He directed music videos for Chris Isaak, X Japan, Moby, Interpol, Nine Inch Nails and Donovan, and commercials for Dior, YSL, Gucci and the New York City Department of Sanitation.

My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees.

[12]: 1 At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Lynch did not excel academically, having little interest in schoolwork, but he was popular with other students, and after leaving he decided that he wanted to study painting at college.

The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who sings the alphabet to a series of images of horses before dying at the end by hemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets.

[18]: 18 Lynch left the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after three semesters and in 1970 moved with his wife and daughter to Los Angeles,[19][20] 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.

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.

[6]: 104 After The Elephant Man's success, George Lucas, a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi.

The main character, Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a nobleman who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis, which grows the rare spice melange, the empire's most highly prized commodity.

Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, Blue Velvet was set in Lumberton, North Carolina, and revolves around a college student, Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field.

Investigating with the help of his friend Sandy (Laura Dern), Jeffrey discovers a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly rapes her.

[6]: 211–212 1990 was Lynch's annus mirabilis: Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and the television series Twin Peaks was proving a smash hit with audiences across the world.

[29] Calling its plot a "strange blend" of "a road picture, a love story, a psychological drama and a violent comedy", Lynch departed substantially from the novel, changing the ending and incorporating numerous references to The Wizard of Oz.

[32] After Wild at Heart's success, Lynch returned to the world of the canceled Twin Peaks, this time without Frost, to make a film that was primarily a prequel but also in part a sequel.

"[6]: 187  The result, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), primarily revolved around the last few days of Laura Palmer's life, was much "darker" in tone than the TV series, with much of the humor removed, and dealt with such topics as incest and murder.

[6]: 245  Le Blanc and Odell write that the plot made it "seem as far removed from Lynch's earlier works as could be imagined, but in fact right from the very opening, this is entirely his film—a surreal road movie".

"[37] It was named one of the best films of the year by The New York Times; Janet Maslin wrote: "Somehow it took David Lynch to lead audiences past the ultimate frontier: into a G-rated parable of spirituality and decency, seen from the unfashionable vantage point of old age.

Mr. Lynch accomplished the unthinkable by putting Richard Farnsworth, in a devastatingly real and rock-solid performance, on a lawnmower at five miles per hour and still building enough drama and emotion for a great chase.

The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely.

But in 2022, he agreed to a cameo in one: Mr. Spielberg's autobiographical feature The Fabelmans, where the enigmatic if not eldritch Mr. Lynch was cast as John Ford, the maker of westerns and the grand old curmudgeon of American cinema.

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.

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.

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.

[7][182][183] In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that "after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era",[184] and AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking".

"[193] Tributes were also paid by Judd Apatow, Mel Brooks, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam, James Gunn, Ron Howard, Patton Oswalt, Pedro Pascal, Billy Corgan, Questlove, and Ben Stiller.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Lynchian artwork as "juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments" and "using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.

"[197] David Foster Wallace wrote, "An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term 'refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter'" but that "it's ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it.

[6]: 62  He expressed admiration for Federico Fellini,[6]: 62  Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock,[199] Roman Polanski, Jacques Tati,[6]: 62  Stanley Kubrick, and Billy Wilder.

Le Blanc and Odell write, "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas".

[205] Some have suggested that Lynch's love for Hitchcock's Vertigo, which employs a split lead character (Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster, both portrayed by Kim Novak) may have influenced this aspect of his work.

[209] He frequently worked with composer Angelo Badalamenti, film editor Mary Sweeney, casting director Johanna Ray, and actors Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie, and Laura Dern.