,” which Lynch created with writer Mark Frost, remains one of the most enigmatic and singularly director-driven series to ever find a wide American audience on television. It clung to Lynch, too, who returned to it with the 1992 prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and a 2017 series.

After the nocturnal noir “Lost Highway” (1997) and the comparatively simple road movie “The Straight Story,” starring Richard Farnsworth as a 73-year-old man who travels cross country by lawn mower, Lynch directed his last masterpiece, 2001’s “Mulholland Drive.”

The film, starring Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts as young actors in Hollywood, was assembled out of a failed TV pilot. But that restructuring only enhanced the movie's intoxicating puzzle, a doppelganger murder mystery. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, it ranked as the eighth greatest film of all time.

Lynch's last feature was 2006's “Inland Empire,” a fragmented and experimental thriller made without a script and shot on digital video.

In 2005’s “Lynch On Lynch,” edited by Chris Rodley, Lynch addressed some of the mysteries at the heart of his work.

“The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets,” he said. “It’s like a little egress. You can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”

AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed reporting.

FILE - Filmmaker David Lynch appears during the Rome Film Festival in Rome on Nov. 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis, File)

FILE - Director David Lynch, center, poses with actors Laura Elena Harring, left, and Naomi Watts, from his film "Mulholland Drive," at the Los Angeles Film Critics 27th Annual Achievement Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2002. (AP Photo/Lucy Nicholson, File)

FILE - Filmmaker David Lynch poses for a portrait in his private screening room in Los Angeles on Sept. 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, file)

FILE - Filmmaker David Lynch poses at his Los Angeles home March 14, 2002. (AP Photo/Chris Weeks, File)

FILE - Director David Lynch and his wife Emily attend the 2nd annual Change Begins Within benefit celebration, hosted by the David Lynch Foundation on Dec. 13, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File)

FILE - Emily Stofle, from left, director David Lynch actor Kyle MacLachlan, and Desiree Gruber appear at the screening of the TV series "Twin Peaks" at the 70th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, on May 25, 2017(AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

FILE - Filmmaker David Lynch poses at his Los Angeles home March 14, 2002. (AP Photo/Chris Weeks, File)

FILE - David Lynch appears at the Governors Awards in Los Angeles on Oct. 27, 2019. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Thom Tillis isn't holding back during his final year in Washington.

“I'm sick of stupid,” the two-term Republican from North Carolina said from the Senate floor recently as he derided President Donald Trump 's advisers for stoking a potential U.S. military takeover in Greenland.

It was just one of several moments during the opening weeks of 2026 when Tillis, who isn't seeking reelection, seemed unconstrained by the anxieties that weigh down many of his GOP colleagues who are loath to cross the White House for fear of triggering a political backlash.

He's one of just two Republicans, along with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who participated in a congressional delegation to Denmark this week while Trump threatens to seize Greenland. He was quick to criticize the Justice Department's investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. As Trump and his allies try to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, Tillis backed the eventual display of a plaque honoring police who defended the Capitol that day.

He has shown particular frustration with Trump's top aides, notably deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller.

“I don't want some staffer telling me what my position is on something,” he said after Miller gave a forceful interview on CNN saying Greenland “should be part of the United States.”

“He made comments out of his depth,” Tillis added.

The moves reflect the sense of freedom lawmakers often feel when they know they won't have to face voters again. They've helped attract swarms of reporters who follow Tillis through the halls of Congress as he offers candid thoughts on news of the day. And they've won support from the handful of other Republicans who sometimes cross Trump, including Murkowski, who called out “good speech!” as she passed him in the Capitol following his floor remarks on Greenland.

For the 65-year-old Tillis, who has won elections in one of the most politically competitive states, the approach is notable for the way in which he's pushing back against the White House. He's hardly staking out a position as a never-Trumper and repeatedly — often effusively — expresses support for the president.

Rather, he's targeting much of his criticism at senior White House aides, sometimes raising questions about whether Trump is receiving the best advice at a consequential moment in his presidency as the GOP enters a challenging election year.

“I really want this president to be very, very successful,” Tillis said this week. “And a part of his legacy is going to be based on picking and choosing the right advice from people in his administration.”

Heading into the midterms, Tillis said, “I want to create a better environment for Republicans to win.”

Tillis, who had a challenging childhood involving multiple moves, worked at an accounting and consulting firm before entering politics. He was the speaker of North Carolina's House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015. He said this week that he approaches his concerns from a business perspective.

“Sometimes there's just things that people need to say, ‘not a good idea, not in our best interest, hard to implement,” he said. “I probably should have started by saying that’s what I did in the private sector for about 25 years.”

Beyond Miller, Tillis has raised questions about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's immediate response to the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Hours after the shooting, while an FBI investigation was still unfolding, Noem defended the officer and said Good “attempted to run a law enforcement officer over.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill the next day, Tillis said he was “surprised by the level of certainty in her comments” and suggested such rhetoric influenced Trump, who was also quick to defend law enforcement.

“She's advising the president so the president's comments had to have come I assume through the advice of the secretary,” he said.

Tillis' balancing act was on particularly vivid display earlier this month on the fifth anniversary of Jan. 6, when he helped broker the deal to publicly show the plaque honoring officers that was held up by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Speaking from the Senate floor, he called the attack “one of the worst days in my 11 years in the U.S. Senate.”

He lauded the staff and U.S. Capitol police who defended lawmakers and helped ensure that Congress ultimately certified Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. But he also struck fiercely partisan tones, blaming Democrats for embracing a movement to defund the police and criticizing media coverage of protests that turned violent during the summer of 2020.

Tillis framed Jan. 6 as a “wonderful stress test for democracy” before arguing that the Biden administration went “overboard” by prosecuting “people who were dumb enough to walk into the building but they weren't the leaders.” He then pivoted to criticism of Trump's sweeping pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, including those who attacked police.

But even then, he didn't directly blame Trump, again focusing on his advisers.

“The president, on the advice of somebody in the White House — and I hope I find out the name of that person — also pardoned criminals who injured police officers and destroyed this building,” Tillis said. “If you had that happen to your office or your business, would you think well they were just a little hotheaded and let them go and not prosecute them? Or would you hold them accountable for destroying the citadel of democracy?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Tillis' assessment of Trump's aides. The senator rejects any suggestion that he's stepped up his criticism because of his impeding retirement, calling the notion “hysterical.”

His relationship with Trump hit a low point last summer when he opposed the president's sweeping tax and spending cuts package. Trump accused Tillis of seeking publicity and said on social media that the senator was a “talker and complainer, NOT A DOER.” Tillis announced his retirement soon after voting against the measure, one of only two Senate Republicans to do so.

Trump has been more sanguine in response to Tillis' more recent comments. Asked this week about the senator's criticism of the Fed probe, Trump said, “That's why Thom's not going to be a senator any longer, I guess.”

“Look, I like Thom Tillis,” Trump said. “But he's not going to be a senator any longer because of views like that.”

Associated Press writer Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE -Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., speaks during a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Oct. 13, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP, File)

FILE - Wearing a beaded bolo around a pin that says "United States Senate," Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., listens to thanks from members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, after the passage of a bill granting the tribe with federal recognition, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Dec. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)