Before he became a filmmaker, David Lynch—the creator of surrealist noirs like Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive who died Thursday at age 78—was just a kid who lived in lots of places.
Durham was one of them.
Lynch’s ties to the Bull City start before he was born: his parents met as students at Duke University. His father, Donald, worked for the Duke Forestry Department and lived in a stately brick home at 116 North Buchanan Boulevard, according to 1940 draft records. David was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, and the family would later make their way to Durham in the early 1950s as his father’s work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture took the family from city to city.
In a short YouTube video posted in 2020, Lynch recalled a moment from that time: standing alone on Duke’s campus, looking at a “beautiful building” while “Three Coins in the Fountain” drifted from a nearby radio.
“That music married with that image of the building, and it became a kind of memory that stuck with me,” Lynch mused.
Lynch was eight years old during his time in Durham—the same age, he told People magazine last year, that he started smoking. He would continue smoking until 2022, quitting two years after an emphysema diagnosis. The disease would ultimately claim his life.
Lynch created some of Hollywood’s strangest and most influential films, from Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive. In the mid-1980s, he returned to North Carolina to film Blue Velvet, a noir thriller featuring Dennis Hopper as a gas-huffing psychopath terrorizing a small town. The film borrowed the name of a real North Carolina city, Lumberton—a move that left some residents disgruntled, due to its mixed depictions of the city—but was filmed in Wilmington, helping to kickstart the city’s reputation as the “Hollywood of the east.”
All the places he lived and filmed—from the Pacific Northwest’s dark woods to the rust belt’s decrepit railroads, to Wilmington’s white-picket fences—shaped Lynch’s vision of America, a landscape where darkness and light battle it out in diners, lumber mills, and dive bars.
Durham cinephiles can experience Lynch’s work at two upcoming tribute screenings. The Carolina Theatre will present a free showing of “Blue Velvet” on January 21 at 7 p.m. The following evening, Durham County Library’s Main Branch will screen Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of “Dune” at 5:30 p.m.
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