Image by Amy T. Zielinski via Getty / FuturismBeloved "Mulholland Drive" director David Lynch lived just off that titular Hollywood street and his death may well have been related to the wildfires that blazed nearby.Sources close to the director toldDeadline that Lynch "took a turn for the worse" after being forced to evacuate his house due to the Sunset fire, which burned for about a day in the Hollywood Hills as larger conflagrations devastated other parts of LA County.Aged 78 at the time of his death, the lifelong smoker revealed to Sight and Sound magazine last year that he had been diagnosed with emphysema. During that gloomy interview, Lynch said that he didn't leave his house often due to fear of contracting COVID-19 alongside his debilitating lung disease, and could only work if he directed remotely."Ill tell you, I've gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so Im homebound whether I like it or not," the "Twin Peaks" creator told the magazine. "I cant go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I'm out of oxygen."Though no official cause of death has been released in the aftermath of Lynch's passing, speculation has raged online about the potential link between the fire-mandated evacuation of his Hollywood home a brutalist mauve mansion built by Frank Lloyd Wright's son for the writer Beverly Johnson that's located right off Mulholland and his death so soon after.The already-dodgy air quality in LA has been positively apocalyptic since it suffered warring wildfires last week and Lynch being exposed to it could well have contributed to his death,linking it in a grim way to the climate and energy crises also implicated in the deadly California fires.In a meta-analysis of studies about wildfire smoke's impact on emphysema, a common form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), theHealthcare (Basel) journal suggested not only that inhaling post-fire particulates can lead to "increased all-cause mortality," but also that older people with COPD are at greater risk of becoming ill or dying after wildfires.And the fires notwithstanding, Lynch acknowledged in his Sight and Sound interview that his love affair with cigarettes was likely to do him in."Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me," he told the magazine. "It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting 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," he said, "its killing me."Observers on social also tied those poetic factors together when mourning the "Inland Empire" auteur."Dying from cigarettes and a fire itself caused by both nature and human evil is deeply Lynchian," one wrote.Share This Article