Visionary filmmaker behind ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Eraserhead’ David Lynch, who partly grew up in Spokane, dies at 78

David Lynch, the prolific artist and filmmaker who created the television show “Twin Peaks,” died Thursday, four days before his 79th birthday. His early childhood in the Inland Northwest left a lasting impression on his psyche.

“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us,” his family posted on his Facebook page. “But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ ”

Last August, Lynch announced on the social media platform X that he had emphysema from years of smoking but had quit more than two years ago.

“I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire,” he wrote.

Born in Missoula in 1946, his family moved to Sandpoint just two months later. His father was a scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and moved around frequently.

In the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life” Lynch recalls an early memory from Sandpoint, when he sat with his friend in a mud puddle his parents dug for them under a tree and filled with a garden hose so they could stay cool in the summer heat.

“It was so beautiful,” Lynch said. “You’d get to squeeze mud and sit with your friend under the shade of this tree. Forget it!”

When he was 2, the family moved to Spokane where, again, Lynch said he had happy memories and a happy family.

“It was a beautiful place to grow up,” Lynch said in a 1980 interview with The Spokesman-Review following the release of one of his early films, “The Elephant Man.”

“I haven’t gone back since, because I am afraid of destroying the feeling,” he said. “I remember skies that were very blue, and having a bright white picket fence, and looking up and seeing airplanes flying overhead. The garden in our yard had bright green plants with little yellow flowers.”

But something darker was afoot.

The article reveals an eerie sneak peek into Lynch’s vision for a project he was calling “Gardenback,” which eventually became “Blue Velvet,” released six years later.

“I picture ‘Gardenback’ as taking place in Spokane, in my back yard,” Lynch told The Spokesman-Review. “It’s sort of about adultery. And though on one level it’s about this sense of ‘good times’ in the streets, it’s really about a sickness within.”

In “The Art Life,” Lynch recounts a disturbing incident when he was playing outside at night with his brother. Out of the darkness appeared a naked woman with a bloodied mouth.

“She came closer and closer, and my brother started to cry,” Lynch said in the documentary. “Something was bad wrong with her. And I don’t know what happened, but I think she sat down on the curb, crying. But it was very mysterious, like we were seeing something otherworldly. I wanted to do something for her, but I was little. I didn’t know what to do and I don’t remember any more than that.”

The haunting memory closely resembles a famous scene in “Blue Velvet.” The film takes place in a town called Lumberton and examines the seedy underbelly of the 1950s suburban American dream.

Lynch didn’t stay in Spokane for long. In grade school, his family moved again to Boise, then to Alexandria, Virginia, for high school. But Spokane left an impression.

“He seems to have a really deep and true connection to Spokane, and I can’t quite put my finger on it,” said Pete Porter, a film professor at Eastern Washington University and the director of the Spokane International Film Festival. “It’s something that’s always kind of in the background.”

Porter said “Blue Velvet” is one of the most important films of the 1980s.

“Lumberton is a little like Spokane,” Lynch said in an interview about the film with the Chicago Tribune.

In the documentary, Lynch names the cross streets where the childhood incident happened: Shoshone and Park Circle Drive, which places his home on the South Hill near Manito Park.

In Blue Velvet, the main character is warned not to go down to Lincoln Street, the dangerous part of town. Lincoln Street is also where Shoshone Place terminates in Spokane, Porter noted.

“In those days, my world was very, very small,” Lynch said in the documentary. “It extended only a couple of blocks in each direction to his friends’ houses and the grocery store.

“That’s why I say huge worlds are in those two blocks. Everything is there. Everything.”

Known for his surrealism and avant-garde style, Lynch found surprising mainstream success. His first feature film, “Eraserhead,” was a cult hit. He was soon trusted with the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” in 1984.

Yet he famously refused to offer easy interpretation of his work and left things ambiguous, said Spokane film critic Nathan Weinbender.

“His work is about memory and nostalgia,” said Weinbender, who co-hosts Movies 101 on Spokane Public Radio and formerly wrote for The Spokesman-Review. “It’s also about the very idea of small-town, squeaky-clean, white-picket-fence America, and that it’s a lie – a facade for corruption, perversity and evil.”

Something about that must have resonated with a wide audience, Weinbender said.

However, Lynch’s most lasting influence is likely the short-lived television show “Twin Peaks.”

Marketed as mystery that would eventually be solved, it was different from anything else on TV in the early ’ 90s, Weinbender said.

Porter said the show was the prototype for “prestige television” with more complicated storylines and higher production value previously reserved for film.

More than a director, Lynch was a visual artist and a musician.

His last feature film nearly 20 years ago was “Inland Empire,” set in the other Inland Empire, the one in California. But he continued to make dozens of experimental short films, treating them as art pieces.

“If you thought his movies were strange, his short films are really weird,” Weinbender said.

Various urban legends about Lynch’s Spokane connections exaggerate the amount of time he spent in the city or that he came back to visit as an adult, Weinbender said, but there’s not much evidence to support that.

There used to be a tavern in Browne’s Addition called the Swamp that Lynch was rumored to frequent, but Weinbender couldn’t confirm that either when he was researching an article about Twin Peaks for the Inlander in 2017.

A few homages to Lynch do exist, though. He makes an appearance on a mural of famous figures with Spokane connections on the exterior wall of Paper St. Coffee Co. near Gonzaga. And the Baby Bar in downtown Spokane is decorated with red curtains and red lights inspired by the red room in Twin Peaks.

Porter said Lynch’s genius was his endlessly generative creativity and ability to surprise. And while his films explored dark edges, they also had plenty of bright spots, like his memories of Spokane.

“On one hand, people have this expectation that David was very unusual, which he was,” Porter said. “But on the other hand, he was very grounded and very down to Earth.”