From Mulholland Drive to Twin Peaks via Lost Highway: All David Lynch Movies and TV Shows – Ranked | David Lynch

It is one of life’s eternal mysteries that in the last two decades of his life no one was willing to finance another feature by America’s greatest filmmaker at the time. Almost as much of a mystery was his last finished film: the evil twin of his previous film, Mulholland Drive. As Laura Dern’s bewitched actor settles into the character she plays, this digitally shot rampage down Hollywood’s boulevard of broken dreams shows the narrative fragmentation of his late period. It runs the gamut from inspired camcorder surrealism to make-it-up-as-you-go incoherence (which is what it was: Lynch-shot without a finished script).

11. Dune (1984)

Even the great humiliation of Lynch’s career – butchered in the editing room and later rejected by the director – contains moments of genius. The Frank Herbert tale appears as if it were transcribed during a week-long spice bender. But what a ball the prodigy, working with a big studio budget for the first time, clearly had with the visuals. The squid-like spice navigators, the wireframe force fields, the mountainous three-lipped Shai-Hulud: the baroque opulence puts the calculated corporate tastefulness of Denis Villeneuve’s version to shame. Stitches in rubber Y-fronts get our vote every time.

“Wild at heart and weird at the top!” is something of a career motto. But this adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel – made quickly alongside Twin Peaks – feels like Lynch’s most conventional work. Trading in the stock Americana of the road movie, Elvis and the Wizard of Oz, it struggles to transcend that iconography and arrive at the arresting weirdness that Lynch usually found so quickly. Perhaps the one indelibly Lynchian moment is when Willem Dafoe’s obscene lass Bobby Peru verbally attacks Laura Dern’s Lula – a scene that could have been unimaginably harsh in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. In Lynch’s it’s funny and shocking – and all the more shocking for being funny.

Inspired by the psychological schism Lynch saw inside OJ Simpson, Lost Highway was the dry weather for the innovative Möbius strip narrative of Mulholland Drive. The film “flips” halfway between Bill Pullman’s non-killing jazz saxophonist and Balthazar Getty’s chad of an auto repair shop worker, in such a way that it is not clear who is the imagination or the projection of whom. Structurally avant-garde and – especially when the unblinking Mystery Man is around – often deeply unsettling, it’s also possessed by a miserable single-mindedness that eventually wears you down.

Working as an employee of executive producer Mel Brooks, Lynch was in restrained mode, turning out what is akin to a genteel classic-era studio weeper. Instead of the technique, all the grotesqueness is entirely in the narrative. Not in the disfigured John (Joseph) Merrick himself, played with supreme dignity by John Hurt, but in society’s reactions to him – even in the self-serving motives of his guardian Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins, equally dazzling). If this was work for hire, it had a bravura innocence – culminating in the crushing final vision of Merrick’s mother reassuring him: “Nothing will die.” Words for Lynch believers right now.

This prelude to the culture-changing television series underwent a reassessment in the 21st century, as the debate surrounding gender relations and sexual assault intensified in the run-up to #MeToo. What in the early 1990s seemed like a self-indulgent rejection of the show’s winning nature now seems ahead of its time and a striking performance of empathy on Lynch’s part. He fully inhabits the victim role as Laura Palmer bravely faces her dark, incest-confused destiny. But there’s no denying, with the shining knight of the FBI’s Dale Cooper barely in the picture, that it’s relentlessly bleak.

Lynch began his acting career as he wanted to continue: Transmuting his deepest anxieties and phobias to the screen with complete openness. In this case, his fear of fatherhood – embodied in the lumpen homunculus that breaks down while in the care of the film’s shock-haired protagonist Henry. Filmed painstakingly over five years, with jack-of-all-trades Lynch involved in every technical department, it was unmistakably the work of a singular sensibility, from house clos intensity and claustrophobic smokestack atmosphere to the cast of hallucinatory entities like the moon-faced lady who emerges from Henry’s radiator. The dogged pace and dumbness only strengthened its midnight-movie credentials.

Perhaps the most Lynchian thing Lynch ever did was to follow up Lost Highway with this seductively normcore, sweet and immensely moving fable, based on a true story. Veteran Hollywood actor and former stuntman Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, a war veteran who made a 240-mile journey to see his estranged brother on a John Deere lawn tractor. This is where all those hours of transcendental meditation paid off for the director: slowed to 5 mph, he wrings every drop of beauty and human goodness out of the Midwestern setting as Straight’s journey decelerates into the sublime calm of its climax.

The eighth episode – depicting the original sin at Los Alamos, which gave birth to the show’s demonic Killer Bob – is often cited as the greatest hour of prestige television of all time. Returning 25 years after Laura Palmer promised, Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost lived up to the sky-high expectations by confounding them. At odds with nostalgia, by withholding Agent Cooper in his full glory until episode 16, turning David Bowie into a giant cauldron and aggressively ignoring television conventions (two minutes of someone sweeping a bar-room floor, anyone?), it felt often closer to video art than primetime television. But if this is Lynch’s swan song, at least we have 18 unreleased hours of it. With the show’s Manichean struggle extended to New York, Texas and Las Vegas, Lynch gave us a requiem for a broken, demoralized America, culminating in Kyle MacLachlan’s recurring hero waking up to his own nightmare on Laura Palmer’s front porch.

Only the man whose Twin Peaks character’s name was Gordon Cole – the studio head of the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard – understood and adored Hollywood enough to make what is arguably the greatest tribute to it ever. Assembled from the shards of a failed TV project, this endlessly revisitable noir mosaic is a surreal map to LA’s twin poles: the aspiration and the downfall, the infatuation and the trepidation, the illusion and the disillusionment. As she plays the amnesiac PI who plays at being a femme fatale, Naomi Watts’ ingenuity simultaneously becomes more and more adept in front of the camera: “This is the girl!” After passing her audition, she seems at home in the indescribable mysteries of performance and identity and the soul of Los Angeles itself. Which is of course one and the same thing.

Choosing between Lynch’s two finest features is like choosing between cherry pie and doughnuts. But Blue Velvet edges it out for me as the more personal and visceral of the two; his formative statement on the violence and evil lurking behind white picket fence banality whose influence quietly flourished in 90s independent film, art and comics. Set in the director’s 1950s-tinged perpetual present, it has an almost ritualistic power, as Kyle MacLachlan’s greenhorn apprentice struggles to protect Isabella Rossellini’s lounge singer from Dennis Hopper’s nightmare hipster – but encounters his own dark side. The showpiece scene – “the eye of the duck”, as Lynch called such scenes – where Hopper is undone by an interpretation of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams demonstrates the director’s unrivaled ability to use the stylized and surreal as a conductor for raw emotion.

A damn good cup of coffee. A girl wrapped in plastic. A firewood-carrying oracle. Grief expressed through news song. Thumbs up from Dale Cooper. Canada as the source of all corruption. Backwards talk from dwarves and ladies. Traffic lights at night. The lurking demon behind the sofa. Like a fish in a percolator, the original Twin Peaks was where the Lynchian sensibility filtered irreversibly into the zeitgeist.

Audiences had never seen anything like it: an apparent homage to the comforts of daytime soap opera, none of it easy or ironic, but laced with Lynch’s usual 1950s pop culture references, Dadaist skits and chilling sexual brutality. Not only did it expand the parameters of television, but it made the fullest and most seductive statement of the director’s worldview; his great American cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil battled for the souls of small-town prom queens and FBI agents.

Yes, the second season goes down badly after Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed and Lynch was preoccupied with Wild at Heart and other things. But his collaborators’ faltering attempts to replicate Lynchian weirdness in his absence only served to highlight his incomparable talent for finding the offbeat path to overwhelming emotion. Whenever the show called for revealing violence or charged metaphysics (“It’s happening again!”), he returned to the director’s chair and unfailingly delivered. Thanks for warning us about the Black Lodge, Mr. Lynch – and we’ll see you in the white.