‘A one-way ticket to heaven’: Cigarettes were David Lynch’s magic wand – and his downfall

IIt was a cold autumn day when I interviewed David Lynch in his Parisian art studio. The filmmaker sat at an ink-splattered table as I went through my questions with a sense of increasing desperation. “Well, yes and no,” Lynch replied, smiling. “No, well, maybe,” he would say, beaming at the far wall. He lit one cigarette from the butt of the other and asked Mindy, his assistant, to provide him with hot coffee. The tobacco smoke mixed with the steam from his mug. It felt like he was pushing up clouds to hide himself from view.

Lynch’s cigarette was his magic wand, his trusty, and possibly also his brush. It allowed him to draw beautiful circles in the air to illustrate the point he was making, or to throw up a smokescreen like the Wizard of Oz. Without a cigarette in his hand, the man looked like a healthy, small-town pharmacist. That made him look like a hard-boiled noir detective. Perhaps both men were Lynch; Maybe Lynch wasn’t either. He liked to be changeable and terribly difficult to pin down. His sister, he told me, was afraid of garden peas – and he said he understood why, because peas are confusing. The outer shell splits to reveal a soft core, just as humans can switch from light to dark in an instant.

Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor – who had his first cigarette at the age of four – and Lulu in Wild at Heart, 1990. Photo: Polygram/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Lynch’s best work contains themes of doubling and twinning. Fred Madison becomes Pete Dayton in the fantastic Lost Highway. The two women merge into Mulholland Drive. Lynch also had different sides, but he kept his seemingly shocking extremes in a loose, cheerful armor. He kept his fans guessing, or hopelessly hunting for diversions. How could you reconcile his bland, pleasant demeanor with his dark, twisted films? For that matter, how did his years of devotion to transcendental meditation fit in with his lifelong nicotine and caffeine addiction? One must surely cancel out the other: the irresistible force of transcendence versus the immovable object of its addictions.

“No, no, no,” Lynch interrupted, quickly reassuring me on this point. There was no contradiction. All the elements worked in harmony and combined to take it to the next level. “You don’t have to give up anything. You just add meditation to whatever you want to do. Embrace the experience and kapow, you’re ready to boogie. You can drink all the damn coffee you want. Cigarettes, he suggested, weren’t a big problem either – at least not on an emotional or spiritual level.

Lynch said he smoked his first cigarette at the age of eight (which, by the way, is four years older than Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart). Smoking was part of his identity as a painter and filmmaker. It calmed his nerves and focused his thoughts. “For me it was part of art life,” he told Sound and Vision last year. “The tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and smoking and looking at your work or thinking about things. Nothing in this world is so beautiful.”

Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet, 1986. Photo: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstar

But if Lynch’s cigarette habit made him a success, it was also inevitably his downfall in the end. Smoking destroyed his health and shortened his life, and by the time he finally quit in 2022, the damage had already been done. He was diagnosed with emphysema, rarely left his home and required supplemental oxygen to walk even a short distance. Smoking, he admitted, was entirely to blame. He urged others to quit and said he wished he had done so much sooner. He had tried to give it up before, he explained. “But when the going got tough, I had that first cigarette and it was a one-way ticket to heaven.”

Last month, researchers from University College London released a report showing that the average cigarette takes 20 minutes off a smoker’s life. I suspect Lynch smoked at least one pack a day, which would equate to ten years of wasted time. Or to put it more crudely: it is equivalent to two or three unmade films and perhaps a hundred paintings that never found their way to the canvas. Today that seems to amount to burning down the Pompidou.

As for Lynch, his relationship with his cigarettes was outwardly tranquil yet full of ambivalence. It swung from one extreme to the other in classic Lynchian style. The cigarette was nirvana and it was hell; his faithful assistant and his saboteur. He loved it and it killed him, but it also helped him get his photos. It was his dirty, deadly habit, his one-way ticket to the grave. Nevertheless, if Lynch is right and heaven exists, I hope his particular version is outfitted to his liking, with a bottomless mug of coffee and an unquenchable cigarette. It could look like JFK’s eternal flame, with added white smoke and a faint smell of danger.