How David Lynch Inspired Generation X

RIP David Lynch, 1946-2025

This is a guest post by my husband, Terry Osterhout, a photographer, independent filmmaker, and proud weirdo.

David Lynch passed away yesterday. My sadness is deep and heavy, but I’m also full of joy for the legacy he left behind. I consider him to be the greatest film director to have ever lived.

David Lynch fans are a wonderful community of people. We all kind of claim him as our own individually because his work impacted so many of us on a personal level and he gave all of us weirdo artists hope that we, too, could follow our dreams and live the “Art Life”. David Lynch has long and lovingly referred to the complete devotion to art as a way of life, not just a hobby or profession.

The collective generational discovery of David Lynch by Generation X probably began with Dune (for some of you, it was Eraserhead). My dad took me to see it in 1984. I was 14 years old and as a young comic book nerd living in a small Northern town in Michigan, I thought it was fantastic! There was a sensibility there I could relate to, it deeply resonated with me. But at the time, I didn’t know David Lynch directed Dune; they used the pseudonym “Alan Smithee” because Lynch lost final cut and hated the resulting film, so he removed his name from the credits (his name is attached nowadays). I didn’t really know what a director’s job entailed at that age anyway, I just knew I was amazed.

Dune, 1984

Two years later at 16, my friend and I joined an older friend who was renting a house for some beer and movies. The house was deep in the country surrounded by forests and in the middle of a snow storm, but we were armed with two VHS tapes: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and some film called Blue Velvet Siskel & Ebert had reviewed. After we watched Rear Window first, we began Blue Velvet and life as I knew it ceased to EVER be the same again. Every fucking frame of that movie was ART! Every action, motivation, line of dialogue and explosive moment of violence (or the threat of violence) was spellbinding. The performances felt too real, and the dark underbelly felt like the side of the small town I lived in that people talked about in whispers but never in the open. That film cemented my desire to know who was responsible for this puzzling masterpiece, and evoked the curiosity in me over just what a director did.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet was the first film to awaken the possibility that there was a place for me in the world outside of my small town. Despite the lack of support from my own parents for my artistic tastes, I began to believe that I wasn’t that different and that my voice had value among other creatives. My friends and I quoted lines from Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth character for years after seeing Blue Velvet because we found his performance so terrifying but also absurdly funny in a really uncomfortable way.

If you’ve seen Blue Velvet, you can hear this picture

As I grew from teenager to young man, along came Twin Peaks to further expand my idea of what visual storytelling could look like when you pull back the layers and expose the elements hidden on a regular basis. I was 20 years old when Twin Peaks began, and my love of the alternative and dark was in full swing. I listened to gothic music, read Henry Miller, and was now obsessed with arthouse, international cinema, and independent filmmaking.

I had moved to Fresno, California in 1990 and watched Twin Peaks religiously. When the second season ended with a terrifying and magical cliffhanger (involving almost every major character in peril) and then the network didn’t renew it for a third season, it left me hollowed out and devastated—so much so that I found a gutted television, filled it with donuts, and mailed it to the studio with a note that said simply “Save Twin Peaks.” Shocking to absolutely no one, this tactic didn’t work. I found myself imagining the limbo of those characters. With Twin Peaks, minds all over the world were blown and people were hungry for more, but David Lynch has a way of refusing to placate while delivering experimental art that compromised not one ounce of integrity or vision.

I was living in Santa Barbara when Wild At Heart was released. I saw it dozens of times in the theater, studying and analyzing the brilliant high-octane doomed love story. The road trip in Wild at Heart resonated with me because after high school I zig-zagged across the US on bus, from Ann Arbor to New Orleans to California, allowing this naive young man to experience adventures and meet people outside of Michigan.

While living in Ann Arbor, Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me came out. I was dating an older woman who was obsessed with Old Hollywood. She rode around on a vintage bike wearing thrift store 1950s dresses. Even though she was unfamiliar with Twin Peaks, I took her to Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me knowing it was a prequel (she didn't need to have watched the show). But that movie might have ended our relationship because she said the experience made her physically ill. I was uplifted and mesmerized by Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me, but also left emotionally exhausted because David Lynch literally resolved NOTHING. Yet as the film sat with me over the years, and I re-watched it, I realized that it offered up many answers if I knew where to look. It’s a film that defies every expectation, and satisfies nothing in the way of desperate closure. The only instant gratification David Lynch ever offered from his art and films was the initial exposure to new work, but every other aspect of his work demanded intellectual labor from the viewer.

The 1990’s became my film-obsessed years. I worked in video stores in Ann Arbor, California, and NYC, and consumed thousands of films. Video stores were my film schools, and watching the extra features and listening to audio commentaries were my extra credit. I knew I wanted to make films, and by the time I had moved to NYC in 1994, I was determined to become an actor and a director, but on my terms creatively.

The video store I managed in NYC was a celebrity haven with clientele that included the Coen Brothers, Tom Noonan, Julia Stiles, Richard Dreyfuss, Martha Plimpton, David O Russell, Anthony Bourdain, Mira Nair, and so many amazingly talented people. For this small town guy it was like I had already made it just by knowing these creative people I admired so much, but it was always David Lynch’s influence that kept me striving to not give up even when my screenplays were rejected for being too weird, shocking, or explicit.

Image of me acting in my short film Breaking Blackheart

Seeing movies in New York City theaters beats every single movie theater experience I have ever had, and seeing David Lynch’s Lost Highway in a smaller NY Arthouse theater was beyond religious in scope for me. David Lynch hit a massive peak (no pun intended) with Lost Highway: the mind-bending story, the deeply disturbing sex and violence, the Trent Reznor produced soundtrack, the nightmarish mood and environments, and the brave performances. Lost Highway was the ultimate David Lynch experience and moved me in ways beyond what I had experienced with his other films. I connected with the themes of duality because growing up in a small, conservative town always made me feel like I needed to cultivate a persona when dealing with judgy people. David Lynch inspired me to stop caring what small-minded people thought of me or my art.

By the time I moved back to California after 9/11, I was focused mostly on fine art photography, but my desire to return to low budget filmmaking was inspired once again by David Lynch who made Inland Empire in 2006, his own little digital video feature film. I spent years in California photographing moody dark conceptual shoots with models, focusing on telling stories with the sets we shot, and it was at 40 years old in 2010 that I met model Liz LaPoint who would become my muse and wife.

My story comes full circle with David Lynch. Even though I experienced a chaotic and painful childhood, being bullied for being creative instead of being into sports and hunting like the other boys, Liz and I decided to move back to the small town of my youth. I was hoping things had changed since the ’70s. In 2017, I was making a conceptual art book with Liz (and model Luke Gardiner) called The Chosen Nightmare when Twin Peaks the Return premiered. I was living in the small town where I grew up and realized for the first time it’s a setting like the fictional town of Twin Peaks—the irony was deafening. Twin Peaks the Return was not the 25 year closure fans were waiting for, but it was much deeper and more meaningful because it was a love letter to originality in art, free expression, and having the “Room to Dream” (also the name of the wonderful book about his life.) Twin Peaks the Return was David Lynch’s way of telling fans that you cannot go back, and you shouldn’t want to go back. It was the ultimate challenge to convention and refused to follow any narrative rules. David Lynch created from the gut and from a fire in his soul. He created fearlessly and freely, embraced the darkness, and held our hands as he led us into the shadows.

My dad made me do a tame version for picture day of how I usually looked in high school, so I went from Robert Smith to (unintentionally) David Lynch

David Lynch inspired Generation X to be “weird” without shame, but more importantly to be authentic and to speak your truth through your art, because a life without passion isn’t a life truly lived. Everyone who personally knew David Lynch loved him; who wouldn’t love someone with such a sunny disposition masking a deep, dark universe behind his eyes?

After Twin Peaks the Return I knew in my gut that we would never get a new feature film or show, but we didn’t need it. Lynch had given the world more than just a handful of entertaining mysteries. He cleared the way for us offbeat artists to express ourselves freely. The world needs unique perspectives and diverse cultures; spice make everything taste better. I have suffered and struggled enormously in this life, but creativity has always been my therapy, especially cinema. Art has always been the place where I am purely doing something that feeds my soul to its very core. When I have a story idea or a concept for a photoshoot or illustration and I can’t get that idea realized fast enough, I get frustrated because I don’t want those dreams to die and go unrealized. The death of our dreams is worse than the death of our actual life in many ways, but if we are alive still we at least have the power to continue to pursue our dreams.

Art by Sean Longmore

As I begin my foray into stop motion animation at 55 years old (because Gen X is never too old to start fresh), learning ball joint doll-making and other skills so I can make my own kooky little films without compromising my vision, I think of David Lynch. He did not die; his legacy is infinitely more powerful than our human shells. His unorthodox films and paintings will endure and inspire new generations until this planet ends.

David Lynch might have been a Boomer, but he was the Godfather of Generation X artists and filmmakers and we owe him a debt for the creative freedom we now enjoy because he blazed a trail and brought alternative art and ideas into the mainstream. We may never get a new David Lynch movie but his films are new every single time you rewatch them and that is why his work transcends whatever medium he uses to deliver the story. Everything he created was a part of a separate, alternative universe from our own that defied explanation but demanded to be carefully explored. The world is infinitely more interesting having had David Lynch in it, but the impact David Lynch has had in inspiring me and pushing me to continue as an artist when I doubted myself so often, is beyond measure.

I’ll see you in the Sycamore trees, David. I’ll bring the donuts if you bring the coffee!