#Sooty and Co

[mrs-elsie-barnes]

I like to share my hobbies with my daughter so she knows I'm a real whole person and not just her mum. Including fandom stuff, in an age appropriate way!

She likes that I write stories and I write them for her too.

So here's a brief plot outline of a Sooty and Co fanfiction she came up with last night. She can't write yet so let's call it a podfic.

Sooty and Sweep steal the caravan and take her to the beach and they do a water fight on the beach and then Matthew buys them ice cream and Scampy steals her ice cream. The end.

And if you don't know Sooty and Co

(the 90s version is free on YouTube. Enjoy)

[partywithponies]

THE OFFICIAL SOOTY TWITTER HAS GONE BACK TO USING THE HASHTAG #CosTootyPooSmesh WHEN PROMOTING NEW MERCH. NATURE IS HEALING

[sootygifs]

Hello everybody. There is lack of Sooty GIFs online. I am here to fix that.

GIF from Sooty & Co - “White Elephants”

[the-time-lord-oracle]

One of those old children's promos by VCI in the 1990's. I remember this one from the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends Story & Song Collection VHS. I loved that video. How many of these programmes do you remember?

[shit-the-vampyr-cast-never-said]

Geoffrey: I'm going to get to the bottom of this!

Jonathan: Well, with a bottom the size of yours, anything's possible.

[lexie-squirrel]

[super-sootica]

I do not appreciate having to snooze tumblr live. You can't force this on me, I'm not an American so I have rights.

[robynewren]

Sooty and Co - A Scampi Conspiracy

Join me friends on another spiral into the weirdness of my brain.

So I was wfh earlier, and my dad will sit and watch videos on Facebook sometimes when I'm working, and I happened to hear a video where the drummer from Iron Maiden went on the Sooty and Co show.

Let me repeat that. There was a collaboration between one of the legends of heavy metal, and a mute bear puppet.

What kind of fever dream madness was the 80's?!

If you said today, "hey do you remember that time that Iron Maiden and Sooty did a crossover", you'd be asked to do a drugs test!

But my brain, being my brain, wasn't satsified to just accept that Sooty and Iron Maiden did a crossover. Oh no.

In my brain, Sooty is now a metalhead.

Why doesn't he speak? He's thrown his voice out at all the concerts he's been to. Poor little thing can't talk, he's constantly sucking on strepsils!

But that led me to another question... why don't we ever hear of Little Cousin Scampi anymore? Yeah, you'd forgotten about him until I said that didn't you.

That's because now in my brain, Little Cousin Scampi does not exist. It's Sooty in his KISS makeup.

Do you remember a time when Sooty and Scampi interacted on screen together? No? THEY'RE THE SAME BEAR!

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED(dy) Talk.

[arwenkenobi48]

Prince John: it’s nothing to do with the fact that you’ve just arrived, but as a matter of fact, I was just leaving

Sir Hiss: alright, you don’t need to rub it in

[bekolxeram]

A whole day late to @bucktommyfluffebruary's day 1 prompt: non-sexual intimacy. Inspiration strikes suddenly, what can I say?

You can also read it on AO3.

Golden Hour

rated G | 1027 words

“Morning, team!” Buck walks into the firehouse with an extra bounce in his step, looking the most carefree he’s been for months.

“What got you so… woah,” Hen begins questioning, but stops in the middle of the sentence once she fully turns around and takes a good look of her strangely jovial co-worker.

“What’s wrong? Is there something on my face?” Buck instinctively touches his face in response to Hen’s reaction. He has a hard time deciphering her expression; She seems… surprised, astonished, but at the same time, shocked, and confounded.

“No! Not really. You seem… happier,” Hen puts on a reassuring smile, “but the bags under your eyes seem like they came straight from the Milan Fashion Week, and your hair looks like you’ve just rolled out of bed.”

The entire 118 bore witness to Buck’s post-Tommy heartbreak. Yes, he obsessively checked his phone and got addictive to baking, maybe he let his stubble grow out a day or two more than it should, but he never, ever, neglected personal hygiene or grooming. He always made sure to dress like a functioning member of the society before heading to work, what happened outside of shift was his own business.

“I used to know someone like this at school,” Chimney joins in. “His girlfriend dumped him just before summer break. Then he came back to school looking like a hobo, but at the same time, happy as the Buddha. He told me he went on a trip to discover himself.”

“But Buck was with us last shift, 48 hours ago. What life-changing destination could he have gone to in such a short amount time?” Hen furrows her brows in confusion.

“By trip, I mean an acid trip,” Chimney snickers, then he turns to face Buck in chorus with Hen, waiting for an answer.

“I can assure you, I’ve never taken any mind altering substance before coming to work. That would be irresponsible!” Buck objects, attempting to halt this dangerous speculation at once.

Just as Hen and Chimney are about to interrogate further, Eddie chimes in while slowly sipping on his coffee, “Buck and Tommy are back together without telling us.”

Gasps, then cheers fill the room.

“Wait, how? Did Tommy tell you?” Buck asks.

“No one told me anything,” Eddie takes another sip from his mug, “I can just tell, from your hair.”

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Oh! Yeah!” Hen’s whole face is lit up by her realization, “the hair thing, right?” She vaguely gesture at her head.

“Exactly.” Eddie snaps his fingers at Hen.

“What hair thing?” It’s now Buck’s turn to be utterly confused.

“I don’t get it either,” Chimney turns his attention to his brother-in-law. “Is Tommy bad at picking shampoo? Or hair product? Can’t you just bring your own?”

“Um… I don’t know.”

“You’ll get it once you’ve spent enough time with them,” Eddie sighs.

“I’ve spent plenty of time with them. One is my oldest friend, the other is my brother by marriage!”

“With both of them together, as a third wheel,” Eddie adds.

Chimney grimaces. “Ugh, no! Is it a sex thing?”

“It’s appropriate safe in public,” Hen clarifies, “as long as you don’t find two people of the same gender being in love inappropriate.”

“Oh, okay,” Chimney nods in understanding, “but, what about the bags under your eyes?”

“Um… Tommy and I…”

Buck’s interrupted by Eddie.

“Stop. That one’s definitely a sex thing.”

It takes Chimney another few months to figure out what the “hair thing” actually is.

Buck and Tommy have been invited to dinner at the Han’s.

The four of them were anxious about the possible awkwardness, but Chimney and Tommy settle right back into their old buddy dynamic once the conversation starts flowing.

“I think you two fixed my brain when you showed up all sooty at the hospital. I was groggy all week, but connecting the dots that you guys had been making out? That was the first time I felt like I could finally think clearly,” Chimney recounts his experience coming down with viral encephalitis, and marrying the love of his life at a hospital.

“A hospital, what is it?” Tommy asks, barely containing his giggle.

“It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now,” Chimney bursts into laughter in unison with Tommy by the time his finishes his sentence.

“Um… What’s the joke?” Maddie asks, while both Buckley siblings frown, seemingly puzzled.

“Airplane! The greatest comedy movie of all time!” Chimney exclaims.

“And the most quotable,” Tommy supplements.

“Neither of you have watched Airplane? Tommy, you didn’t introduce your man to the most influential film in your life?”

The Buckley siblings shake their head.

“Alright, we’re watching it after dinner.”

Chimney has seen Airplane! countless times before. The simple, sometimes childish humor of this classic has been his go-to for years whenever he needs a pick-me-up.

He may have the ability to recite the entire movie from start to finish, but the source of the enjoyment now comes from watching his friends and loved ones’ reaction to this comedic masterpiece, to experience the amusement and wonder anew from their fresh eyes.

“We have clearance, Clarence.”

“Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?”

Chimney turns to focus on the viewers’ reaction, instead of the screen.

Maddie’s almost crying with laughter, while shoving a few kernels of popcorn into her mouth. Popcorn with butter and pickle juice, the exact snack she’s been craving.

Buck, on the other hand, is laying his head onto Tommy’s shoulder.

And Tommy, he absentmindedly anchors his hand into Buck’s hair, and ruffles the curls around.

Chimney himself would gladly push off whoever dares to touch his carefully styled hair, but Buck’s happily leans into his boyfriend’s touch.

“Is that correct phraseology in aviation?” Buck beams at Tommy, half flirting and half genuinely asking to satisfy his curiosity.

“Yeah, more or less. That’s why it’s a classic,” Tommy gazes back at Buck softly, hand still messing up the younger man’s hair.

Buck shows his dimples, nestles his head at the crook of Tommy’s neck, and continues watching the movie.

My brother is in good hands.

Chimney tells himself silently.

[iconicstoner]

I don't feel like Emmett gets enough love...maybe something where reader really wants his attention but he is hunting (or something like that) and really misses the feeling of his lips and hands...I'd also prefer to see how cheeky and lighthearted he can be...thank youuuu

a/n: I really loved writing this and thank you sm for the request! Emmett is a super underrated character and I always love getting to write about him. I hope you enjoy the story :)

------------------------------------------------------------

miss me?

gn!reader x emmett cullen (fluff)

words: 1243

summary: You can’t help missing Emmett, your boyfriend, while he’s away hunting. When he’s finally back he learns how much you missed him, which results in him playfully teasing you. 

“Is it even fair that you’re playing Scrabble with us?” you ask Edward, frustrated about your losing streak. Esme, Carlile, Edward, and you are all playing Scrabble together in the living room. Alice and Rosalie are there too, but neither of them are playing. Rosalie is watching a soap opera and Alice is knitting something. She says it’s going to be a sweater, but it doesn’t really look like one. 

“It’s Scrabble, not poker. Reading minds doesn’t exactly help me with this game,” Edward responds as he lays down the word fuliginous. 

“What the fuck kind of work is fuliginous?” you ask, annoyed with him.

“It means sooty,” Edward said sassily. Carlisle laughed under his breath, trying to hide it. Carlisle and Esme had really embraced you as one of their kids, but like most siblings, you and Edward were always teasing each other about something. In fact, most people in this family were always teasing each other. It made everyone feel more human to not be so grim all the time. That’s what had originally attracted you to Emmett. He was always laughing or cracking jokes, and he reminded you not to take everything so seriously. That’s why when he first confessed his love to you, you thought it was just some joke. Right after, when he started kissing you, you realized it was serious. 

“I forfeit,” Carlisle said. 

“What?” You asked disappointedly. In the Cullen house it was widely agreed that if someone forfeit it felt like no one truly won. 

“Yeah, he’s got nothing he can play,” Edward responded. Clearly his mind reading was helping him with Scrabble. 

“Why do you seem so upset?” Esme asked you, softly touching your hand. At heart, she was such a mother.

“Because Scrabble was an effort to pass the time while waiting for Emmett to come back,” Edward responded while looking at you, trying to embarrass you. Yesterday, Emmett and Jasper left to go hunting together and they wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Emmett returning had been all that you’d thought about since he left, and it was starting to drive Edward insane. You couldn’t get his lips off your mind. Cold, soft, always ready to kiss you with so much passion. The thought of his hands was even worse. You reminisced on how large and strong they were. You constantly replayed in your mind the memories of Emmett holding your hips like someone holding onto their favorite mug. Tightly, tight enough to never drop it, but gentle enough to not make it shatter. 

“Don’t worry, they’ll be back early,” Alice tells you from across the room. “But when they’re back you might not be so happy about it,” Alice warns you playfully. Edward laughs, presumably having already seen whatever Alice predicted. You just roll your eyes and start to clean up the board game. 

The next day you stayed in bed all morning watching reruns of your favorite show, hiding away under your comforter. You only got out of bed and got dressed for the day after Alice told you to “look presentable for when Emmett gets home.” Even if she also teased about how much you missed Emmett that weekend, you knew she’d understand. According to Edward, she’d been thinking about nothing but date ideas for when Jasper was back. You were biased, so of course you thought that you and Emmet were the cutest couple, but you had to admit Jasper and Alice were a very close second. 

“They’re here!” Alice shouted excitedly from downstairs. You quickly rushed down, excited to see Emmett once again. It had been a long weekend, and even if you had infinite time with him, it never made the time away from him any easier. 

“Hey, darlin’,” Jasper says as he walks through the front door, quickly grabbing Alice’s hand and kissing it gently. Emmett walked in a few seconds later and began to lean on the doorframe. He had one hand on his waist and the other propped up against the door frame, trying to look seductive. As always, it worked. 

“Miss me, sweetheart?” Emmett asks you playfully. You laugh and he quickly walks over to envelop you in a hug, running his hands through your hair after he does.

“How do you know about that,” you ask confusedly, reluctantly removing yourself from the hug.

“Well, according to the rest of the family you just couldn’t stand to be without me. Constantly talking about how you miss my muscles and my mouth and my-”

“Okay, that’s enough,” you say, embarrassed. He wiggles his eyebrows at you and you have to try not to laugh. 

“Y’know, I remember you thinking about how when you got Emmett alone again you were gonna-” You immediately cut Edward off the same way you had Emmett. It’s a miracle Emmett can’t blush, because he knows if he was human he’d be firetruck red. 

“Oh, I’m gonna kill you,” you shout as you try to jump at Edward. Emmett quickly grabs you by the waist, pulling you back as you make an attempt to strangle Edward. You hear Emmet laugh at your antics as you send a piercing glare Edward’s way. 

“Calm down, killer,” Emmett remarks lightheartedly. Edward hisses at you like a cat that’s been dumped in water, so you reach an arm out to him, pretending to try and claw at him.

“Oh! They’re having another cat fight!” Alice exclaims, causing the whole room to laugh. 

“Let’s get you away from this moron,” Emmett jokes, throwing a cheeky glance at Edward. Without warning, he quickly throws you over his shoulder and begins to walk toward your bedroom. That vampire speed and strength really allows him to do anything. You make an attempt to playfully hit his back as you dangle from his shoulder, but it’s a fruitless endeavor. You hear small laughs from everyone else, but you're not even embarrassed. They’re your family. 

“So, what was it you were gonna do to me when we’re alone?” Emmett asks playfully as he walks up the stairs, still carrying you. He sets you down on the ground when the two of you make it to your room, looking at you with an expectant smirk. You sit on the bed, and he looks down at you curiously. 

“You’ll find out soon enough,” you tease. 

“Don’t taunt me,” he warns with a grin. “Besides, I don’t blame you. Who could resist a big strong man like moi?” He asks as he begins to flex his biceps. 

“Yuck,” you joke, pushing his arm away.

“Oh please,” he rolls his eyes playfully and sits down next to you. “I heard about how much you missed me. And my hands. And my lips.”

“I really will kill Edward,” You respond, deadpan.

“You’ll have to get through me first,” Emmett teases. He wraps his arms around you and flexes his muscles, causing them to tighten around you. 

“No way, I’ll feel too bad when you lose,” you say, trying to hold back a smile as you pretend to be worried about him losing a fight to you. 

“In your dreams,” he scoffs, removing his arms from around you, pretending to be hurt. 

“In my dreams for sure,” you respond flirtatiously, causing Emmett to laugh.

“Dork,” he responds, kissing you right after. He would probably be teasing you about how much you missed him for a while, but that might be something you could get used to. 

[epitomereally]

H/D Erised 2024 fic claim: Pillar of Salt

by epitomereally // E // ~62k

From the lake in the Room of Hidden Things, Draco knows three things: 1. Mirror universes exist, and he’s going to find the best one—the one where he did the right thing. 2. Harry Potter and him are awfully cosy in some of these other universes, whereas Potter in real life is starting to act very odd around him indeed. 3. Draco’s reflection—the mirror version of him, the worst version of him—seems to be growing crueler. And stronger.

Surprising probably no one, I decided to write a horror fic for Christmas, and was enabled by a cabal of demons in the mirror (love you all): @sleepstxtic for the incredible alpha advice, midnight dms, and cheering, @bettsfic—this was my first time working with betts and it was so incredible working with a coach, will do a full rebloggable write-up in the future, promise—@mourningmountainsbindery who encouraged me through some of the darkest times of writing this and who caught my bad british-isms, and @citrusses who relentlessly forged through my run-on sentences and forced me to think about which ones were me being lazy vs. which ones were essential. Thank you SO MUCH.

Thank you to my fellow co-mods @nv-md and @thehoneybeet. It was insanity to try to write a 60k fic and mod at the same time, and you both saved my skin more times than I can count.

And lastly, thank you to my incredible giftee @agentmoppet. Your sign-up and your works have always been & continue to be a treasure trove of inspiration. I am so grateful to have gotten to write this for you and THANK YOU for accepting a Christmas horror fic with open arms. I was extremely nervous hitting that submit button (I hadn't originally intended to write horror when I started writing, but the muse took me where it willed!). Your lovely words while reading meant the world to me.

A snippet:

Draco should’ve known: the second he discovered the lake, Potter would take to it like a dog to a bone. It might’ve taken him a month, but now Potter won’t stop looking at Draco.

Potter won’t stop staring and it’s making Draco want to lash out. It’s making Draco want to tear out of all Potter’s stupid long sooty eyelashes. It’s making Draco want to claw his fingers into those stupid springtime eyes, dig his fingers in and pop them like grapes.

Draco tells himself it’s not about what he said in Potions class the day before, that it’s not pity. But how could it not be, with Draco’s stupid mouth and stupid brain running away from him and saying something as imbecilic as I wanted Harry Potter to notice me. It’s not even true. Draco knows it’s not true, because now Harry Potter is noticing him and it fucking sucks.

[partywithponies]

[sootygifs]

Sooty & Co - “Elastic Tricks”

[justforbooks]

David Lynch

US director whose wildly unconventional films burrowed into the unsavoury depths of his nation’s psyche

David Lynch, who has died aged 78, was the most original film-maker to emerge in postwar America, as well as the greatest cinematic surrealist since Buñuel. His understanding of desire, fantasy and dread was unparalleled; the Paris Review called him “the Edward Hopper of American film”.

He made his debut with the experimental Eraserhead (1977), shot in sooty black-and-white and set in a churning industrial landscape where a man with a tombstone-shaped pompadour tends to his mewling, reptilian baby. From the first frames, Lynch mapped out a cinema of the subconscious that thrived on its own dream logic and nightmare imagery. It shaped everything he did, including his masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), in which an innocent young man (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a human ear and is drawn into the sleazy, violent world of a psychopath (Dennis Hopper) and a terrorised torch singer (Isabella Rossellini).

That film introduced into the archetype of cosy small-town America some potent notes of scepticism and revulsion that have never been dispelled.

This project to burrow into the unsavoury depths of his country’s psyche continued with the television whodunnit Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, which ran for two series in 1990 and 1991 then spawned a big-screen prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). The show returned 25 years later in a bold but often harrowing and impenetrable third series that, despite being made for TV, was voted the best film of 2017 by Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound magazines. To preserve the spell cast by his work, Lynch refused to be drawn on explanations. Asked what the third helping of Twin Peaks was about, he replied: “It’s about 18 hours.”

He exposed the horrors lurking beneath apparently placid exteriors, and found beauty in the quotidian, the industrial – “I’d rather go to a factory any day than walk in the woods” – or the repellent: “If you don’t know what it is, a sore can be very beautiful.” For all the darkness of Lynch’s vision, his films could also be extremely funny, peppered with verbal and visual non sequiturs, skew-whiff line readings, slapstick violence and comic embarrassment. The mix of folksy naivety and elusive strangeness in his work extended to his persona and even his wardrobe: 1950s-style slacks and blazer, and a shirt buttoned to the gullet.

He drank a milkshake in the same diner (Bob’s Big Boy) every day for seven years between the late-70s and mid-80s. Watching him on set, the novelist David Foster Wallace observed: “It’s hard to tell if he’s a genius or an idiot.” The musician Sting, who starred in his science-fiction adventure Dune (1984), called him “a madman in sheep’s clothing” while Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s second film, The Elephant Man (1980), described the affable director as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”.

Though his films were wildly unconventional, Lynch was still nominated three times for the best director Oscar. (He won an honorary Oscar in 2019.) Wild at Heart (1990), a road movie marked by baroque violence and homages to The Wizard of Oz, won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and he was named best director by the same festival in 2001 for Mulholland Drive, a warped neo-noir thriller about an aspiring actor (Naomi Watts) whose dreams of stardom disintegrate horribly after she befriends the amnesiac survivor of a car accident (Laura Harring). Developed by Lynch from his own butchered TV pilot for a series rejected by the ABC network, Mulholland Drive was one of his most seductively strange pictures.

But linear narrative was not beyond him, as he proved with two deeply moving films based on real events: The Elephant Man, about the severely deformed Joseph Merrick (“John” in the screenplay) paraded as a circus freak in the Victorian era, and The Straight Story (1999), in which an elderly man travels 300 miles on a riding mower to see his ailing brother. Both earned Oscar nominations for their lead performers (John Hurt and Richard Farnsworth respectively), which served as a reminder that Lynch’s skill as a director of actors could sometimes be obscured by his extraordinary imaginative powers.

He was born in Missoula, Montana, to Edwina (nee Sundholm), known as Sunny, who occasionally taught English, and Donald Lynch, whose job as a research scientist for the US government’s Department of Agriculture dictated the family’s peripatetic lifestyle. When Lynch was two months old they uprooted to Sandpoint, Idaho, and by the time he was 14 they had moved a further four times.

He described himself as a “troubled” child who was quick to intuit that all was not well. “I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force – a wild pain and decay – also accompanies everything.” The aftertaste of that memory can be found throughout Lynch’s work but particularly in the opening of Blue Velvet, where a montage showing schoolchildren, roses and white picket fences gives way to shots of insects thrashing in the undergrowth.

Having shown an aptitude for painting since adolescence, Lynch began studying art at the age of 18 at the Boston Museum School, then dropped out after a year to travel to Europe with his friend (and future production designer) Jack Fisk, only to return to the US a fortnight later. He got on better at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where his canvases took a darker turn (one work, The Bride, showed a woman performing an abortion on herself). It was there that Lynch met Peggy Lentz, a fellow student, who in 1967 became the first of his four wives. Together they had a child, Jennifer, and there have been almost as many attempts to link the pressures of youthful parenthood to the plot of Eraserhead as there have been theories about what exactly that film means, with its flying sperm-like creatures, roast chickens that writhe when sliced, and a balloon-cheeked chanteuse who lives behind the radiator.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1967, the same year he made his debut film work, the one-minute loop Six Men Getting Sick. He received a grant from the American Film Institute to make his 34-minute 16mm featurette The Grandmother (1970), in which a neglected child grows an elderly companion from a seed. The film combined jerky stop-motion animation with live-action footage, and showcased the sound design work of the great Alan Splet. Along with Fisk and the composer Angelo Badalamenti, Splet would become one of Lynch’s most vital collaborators.

In 1972, Lynch began work on Eraserhead. The shoot lasted five years, with regular pauses whenever the production ran out of money; Lynch would then supplement the budget with cash from family and friends (Fisk and his wife, the actor Sissy Spacek, were among those who donated) and by working odd jobs, including a paper round. After his marriage broke down, he also slept in the stables where the film was being shot. When it was finally released, Eraserhead was received with bafflement in many quarters, and with a slow-dawning fanaticism by those who caught it in the midnight movie slots at cinemas in the US, where it played, in some cases, for several years consecutively.

The film attracted the admiration of the poet Charles Bukowski and the musician Tom Waits, and went on to influence film-makers including Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, who reportedly screened it to the cast and crew of The Shining to put them in the appropriate mood.

During the early stages of production on The Elephant Man, Lynch’s attempts to design the complicated makeup failed catastrophically. But the finished film, with makeup by Christopher Tucker, a clammy feel for Victorian England and some unmistakable Lynchian touches (such as the main character’s birth in a giant ball of smoke), was an outstanding success. It melded the director’s sensibility with compassionate, classical storytelling, even if it did play fast and loose with the facts (the real Merrick, for instance, took a healthy cut of profits from being exhibited).

Lynch’s next project, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling space epic Dune, was the only one of his films to escape his control entirely, and to be released in a form not approved by him. He was unsuited to the rigours of blockbuster film-making, and his attempts to wrestle Herbert’s many-tentacled narrative into coherent shape were doomed. The film was an expensive flop – Lynch called it “a fiasco” – but it still contained astonishing sets, costumes and sound design. And it introduced Lynch to MacLachlan, who played the bland hero and would become the director’s on-screen alter ego, the Mastroianni to his Fellini, in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. In the latter, MacLachlan played the coffee-and-cherry-pie-loving FBI agent Dale Cooper, whose dreams guide his detective work as strongly as any physical clues.

The experience of making Dune left Lynch drained and depressed. “I was almost dead,” he said. “Dune took me off at the knees. Maybe a little higher.” He amused himself by contributing a four-panel comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, to the LA Reader newspaper; it ran for nine years, during which time his drawings of a dog chained in a yard remained unaltered and only the text in the speech bubbles changed.

His fortunes were revived, along with his right to final cut, with the sumptuous and terrifying Blue Velvet, a project he had been planning since before Dune. The novelist JG Ballard called it “the best film of the 1980s – surreal, voyeuristic, subversive”.

Wild at Heart could only look frivolous by comparison, despite game performances by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as the lovers on the run. But Lynch was back at the height of his powers with the first series of Twin Peaks, which began with the discovery of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washed up dead and wrapped in plastic. It altered television irrevocably, paving the way for shows such as The X-Files and Lost, True Detective and The Killing; David Chase also cited it as an influence on The Sopranos.

That enthusiastic reception made it all the more bruising for Lynch when Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned. In its focus on the days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder, the film sacrificed the quirkiness of the series in favour of an intense mood of violence and suffering, and it was several years before the picture was reappraised more positively.

Lynch’s next film, Lost Highway (1996), was a profoundly unsettling thriller that hinged on an audacious narrative fracture: one moment a jazz saxophonist suspected of murder is sitting in his prison cell; the next he has vanished and the guards find in his place a young mechanic who has no idea how he got there. The film was steeped in deadpan humour and violent imagery (there is a memorable death-by-coffee-table), as well as nausea-inducing high-speed driving footage that would be subverted comically in his next movie, The Straight Story, which never exceeded 4mph.

Acclaim for The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive restored Lynch to his late-80s standing – the latter went on to be voted the best film of the century so far in a poll of critics conducted by the BBC in 2017. His last film, Inland Empire (2006), was concerned, like Mulholland Drive, with an actor (Dern) suffering a breakdown. But at three-hours-plus and with an unusually ugly visual style (it was shot by Lynch on a handheld Sony digital camera), as well as a meandering narrative interrupted occasionally by a rabbit sitcom complete with laugh-track, it offered little of the compensatory seductiveness of the director’s other films.

That said, Lynch was not alone in feeling that Dern deserved an Oscar nomination, even if his decision to express this view by sitting on a Hollywood street corner with a cow and a poster of the actor’s face was more unorthodox than the usual method of taking out a full-page ad in the trade papers.

With the exception of the third series of Twin Peaks, Lynch devoted the rest of his days to painting, music and writing, while resisting suggestions that he had retired from film-making: “I did not say I quit cinema. Simply that nobody knows what the future holds.” Among the albums he released was the avant-garde blues collection Crazy Clown Time (2011). He also worked with the journalist Kristine McKenna on the memoir Room to Dream (2018), in which her biographical chapters about him alternate with ones in which he muses on what she has written and adds his own reflections, and gave an uncanny performance as the eye-patch-wearing, cigar-smoking film-maker John Ford in the final scene of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans (2022). Though initially reluctant to take the role, he was persuaded by Dern and by Spielberg’s assurance that there would be a large bag of Cheetos waiting in his dressing room. “Any chance I can, I get them,” Lynch said.

He was a passionate advocate of transcendental meditation, writing and speaking at length on the ways in which it had helped his work and enabled him to “catch fish” – his favourite metaphor for the creative process. (“If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it.”) The clarity engendered by meditation was perhaps at odds with the gnomic quality of much of his work.

Last year, he revealed that a lifetime of smoking had left him with emphysema. “I can hardly walk across a room,” he said. “It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.”

He is survived by his fourth wife, Emily Stofle, whom he married in 2009, and their daughter, Lula; by a daughter, Jennifer, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; by a son, Austin, from his second marriage, to Mary Fisk (sister of Jack), whom he married in 1977 and divorced in 1987; and by Riley, his son with Mary Sweeney, who edited and produced many of his films from the 1980s onwards, as well as co-writing The Straight Story, and whom he married in 2006 and divorced the following year.

🔔 David Keith Lynch, director, born 20 January 1946; died 16 January 2025

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Working on something delicious with my co-conspirators from Bridgetown, Furtive Goblin and @feralindiecharlie ! Sooty Beards, a setting zine that explores a dying dwarven coal city as it sinks into corruption, depravity and canary shit. Pray the black lung gets you before Uncle Whitedamp does.