Christopher Rhoten
It has now been one year since David Lynch’s death. Love or hate his films, Lynch spearheaded experimental filmmaking into the mainstream on both television and the silver screen for over four decades. His style is among the most distinctive in all of cinema: twisty, fractured narratives that marry the tropes and characters of horror, neo-noir, and comedy with surreal, dreamlike sensibilities. While his films all seek to disturb, fans of Lynch know they would not be what they are without his radical empathy. A David Lynch film provokes as much as it perturbs; movies like The Elephant Man or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me capture the ugliness of life, but just as often its beauty, reflecting how uniquely his films float between heaven and hell.
While experimental filmmaking is built to appeal primarily to a niche, Lynch’s oeuvre is among the most consistent and popular of American directors. Some are horror, some are noir, but like the ants at the beginning of Blue Velvet, all of his movies repeatedly dig beneath the surface to uncover truths often taken for granted. Their stories explore the secrets, subconscious fears and desires, and mysteries lurking behind everyday life, each approached with the formal and narrative fearlessness of an artist shooting for the moon. Even if a few land somewhere in the stars, some have entered permanent discussion as among the best films ever made. With his legacy etched in stone—“Lynchian” has become a cinematic term itself—and his filmography complete, the only thing left to see is how the films of Idaho’s boy scout stack up.
10. DUNE (1984)
There had to be one at the bottom. Lynch’s ill-fated take on Dune is perhaps his only film generally agreed upon as outright bad, in the sense that there is simply too much plot crammed into a story that seems uninterested in its own lore. Dune is confusing, uninspired, and Lynch himself (who lacked final cut) would later disavow it. The American director was simply the wrong man for the job—if anything, the creativity already present in the novel seemed to shackle his usual spontaneity.
Regardless of its quality, Dune demonstrated the potential to adapt Herbert’s epic, as proven almost 40 years later by Denis Villeneuve’s duology, which is set to wrap up with a third film later this year. And Lynch’s burgeoning relationship with star Kyle MacLachlan, first established here, would lead to one of cinema’s most fruitful collaborations.
9. WILD AT HEART (1990)
Garish, maximalist, and juvenile, Wild at Heart lives up to its title in every sense of the word. Instantly controversial for its copious amounts of graphic content, the film somehow won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the director’s only time taking the prize.
Lynch’s funniest film is a showcase for flamboyant and over-the-top performances: Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern channel Elvis and Marilyn as Sailor and Lula, respectively, playing an endearingly demented couple madly in love and on the run from hitmen. Equally memorable is Willem Dafoe as the toothy, ridiculously evil Bobby Peru, Diane Ladd as Lula’s psychotic mother, Marietta Fortune, and Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee, in an insane eleventh-hour cameo as Glinda the Good Witch, who inexplicably appears to remind Cage’s Sailor about the power of love. The film does not always blend its inspirations smoothly—an eclectic mix of The Wizard of Oz, Elvis, and neo-noir—but with no single genre to box things in, its volatile tonality never feels insincere.
A love story forged in the very fires of hell, Wild at Heart is Lynch at his most excessive, but certainly not his least effective.
8. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
It has been two decades since filmgoers were treated to a black-and-white poster of nothing but Laura Dern’s terrified face and the tagline “a woman in trouble.” In retrospect, it seems almost a waste that Lynch’s final film was released twenty years before his passing, especially since there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to his unrealized projects. Still, it is somewhat fitting that his last theatrically released film (some consider The Return an eighteen-hour movie) was the Lynchiest and least accessible of them all.
Inland Empire is an extraordinarily confusing story about the production of a cursed Polish folktale that quickly loses any concrete sense of reality, giving way to a stream-of-consciousness series of disturbing dream sequences and duplicate lives. Shot without a completed script and entirely in low resolution with a camcorder, Lynch’s self-referential swan song might be his most frightening film, but it is without question one of his most creative. Sometimes this creativity proves incomprehensible, but the attempt itself is staggering.
An early precursor to analog horror, the film’s slippery sense of time and place results in a cinematic experience unparalleled before or since, one akin to getting sucked into your TV screen in the middle of the night. If Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s Persona, Inland Empire is his 8½: a movie about moviemaking that paints a disorienting, nightmarish, low-res picture of Hollywood and all its vices.
7. THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)
Based on a true story, The Straight Story was Lynch’s self-described “most experimental” film—a humorous but fitting description for a movie about an old man on a lawnmower. Linear, G-rated, and disarmingly sincere, it tells the simple tale of a septuagenarian traveling across the country to mend a relationship with his brother, who recently suffered a stroke. The film was an instant success and earned Lynch another Palme d’Or nomination, one of four in his career.
Propelled by stirring performances from Sissy Spacek and Richard Farnsworth in his final role, The Straight Story makes a compelling case that ten films were too few across a career filled with experiments. Lynch’s skill at traditional storytelling and the heartfelt subject matter remind us that he spent his time making trippy mind trips by choice, not necessity. Farnsworth’s Straight is filled with regret, but he does not let it stop him from trying to see the good in a world that continues to offer it back, and his humble odyssey results in plenty of chances to both give and receive small acts of kindness across the Midwest.
As told in the Chris Rodley book Lynch on Lynch, the director once heard the following observation by a patron at one of the film’s screenings: “Isn’t it odd that there are two directors named David Lynch?” Despite the familiar subject matter simply explored without his usual eye for the surreal or the macabre, it is indeed jarring to think that “Walt Disney presents a film by David Lynch” is an actual phrase in an actual movie. One wonders what Lynch’s Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century might have looked like.
6. ERASERHEAD (1977)
Is Eraserhead the definitive midnight movie? Released in 1977, Lynch’s debut effort has baffled and repelled as often as it has enraptured audiences—a defining trait of cult films. What makes it unique is the brazen formal experimentation: chiaroscuro lighting, unnerving sound design, and liberal dream logic, elements that coalesce into a bizarre nightmare world set within a pounding industrial wasteland.
Lynch’s “most spiritual film” also best explores his obsession with modernity: Eraserhead hums with domestic unease. The passive Henry is trapped in his peculiar environment, from the harsh factories in his neighborhood to his claustrophobic home to the “child” that forces him into the nuclear family. Lynch’s career-long use of the stage makes its first occurrence by way of the Lady in the Radiator, embodying Henry’s yearning for escape as she sings, “in heaven, everything is fine.”
Eraserhead is more layered and complex than it might seem, but you do not need to be a film historian to recognize its central theme: the fears and anxieties of parenthood. Henry’s disturbing, deformed alien baby and its darkly comedic penchant for frightening its father have been discussed for decades—a bewitching absurdity perhaps unsurpassed by even Lynch himself. Inspired by the director’s time living in Philadelphia, five years he described as nothing but “violence, hate, and filth,” Eraserhead is a formative and freaky introduction, born of the filmmaker’s own personal turmoil. Six will be low for some, but the placement is less a statement about the quality of Lynch’s first film than about the ones that follow.
5. TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)
Make no mistake: fans and contemporary critics alike did not take kindly to Fire Walk With Me back in 1992. The film was booed at Cannes, bombed at the box office, and elicited the infamous quote from Quentin Tarantino: “David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.” To be sure, such a stark tonal departure from the show required acclimation that many found difficult, and, in terms of plot, it is largely an unnecessary prequel to the series.
But Fire Walk With Me is not Twin Peaks Season 2.5—it is a film that knows pandering to the audience is the surest way to produce something immediately forgettable. Thirty years ago, wrapping up an eccentric but relatively straightforward ABC soap opera with something like this seemed downright insane. Today, many recognize that the film’s beauty lies in its bravery; “weird” and “messed up” no longer carry the same stigma, as shown by the mainstream success of A24 and Neon.
This is Laura Palmer’s story, told in all its violent, messy, and shocking glory, given literal center stage in the interdimensional Red Room. While Lynch would revisit small-town America many times as a source for horror, the last days of Laura Palmer may be his most abrasive and bleak example. Fire Walk With Me’s fearless exploration of parental abuse and incest makes for a difficult watch, arguably his saddest, and goes far beyond what would have been allowed on television. Its reputation embodies one of Sheryl Lee’s piercing screams: hard to stomach, impossible to forget.
4. LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
Lost Highway was not especially well-received upon its release. (You might be beginning to notice a pattern here.) Today, many agree that Lynch’s surreal, inky black neo-noir is a difficult first watch but also a layered, rewarding, and fiercely feminist deconstruction of the genre. The film’s Möbius-strip structure alludes to the jealousy between a jazz performer and his wife before shifting focus to a “new” set of characters halfway through, including the inscrutable Pale Man and a dangerous femme fatale. A variety of Lynch’s career-long traits are prominent here: experimentation with structure, fascination with video and recording, and duality.
Once you tune into the film’s wavelength, it is hard not to admire the clever way Lynch explores identity and how men intuitively imagine and reimagine women; as later explored in Mulholland Drive, people are often multiple people at once. Lost Highway also oozes early-2000s style, with scuzzy, neon-lit hallways and jazz clubs, and a punishing mix of rock and metal, making it a product of its time in both the best and worst ways. Some say the scariest moment is the party scene, where the Pale Man stares our protagonist in the eye as he answers a phone call miles away, inside the man’s house; my money is on the Marilyn Manson cameo.
Lost Highway is occasionally disjointed, even for diehard fans, but the particularly unsettling balance achieved between style and narrative makes it one of Lynch’s most striking works of art.
3. BLUE VELVET (1986)
Blue Velvet begins innocuously enough. While visiting his ailing father, Kyle MacLachlan’s unassuming college student Jeffrey Beaumont discovers a detached ear in a field and reports it to the police. Curiosity gets the better of him, and his own investigation spirals into a bizarre, perilous conspiracy involving gangsters, abduction, and a disturbed nightclub singer.
David Lynch had an idyllic childhood by all accounts, yet as he grew up, he developed a fascination with the commonplace evil of the world, particularly in small-town America. Blue Velvet explores this unusual contrast with little subtlety, as the comforting pleasures of picket fences and apple pie are infested with sexual deviancy, murder, and abuse, often symbolized with insect imagery. Like several Lynch films, 1950s popular culture and gritty noir intersect in ways previously unimaginable. But like Wild at Heart, there is hope at the end of the Yellow Brick Road: a line from the Bobby Vinton cover that inspired the title—“And I still can see blue velvet through my tears”—perfectly summarizes the idealism of Lynch’s fourth feature.
Blue Velvet has left an indelible mark on noir, mystery, and the thriller. The profane Frank Booth continues to shock, while the tenderness of Laura Dern’s Sandy still warms the soul. It may be “gateway” Lynch in terms of linearity, but there is nothing simple about the cultural complexities it explores.
2. THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)
For much of The Elephant Man, it seems the film is following Anthony Hopkins’ measured Frederick Treves. Treves, a surgeon, discovers a severely deformed man named John Merrick at a Victorian freak show and takes him in to be studied. Dubbed “The Elephant Man,” Merrick is covered in tumors and deformities but quickly demonstrates remarkable intellect, allowing Treves to communicate with him and improve his life, attracting the awe and attention of very powerful people.
Initially, Treves seems to function as a self-insert for David Lynch himself, voicing anxieties mid-film about unintentionally exploiting Merrick and shifting his experience as an attraction to the poor to spectacle for the rich. Gradually, however, Merrick’s story takes over. Treated like a monster-movie villain in the opening half hour—kept in deep shadow by Freddie Francis’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography—Merrick slowly emerges as a mind more human than most, a singular lover of beauty and the arts. By the end, Lynch draws a parallel between Merrick and himself: both are “tortured” artists who crave the limelight, even at the cost of vulnerability, an idea that sounds ridiculous on paper but somehow works.
There is less surrealism here than in most Lynch films, but not none: visions of elephants and Merrick’s mother haunt her son throughout the story, and scenes Ebert once dismissed as ‘idiotic’ now read as vital flourishes in the film’s exploration of what being beautiful actually means. Arriving on the heels of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man is occasionally sentimental, but that sentiment is earned through John Hurt’s masterful performance and Lynch’s dedication to capturing not only the lows of such a life but the highs as well. Perhaps those who lack empathy simply lack imagination.
1. MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)
It would be difficult to discuss David Lynch’s filmography and rank any other film at the top without also including his television work. Ranked by the New York Times last year as the second-best film of the twenty-first century (bested only by Parasite), Mulholland Drive is the director’s most popular film, his most celebrated, and by nearly every other metric, his best.
To this day, Lynch’s ability to replicate dreams is unparalleled. Dreams never have a true beginning. Dreams are filled with figures assembled like a patchwork quilt from vaguely associated memories. Dreams often elicit terror and ecstasy hand in hand without seeming strange in the moment. All of these sensations apply to Mulholland Drive, a deeply mysterious story about an aspiring actress and an amnesia victim crossing paths in LA, where implications are felt more than rationally parsed. There may not be a scarier jumpscare in cinema than the diner scene, nor a musical number more inexplicably emotional than the third-act performance of the Roy Orbison-penned “Crying,” which brings both women to tears. Certainly, there will not be a better Billy Ray Cyrus cameo.
Jam-packed with symbolism, motifs, and haunting visuals, the film has inspired countless theories and reinterpretations over the years, even though the simplest explanation is likely correct. We cannot forget that the ability to reproduce dreams does not inherently supply meaning. The genius of David Lynch is—and always has been—his ability to see reality reflected in the subconscious. At some point, all of us have created fantasies to live in, perceiving the world as we wish it were, making Betty’s story as haunting as it is perplexing. An avant-garde tour de force of obsession, identity, and desire, Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s masterpiece, or at least one of them. It is a dream we will cherish long after its creator has gone silent.
