‘Twin Peaks’ Creator David Lynch Reveals Emphysema Diagnosis, Says He “Will Never Retire” But Is “Homebound Whether I like It Or Not”
Auteur filmmaker David Lynch says that despite his relatively recent diagnosis with emphysema, he “will never retire” from practicing his craft.
Lynch, known for not only creating the high-strangeness TV series Twin Peaks but also directing such cinematic highlights as Dune (1984), Blue Velvet, and Mullholland Drive, spoke to his career future after he revealed during his recent cover interview with Sight & Sound magazine that after decades of smoking cigarettes (and only cigarettes, would you believe it?!?), he had been stricken with emphysema so severe that he can’t leave his house due to his heavily compromised immune system.
Asked by the magazine’s Sam Wigley if he was itching to get back to a physical set, the filmmaker asserted, “No. I’ll tell you, I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen.”
“Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me,” Lynch told the magazine’s Sam Wigley. “It was the part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lightning things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things: nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit it.”
“And now, because of Covid, it would be very bad for me to get sick, every with a cold,” he added. “So I probably would be directing from my house. And because of Covid, they’ve now invented ways where you can direct from home. I wouldn’t like that so much. I Like to be there amongst the thing and get ideas there. But I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it.”
To this end, in response to the pandemonium that arose around the interview from his fanbase of party people, Lynch took to his personal Twitter account on August 5th to clarify his statement and ease the troubled, idiosyncratic hearts of those who were concerned.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began, “Yes, I have emphysema from my many years of smoking.”
“I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco – the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them – but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema,” he explained. “I have now quit smoking for over two years. Recently I had many tests and the good news is that I am in excellent shape except for emphysema. I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire.”
“I want you all to know that I really appreciate your concern,” he concluded. “Love, David”.
Regarding Lynch’s career, the last major project he helmed was Twin Peaks: The Return (aka Season 3), with his last feature film being 2006’s Inland Empire.
(He also cameoed as director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 auto-biographical film The Fablemans and worked during the pandemic on a project called Unrecord Night, the latter of which appears to have been canned by Netflix before it ever truly got off the ground.)
To the uninitiated, David Lynch specializes in the surreal and esoteric, the incoherency and open-ended nature of his films gathering praise from audiences, polarizing critics, and spawning endless fan theories that are interesting, brilliant, and/or insane.
The best introduction to his work would be to watch his first feature film, Eraserhead, and then just keep swimming into the deep end of the ‘dark pool of weird’ that is his mind.
There’s also his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune if you want to start off light, as well as his masterpiece The Elephant Man, the bizarre Blue Velvet, and the underrated mind-f-ck Lost Highway.
And of course, it would be criminal to not recommend his magnum opus series Twin Peaks – but that’s only for those who are ready for some fire walking…
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