His work is freaky and frightening, yet today the Twin Peaks director cuts an almost cosy figure. As he turns 77 – a number of significance – we explore how real life caught up with his dark visions
Beyond his holiness Saint Keanu, if there is another universally beloved figure online it is David Lynch. He is the internet’s eccentric grandpa: unfailingly ringing in the day with his daily weather reports, banging the gong for transcendental meditation and crafting miniature farmyard barns for his youngest daughter, Lula.
His other line, perhaps the most overtly Lynchian, is his daily lottery in which – for seemingly no other reason than gratuitous delight and enigma – he draws a random numbered ball. A confirmed numerologist, his preferred integer is seven. Dorothy Vallens’s apartment – the nexus of lust, violence and voyeurism in Blue Velvet – was on the seventh floor. So was the Philadelphia office of Gordon Cole, the FBI chief played by the director in Twin Peaks. On 20 January, David Lynch will be 77. So there is no better time to ask: how did this once-cult artist – whose work is filled with seething psychopaths and funky dwarves and who for the past 20 years has reverted solely to his most experimental and challenging work – become such a cosy cultural presence?
