With the news of David Lynch’s passing, we feel the urge to write something about his films. My sentiments aren’t special, of course: of the American cinematic masters in the last half century, Lynch ranks highly as a writer’s director, by which I mean that writers are drawn to the strange beauty of the dreams and nightmares he put on celluloid.
My PopMatters colleagues and I aim to speak to how a particular David Lynch film connects. Critics have often erred too far in aligning with Roger Ebert’s famous proclamation about Mulholland Drive (2011) – a film that he described as “a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else” – by acting like any attempt to interpret Lynch’s work is an act of violence or a necessarily reductionist engagement with his work.
Certainly, there exists a subculture of all-too-easily digested videos that aim to demystify things in his films that don’t need it, such as YouTube videos with titles like “The Ending of Lost Highway EXPLAINED”. Part of why David Lynch’s work endures is precisely because of the suggestiveness of his images, which invite a range of interpretations that speak to the depths of his craft and thinking.
With this tribute, we seek to do right by what David Lynch said of the desire for interpretive answers in 2005’s Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews edited by filmmaker Chris Rodley:
The frames are always the same on the film – it’s always the same length and the same soundtrack is always running along it. But the experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That’s another reason why people shouldn’t be told too much, because “knowing” putrefies that experience.
We look back on the fullness of David Lynch’s artistic life while recalling a particular film that feels most personal to us. — Brice Ezell
The following films are chronological by release date.
In many regards, Eraserhead is a microcosm of David Lynch’s long, fascinating, surreal, and singular career. There’s his propensity for working with the same cast, the uncomfortably long takes, the fascination with repetitive black-and-white patterns, the gritty post-industrial aesthetics, the fascination with camp, melodrama, and Silver Age slapstick, the uncanny soundscapes and eerie drones, ambiguous ending and the preoccupation with fantasies and dreamscapes. Despite its many connections to the rest of Lynch’s body of work, however, Eraserhead is still one of a kind.
Not only is Eraserhead Lynch’s most personal film, mainly focusing on the anxieties of being a new father rather than the forensic social commentary that would make up much of the rest of his career, but it’s also some of the most challenging and uncompromising work in Lynch’s canon. Indeed, Eraserhead is one of the most striking, audacious debut films of all time.
Eraserhead follows Henry (Jack Nance), a decent fella with a flat-top haircut who works as a printer at LaPell’s Factory. He receives a message from his ominous neighbor, credited as The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Roberts), that a woman named Mary has invited him to dinner. The perpetually anxious Henry hurries across a hellish industrial landscape, inspired by Lynch’s experience as a young artist and film-maker in Pittsburgh, where he’s informed that the reason Mary hasn’t been coming around is because she’s had a baby, a deformed and nightmarish creature swaddled in dirty bandages that rarely stops crying.
Most of the film orbits Henry and Mary in a cramped, slightly squalid flat as both gradually lose whatever shreds of sanity they once possessed. Henry begins to have visions of a grotesque but angelic chanteuse, the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), who seems to symbolize Henry’s growing urge towards infanticide.
Despite its nightmarish imagery and aggressively avant-garde outlook, Eraserhead feels sweeter and more tender-hearted than nearly any other work in David Lynch’s oeuvre, despite his candid admission of wanting to murder his child. Instead of turning up ears in well-manicured lawns (as in Blue Velvet) or drilling into the bedrock of the American id to let the hidden reservoirs of blood gush and flow in his films, Eraserhead concerns itself with the more mundane anxieties of rashes and bumps, burping and sleep schedules. This in no way dulls its edges or softens the film’s sledgehammer blow to the psyche.
Eraserhead may be David Lynch at his most human, but it’s also uncompromising. Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Twin Peaks seem accessible by comparison. In those films, Lynch had to please – to some degree – the studios and television networks. Eraserhead is Lynch running amok, splashing his weird soul and huge heart across the screen, larger than life, like some modernist abstract expressionist canvas, like a demented homunculus dreamed up by Dr. Caligari and Jan Svankmajer. That this strange, wondrous gem escaped the arthouse, let alone launched one of the most audacious, ambitious careers in film-making history, is one of the great epiphanies of Hollywood history. —J. Simpson
I was a sick 13-year-old anticipating a Monday home from school when Twin Peaks premiered on Sunday, so I got to stay up late and watch it. My parents and I were hooked. I wasn’t aware of David Lynch films, but I was curious about his 1984 sci-fi movie, Dune. I was expecting a new Star Wars since there were action figures for Dune. I finally watched it on cable about a year after its theatrical release, and I was confused and disappointed.
I wanted to see Lynch’s Blue Velvet when it came out in 1986, but my parents must’ve been warned against this erotic thriller because they never rented it, and they rented pretty much everything. I started paying attention to which films won awards. Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990. Since I was a Twin Peaks fan and seeking any transgressive films I could discover from the racks of my local video stores, Wild at Heart was irresistible, even though Roger Ebert wasn’t sold on this road trip crime thriller.
Ebert didn’t like Blue Velvet, either. Gene Siskel liked it, but their discussion was one of those high-horse moments on Siskel & Ebert where the two would sit in smug superiority to a transgressive film. Ebert’s reaction to Wild at Heart was the usual pearl-clutching he engaged in when he didn’t like a movie. Siskel, however, seemed to get it.
A few months later, Wild at Heart materialized for a brief run in the multiplex of my hometown of Flint, Michigan. By then, I was well into the habit of being dropped off at the movie theater to see the genre films my parents weren’t into. When a friend and I asked for tickets to Wild at Heart, the ticket seller balked. I told her my mom knew what we were seeing, and she was cool. Another employee chimed in and said, “Oh, it’s bad. Not sure how it got an R rating.” With all the charm an entitled 14-year-old could muster, I said, “Well, my mom’s not coming back until the movie is over, so you can either let us see it, or you can be annoyed by us for the next 2 ½ hours.” She caved, and we entered the theater.
Despite all the slashers and Twin Peaks we had already seen, we weren’t prepared for Wild at Heart. Not because of the film’s violence and sex, although those were certainly shocking. We didn’t know what to do with it.
All the things I would later appreciate about Wild at Heart viewings mostly unnerved me at first watch. When you’re 14, you pretend to “get it” and pretend to be unfazed, so we professed to love it. When my mom picked us up, we said, “Yeah, it was good,” and didn’t elaborate, aside from bragging about forcing them to let us into the screening.
Now, having seen Wild at Heart dozens of times with the benefit of more life experience, I see that the point is that love is all there is when the world is on fire. I understand this more every day as I march toward the inevitable end of my own life. —Brian Stout
In his book about life on the open ocean, The Outlaw Sea (2004), award-winning author William Langewiesche writes about the conspiracy theorists who emerged following the 1994 sinking of the MS Estonia, “it [is] easier to believe in perfect evil than to assimilate the complexities of accidental history.” There are moments when David Lynch’s depiction of Laura Palmer’s suffering in the Twin Peaks series and its prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), treads in the direction of isolating a “perfect evil” as the origin of Laura’s fate.
Think of the famous “Part 8” of Twin Peaks: The Return, in which the Trinity test births the evil spirit that infects Leland Palmer, a moment that seemingly elevates Laura’s condition to metaphysical realms. At the end of Fire Walk with Me, we witness Laura in the mysterious Red Room with Dale Cooper at her shoulder and an angel looming overhead. For all the ways Twin Peaks can be read as a deconstruction of an old vision of Americana and the barely concealed misogyny that undergirds it, its storytelling exists in realms beyond the material.
Watching Fire Walk with Me in 2025, these metaphysical flourishes resonate in America’s growing darkness. Twin Peaks’ indulgence in soap opera aesthetics and melodramatic bursts of emotion, unmistakable hallmarks of its style, operate in the film as markers of when experience cannot be understood in strictly realistic terms. One doesn’t need to believe in an afterlife to appreciate what David Lynch conjures in Fire Walk with Me, something that recurs throughout his work, something of an “affective transcendent”. The Red Room, Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive, and that burning shack in Lost Highway are sites where darkness funnels into our world from a place that feels elsewhere, whether or not such an elsewhere exists.
What many identify as the “dream logic” of David Lynch’s style is his insight into what heightened artistic forms like melodrama can do in illustrating the great horrors committed by humankind. My first watch-through of Twin Peaks (the original series, The Return, and this prequel film) came in the uncertain and gloomy months after the initial spread of COVID, and something about the strangeness of Lynch’s rendering of the Pacific Northwest sang in harmony with my troubled country.
In Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch’s storytelling is met by the best performance in his oeuvre, and indeed one of the great screen performances of all time in Sheryl Lee’s turn as Laura Palmer. No longer a young woman seen in a flashback or a corpse wrapped in plastic as she was on the original Twin Peaks run, Laura lives out the last week of her life in Fire Walk with Me, forcing the audience to reckon with the trials of familial abuse and male exploitation that led to her untimely demise.
Lee fluidly moves back and forth between embodying a homecoming queen, a friend unable to reveal the depths of her trials to her peers, and a daughter realizing the terror in her family home. There’s a reason why Laura’s screams remain an iconic character note: what other expression could one give, living through such tumult?
As I revisited Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and her performance following David Lynch’s death, with the ravages of anti-feminist backlash in the wake of the Trump election growing by the day, I saw in Lee’s performance a reminder sadly as necessary in 2025 as it was in 1992: the image of the American idyll – in Twin Peaks, of diners with cherry pie and letterman jackets and aw-shucks vibes – has been built on the suffering of women. Lee’s harrowing performance forces us to reckon with the cultural malignancies that underlie the image of the “all-American girl”.
To Langewiesche’s aforesaid point, one can be tempted to use an extradimensional explanation to try to understand a terrible situation. Fire Walk with Me illustrates that Langewiesche’s dichotomy can be false. In the case of Laura Palmer, evil sometimes feels greater than the machinations of “accidental history”. In Laura’s pain, so humanely captured by Lynch and deeply channeled by Lee, we see the consequences of evil as a force that emanates from a dimension beyond our own. When the world’s lights go dark, as they so often do now, I am grateful to have lived at the same time as an artist unafraid to depict evil in such frank terms. —Brice Ezell
David Lynch rarely played it straight. However, for The Straight Story, he played it so straight that Disney distributed his movie, a first for Lynch. This uncommon pairing has an antecedent in the pairing of Salvador Dali with Disney. However, unlike that particular surrealist’s Disney endeavor – 2003’s Destino, a florid stream-of-consciousness animation – Lynch‘s Straight Story is almost completely void of the hallmarks of his usual surrealist style. However, it has other Lynchian hallmarks you can spot if you watch closely.
What I always liked about “typical” Lynch films was how they vigorously tap into the layers of emotional complexity, from fear and anguish to transcendent and mundane bliss. I also appreciate his films’ hallucinatory experiments, their infusion of magical realism, and how both elements elevate the pathos. I adore that his films revel unabashedly in the variegated absurdities of our quotidian lives. In addition, I love that most David Lynch films relish cryptic plots, eccentric characters, and disturbing atmospheres.
The Straight Story is almost an entirely different beast from his more celebrated surrealist fare. Yet, it is thoroughly Lynch for the soft, even squishy, emotional core. It hits the heart and the gut—a visceral valentine. While overt Lynchian hallmarks are scrubbed away, watch more closely, and you will see discrete ones: the fascination with Americana, quirky characters, and elliptical, meditative silences.
I will never forget the first time I saw The Straight Story in the movie theatre with my Lynch-hating partner. I assured him this would be a different Lynchian experience; I had heard the murmurs about its divergences from his other films. As I dabbed my face with tissue at the film’s end, I was pleasantly shocked when my partner expressed enjoyment. I think we were both astonished at how The Straight Story explicitly lacked all the trippy features Lynch was known for.
While David Lynch’s surrealist-noir films have their hearts wrapped in nightmarish tones and scenarios, The Straight Story is heartwarming and heartwrenching. It features the late, great Sissy Spacek and also the painfully charming Richard Farnsworth in his last screen appearance, not long before his death. It tells the story of two estranged brothers reconnecting when one sibling becomes terminally ill, and it involves an epic trip on a lawn mower that is almost unbelievable, except the story is actually true.
The Straight Story is a family film. Not only do its themes of familial alienation and reunification resonate, but I found an affinity in the protagonist’s robust love for his kin. Indeed, there is a stoic sentimentality in The Straight Story, a paradox unique to Lynch: he could balance contrasting emotions so well, careful not to overindulge in either emotional extreme.
The Straight Story is not my favorite David Lynch movie, though it’s in my top five. It’s as significant a film in his oeuvre as, say, Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet, those surrealist films that are a little more ensconced in the collective consciousness. “Lynchian” doesn’t have to just mean “weird”, after all, it could also signify heart, soul, and aching purity. —Alison Ross
I first saw David Lynch’s neo-noir surrealist mystery via a DVD rental from my local Blockbuster Video. I’d spend hours browsing every week and on one of these visits, Mulholland Drive caught my eye. I recognized the director’s name and was struck by the significance of the moment because I knew this was an important filmmaker, and I was about to encounter his cinema for the first time.
The memory of first seeing Mulholland Drive belongs to a period in my life when, as a film student, I was looking to watch different types of films from the mainstream cinema that had become stifling. It’s no exaggeration to say that Mulholland Drive was a shock to the system. I reveled in a film that refused to give its audience answers and instead left us with a puzzle box to solve. Lynch remains one of the first filmmakers to open my mind to the possibilities of film.
Thinking about Mulholland Drive’s special place in my heart sparks another thought. Unlike today, where films are accessible at the click of a button, back when I discovered Lynch, you had to put in some effort. I’d walk or cycle to the video shop, and unlike today, with endless streaming services that are rebranding films as “content”, it was an algorithm-free space, a more organic way to discover cinema. The one thing I still can’t fathom, however, is why I thought it was a good idea to buy only Mulholland Drive on its retail release and not the three-film box set that included Eraserhead and Lost Highway. It was one of those “What the hell were you thinking?” moments!
Mulholland Drive can be critiqued and appreciated for its storytelling, aesthetic, and technical skill. The film opens with a colorful sequence of couples dancing the Jitterbug that then shifts to a car winding through the Los Angeles hills, set to a sublimely haunting score by Lynch’s frequent collaborator, composer Angelo Badalamenti. This marriage of image and sound reaches ethereal heights, and while more subtle than the Twin Peaks soundtrack, the visual storytelling in both is layered with otherworldliness.
Indeed, in Mulholland Drive, music becomes a prism for raw human emotions. it creates an emotional tapestry inside a puzzle-box. What strikes a nerve is how Lynch uses image and sound to create one of cinema’s great jump scares. Then, there’s the dreamscape in the form of a mystery that captivates and bewilders.
I suppose my point is that, for cinephiles, it’s not only about the onscreen story: the films we watch not only shape our journey through cinema but are encounters that tell their own story. Like Woody Allen’s character Isaac Davis talking about what makes life worthwhile in 1979’s Manhattan, the encounter with Mulholland Drive is its own tale. These are memories that make life worthwhile and which, regardless of our different cultures, allow us to speak a shared language. I’ll never forget how, after a day of writing, I sat exhausted at the BFI Southbank to watch an evening screening of Mulholland Drive, only to slip back and forth between my unconscious and the film’s dreamscape, which was quite the mind-fuck, albeit a fantastic one. —Paul Risker
