There’s nothing duller than listening to someone else describe their dreams. But David Lynch’s movies found a way to turn his into groundbreaking cinema. Reveries and night terrors aren’t all the late filmmaker explored in his work, either: in cinematic history, there have been few keener observers of white America. While he lived in and loved Los Angeles, Lynch—who died Thursday—spent much of his life in less glamorous parts of the country, and signaled a deep affection for all of them in his filmography. His cinema and TV work is shot through with the cruelty and kindness lurking in our cities and suburbs, adults and children, the fortunate and destitute.
Much like dreams, merely hearing Lynch’s work described does not compare to experiencing his movies and TV series firsthand. Unconventional to the end, the director’s filmography (plus Twin Peaks, indispensable to his oeuvre) almost always elicits strong responses, with each project re-assembling a number of core ideas, themes, and images.
As a filmmaker that so strongly associated his creative output with the subconscious, this is less a ranking of quality and more a rumination on dreaminess. Lynch was at his best when he invited us into his subconscious. He was transcendent, however, when he made room for us to graft our own onto his.
12. Dune (1984)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Sting
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 36%
Metacritic: 41
Notoriously the project that turned Lynch away from studio filmmaking, Dune is memorable as a fork in the road for Lynch’s career—the moment he vowed never to feel like a sellout again. Yet even with its reputation as a boondoggle for both the director and studio, Dune remains a singular sci-fi epic, making Frank Herbert’s vision of a spacefaring empire’s war over a mind-altering drug feel strange and new again.
11. Wild at Heart (1990)
Notable cast: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Crispin Glover
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 65%
Metacritic: 52
A raucous fairytale romance that sprawls across the American South, Wild at Heart is a raw nerve of a film, following two reckless and hard-rockin’ lovers (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) who hit the road in an attempt to escape the violence that surrounds them. More jarring than other Lynch works in its juxtaposition of real and surreal, there’s an inelegance to Wild at Heart that only underlines the despair its heroes are fleeing. But even with those jagged edges, Wild at Heart sings as Lynch’s most unrestrained film—a primal scream that doesn’t signal madness, but defies it.
10. The Elephant Man (1980)
Notable cast: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft
MPA rating: PG
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
Metacritic: 78
It is fascinating to see Lynch’s preoccupations applied to a conventional period piece. Lynch made his studio debut with this drama inspired by the life of Joseph Merrick (“John” in the film)—a Victorian man who lived with severe physical deformities and rose from freak show act to fixture of high society. Featuring a tremendous performance from John Hurt as Merrick, The Elephant Man is a poignant exploration of something Lynch will return to over and over again: the thin membrane separating humanity’s great cruelty and deep empathy.
9. Eraserhead (1977)
Notable cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart
MPA rating: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%
Metacritic: 87
While all of Lynch’s films gain something after dark, Eraserhead is made for it. The director’s feature debut, about a man who learns he has a deformed child with an inexplicable condition, serves as a compact, troubling introduction to the audio/visual toolbox Lynch would pull from throughout his career. It’s all here: A frightening fascination with industrial decay; scenes of suburban domesticity warped through a funhouse mirror; steam and electricity as conduits between a world we understand and one we do not. It’s a body horror nightmare, and a midnight movie classic.
8. The Straight Story (1999)
Notable cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton
MPA rating: G
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
Metacritic: 86
For a storyteller whose name became a synonym for the surreal, David Lynch’s oddest feature film might also be his most naturalistic. A tender yet plainspoken biographical drama about Alvin Straight, who in 1994 drove his lawnmower 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his ailing brother, The Straight Story is a reminder of Lynch’s deeply humane approach to storytelling. Working from a script by John Roach and frequent collaborator Mary Sweeney, The Straight Story serves as a potent reminder that Lynch’s penchant for exploring the darkness hidden behind picturesque Americana stemmed from a deep love for the decency it threatened to swallow whole.
7. Inland Empire (2006)
Notable cast: Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 72%
Metacritic: 73
Lynch’s final film is both familiar and alien, a restatement of his many fascinations and a new layer of mystery confounding those who seek any definitive interpretation of his work. Inland Empire layers a number of vague stories, preferring mood over plot. There are a pair of folktales, an actress (Laura Dern again) in a cursed production, troupes of carnies and sex workers, and a mysterious hypnotist stalking them all, divulged in recursive loops and troubling echoes. Perhaps his least accessible work, it is also his most experimental and ultimately frightening, a lo-fi nightmare that demands repeated viewings — if you don’t get lost in the first one.
6. Lost Highway (1997)
Notable cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 70%
Metacritic: 53
A more conventional filmmaker would craft a hell of a mystery out of Lost Highway‘s premise: saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is drawn into the Los Angeles underworld after discovering chilling footage taken of him and his wife inside of their home. But Lynch actively resists convention, instead crafting a vivid tableau of döppelgangers and roads that lead nowhere—a circuitous narrative where Fred is inexplicably replaced by a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), and two women with the same face (Patricia Arquette) seem to tie their fates together. Lynch’s work is frequently described in cerebral, dreamy terms, but in Lost Highway he is also tremendously cool, crafting a slick open-ended supernatural thriller that improves as it lingers.
5. Blue Velvet (1986)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Dennis Hopper
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
Metacritic: 75
Following the professional and creative disappointment of Dune, Lynch returned with Blue Velvet, the film that would serve as his artistic calling card for the remainder of his life and career. The quintessential Lynch picture, Blue Velvet follows the boyish college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) as he returns to the prim and proper suburbs of North Carolina and finds a severed ear on the ground. This leads him down a rabbit hole that runs deep: to Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini), a lounge singer he falls in love with; to Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), the gangster keeping her under his thumb; to harrowing physical and sexual violence that transforms Beaumont’s suburban hometown from a pleasant backdrop to a den of nightmares. Blue Velvet caused a fundamental shift in American cinema, and carved an unforgettable scar on the American Dream.
4. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Notable cast: Sheryl Lee, Kiefer Sutherland, David Bowie
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 64%
Metacritic: 45
Few ideas recur in Lynch’s work more than women in trouble, but none of those characters are as vividly imagined or deeply felt for as Laura Palmer. Lynch’s first return to the world of Twin Peaks — this time without co-creator Mark Frost — is a strange creation. After a lengthy prologue that adds more indelibly strange lore to the Twin Peaks mythos, the bulk of the film chronicles the final week of Laura’s life, detailing the breakdown in care and trust that parents and society owe their children—and the hell that young people face when adults abandon them to face the world alone. Fire Walk With Me is a horrifying film. But levied by Sheryl Lee’s devestating work as Laura, it’s also one of Lynch’s most heartbreaking and tragic works.
3. Twin Peaks (1990-1991)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise
MPA rating: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: 78%
Metacritic: 83
If David Lynch never had a hand in Twin Peaks, he would still have had many imitators. That he did help craft Twin Peaks made it impossible to find artists who are not indebted to him in some way. Much ink has been spilled about how Lynch and Mark Frost changed television forever with their creation: how the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer became a vehicle for exploring a sleepy town full of secrets with the supernatural lurking in the margins. A project too big to attribute to one person, or even two, Twin Peaks is nevertheless a testament to Lynch’s consistent push for mystery, and his career-long resistance to explanation. It’s because of the show’s mystery, its ethereal and unexplained lore, that so many had room to play in the Twin Peaks world, and that viewers felt so drawn to its world — a pull so powerful that 25 years later, it would draw everyone back again.
2. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Notable cast: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 84%
Metacritic: 87
Widely regarded as Lynch’s best film and among the best ever made, few movies haunt like Mulholland Drive. A neo-noir romance that drifts between visions of Hollywood as a seedy den of exploitation and frighteningly real dream factory, Mulholland Drive primarily circles Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an actress who befriends and falls in love with an amnesiac named Rita (Laura Harring). Slipping between the grimy world of casting auditions and mobsters, an otherworldly nightclub, and the mystery of Rita’s identity, Mulholland Drive reconfigures itself on every viewing, tempting the audience with the potential for coherence while also asking why they would ever want to try.
1. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, David Lynch
MPA rating: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%
Metacritic: 83
Everything about Lynch and Frost’s 2017 revival of Twin Peaks remains astonishing — that it happened at all, that the pair secured the participation of much of the ’90s cast in addition to a bevy of newcomers, and that they managed to run an 18-part limited series with no apparent network or studio oversight. And then there’s the show itself, which did not settle for being a mere continuation of the original series. The Return is a profound journey through the American subconscious, a lyrical opus rich with overwhelming sorrow, deep hope, and wonderfully funny absurdity. Lynch’s final major work is also his best, a shared dream unspooling one frame at a time. We could spend a lifetime contemplating it.
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