It is one of life’s eternal mysteries that for the last two decades of his life, no one was willing to fund another feature by America’s greatest film-maker of the time. Almost as much of a mystery was his final completed feature: the evil twin of his previous film, Mulholland Drive. As Laura Dern’s hexed actor segues into the character she is playing, this digitally shot rampage down Hollywood’s boulevard of broken dreams dials up the narrative fragmentation of his late period. It runs the gamut from inspired camcorder surrealism to making-it-up-as-you-go-along incoherence (which is what it was: Lynch shot without a finished screenplay).
Saroque opulence … Sting in Dune (1984). Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
11. Dune (1984)
Even the great humiliation of Lynch’s career – butchered in the editing room and later disowned by the director – contains moments of genius. The Frank Herbert narrative comes across as though transcribed during a week-long spice bender. But what a ball the wunderkind, working with a big studio budget for the first time, clearly had with the visuals. The cuttlefish-like spice navigators, the wireframe forcefields, the mountainous tri-lipped Shai-Hulud: the baroque opulence puts the calculated corporate tastefulness of Denis Villeneuve’s version to shame. Sting in rubber Y-fronts gets our vote every time.
10. Wild at Heart (1990)
“Wild at heart and weird on 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 this iconography and reach the arresting strangeness that Lynch usually located so quickly. Maybe the one indelibly Lynchian moment is when Willem Dafoe’s obscene hoodlum Bobby Peru verbally assaults Laura Dern’s Lula – a scene which could have been unbelievably crass in the hands of a lesser film-maker. In Lynch’s, it is funny and shocking – and all the more shocking for being funny.
Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy
9. Lost Highway (1997)
Inspired by the psychological schism Lynch saw inside OJ Simpson, Lost Highway was the dry run for the innovative Möebius-strip narrative of Mulholland Drive. The film “flips” halfway through from Bill Pullman’s uxoricidal jazz saxophonist and Balthazar Getty’s chad of an autoshop worker, in such a way that it is not clear who is the fantasy or projection of whom. Structurally avantgarde and – especially when the unblinking Mystery Man is nearby – often highly unsettling, it is also possessed by a sordid single-mindedness that eventually wears you down.
8. The Elephant Man (1980)
Working as a hired hand for executive producer Mel Brooks, Lynch was in restrained mode, turning out what is akin to a genteel classic-era studio weepie. Rather than the technique, all the grotesqueness is entirely in the tale. 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 guilelessness – culminating in the crushing final vision of Merrick’s mother reassuring him: “Nothing will die.” Words for the Lynch faithful right now.
Sheryl Lee and Kyle MacLachlan as Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper in Fire Walk With Me. Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar Collection/New Line/Allstar
7. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
This prequel to the culture-shifting TV series underwent a 21st-century reappraisal as the debate around gender relations and sexual abuse intensified in the run-up to #MeToo. What seemed in the early 1990s like a self-harming refusal of the series’ winning quirkiness now seems ahead of its time and a striking feat of empathy on Lynch’s part. He fully inhabits the role of victim, as Laura Palmer courageously faces down her dark, incest-blighted destiny. But it can’t be denied, with the shining knight of the FBI’s Dale Cooper hardly in the picture, that it is unremittingly grim.
Deepest anxieties … Jack Nance in Eraserhead. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy
Lynch began his feature career as he meant to go on: transmuting his deepest anxieties and phobias on to the screen with utter candidness. In this case, his fears of fatherhood – embodied in the lumpen homunculus that degrades 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 the huis clos intensity and claustrophobic smokestack ambiance to the cast of hallucinatory entities such as the moon-faced lady who emerges from Henry’s radiator. The stubborn pacing and obtuseness only bolstered its midnight-movie credentials.
5. The Straight Story (1999)
Maybe the most Lynchian thing Lynch ever did was to follow up Lost Highway with this beguilingly 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 a 5mph crawl, he wrings every drop of beauty and human goodness out of the midwest setting, as Straight’s journey decelerates into the sublime tranquility of its climax.
MacLachlan, Dern and Lynch in Twin Peaks: The Return. Photograph: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME
4. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
The eighth episode – showing the original sin at Los Alamos which birthed the series’ demonic Killer Bob – is often cited as the greatest hour of prestige TV ever. Returning 25 years on, as Laura Palmer promised, Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost met the sky-high expectations by confounding them. Flouting nostalgia by withholding Agent Cooper in his full glory until episode 16, turning David Bowie into a giant kettle, and aggressively disregarding TV conventions (two minutes of someone sweeping a bar-room floor, anyone?), it often felt closer to video art than primetime TV. But if this is now Lynch’s swansong, at least we got 18 unexpurgated hours of it. With the series’ manichean struggle extended out to New York, Texas and Las Vegas, Lynch gave us a requiem for a shattered, demoralised America, culminating in Kyle MacLachlan’s returning hero waking into his own nightmare on Laura Palmer’s front porch.
3. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Only the man whose Twin Peaks character’s moniker was Gordon Cole – the studio exec in the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard – understood and adored Hollywood enough to make what is arguably the greatest tribute to it ever made. This endlessly rewatchable noir mosaic, assembled from the shards of a failed TV project, is a surrealistic map to LA’s twin poles: the aspiration and the comedown, the infatuation and the jilting, the illusion and the disillusionment. As she plays PI with an amnesiac accomplice playing at being a femme fatale, Naomi Watts’s ingenue simultaneously gets increasingly adept in front of the camera: “This is the girl!” Aceing her audition, she seems to home in on the ineffable mysteries of performance and identity, and the soul of Los Angeles itself. Which of course are one and the same thing.
The eye of the duck … the ‘In Dreams’ sequence in Blue Velvet (1986). Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar
2. Blue Velvet (1986)
Choosing between Lynch’s two finest features is like choosing between cherry pie and doughnuts. But Blue Velvet edges it for me as the more personal and visceral of the two; his formative statement of violence and evil lurking behind white picket-fence banality, whose influence quietly bloomed in 90s independent film, art and comic books. Taking place in the director’s 1950s-tinged eternal present, it has an almost ritualistic force, as Kyle MacLachlan’s greenhorn student 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 – in which Hopper is undone by a rendition of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams demonstrates the director’s unmatched ability to use the stylised and surreal as a conductor for raw feeling.
1. Twin Peaks S1 & 2 (1990-91)
A damn fine cup of coffee. A girl wrapped in plastic. A log-carrying oracle. Grief expressed through novelty song. Thumbs up from Dale Cooper. Canada as the source of all corruption. Backwards talk from dwarves and dames. Traffic lights in the night. The leering demon behind the sofa. Like a fish in a percolator, the original Twin Peaks was where the Lynchian sensibility filtered irreversibly into the zeitgeist.
Forces of good and evil warring for the soul of a prom queen … Twin Peaks. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Audiences had never seen anything like it: an ostensible homage to the comforts of daytime soap opera, none of it facile or ironic, but cut with Lynch’s habitual 1950s pop-culture references, dadaist skits and appalling sexual brutality. Not only did it expand the parameters of television but it amounted to the fullest and most seductive statement of the director’s worldview; his great American cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil warred for the souls of small-town prom queens and FBI agents alike.
Yes, the second season dips badly after Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed, and Lynch was occupied with Wild at Heart and other things. But his collaborators’ flailing attempts to replicate Lynchian weirdness in his absence only served to highlight his inimitable talent for finding the offbeat route to overwhelming emotion. Every time the series called for revelatory violence or charged metaphysics (“It is happening again!”), he returned to the director’s chair and unfailingly delivered. Thanks for warning us about the Black Lodge, Mr Lynch – and see you in the White one.
