Essential David Lynch Films & TV Shows To Discover (Or Rewatch) This Weekend

The late auteur’s movies and TV shows were a trip into a twisted, lyrical mind that saw the world like nobody else.

One of the most memorable images of David Lynch is not from a film set but from the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea, sitting in a director’s chair with a magnificent black-and-white cow named Georgia.

The surrealist maverick who brought you Twin Peaks, whose family announced on Thursday he had died at 78, had decided to put on a performance art show to get Laura Dern a best-actress nomination for 2006’s Inland Empire. He had run out of money, as he would later explain, and couldn’t afford a billboard ad for a three-hour experimental film shot on low-res video with an improvised script, about an actress who starts morphing into her character, a 1930s Polish woman (possibly a sex worker?) in a B-movie production that seems to be cursed.

David, nothing if not a dedicated friend and artist, spent all day on that corner, sipping coffee next to a huge “For your consideration” sign with Laura’s face on it, while Polish music composer Marek Zebrowski provided a score. She didn’t get the nomination, but the film has since come to be known as one of David’s many under-appreciated gems. “It was so beautiful,” he told Wired at the time, “such a great day, out with Georgia the cow, beautiful piano music, meeting so many great people.”

It was one snapshot of a life lived to its bizarre hilt. If you loved David, you loved everything about him, from that terrific white pompadour and his advocacy for using Transcendental Meditation to calm children’s anxiety, to the many Easter eggs fans could find in his films about how much he loved coffee and thought tea was absolute trash. (In addition to making Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks an avid coffee fan - “That’s a damn fine cup of coffee” - David said he drank 20 cups a day and even started his own specialty blend.

His movies and TV shows were a trip into that twisted, lyrical mind that saw the world like nobody else. And what a pleasure it was. Instead of naming every one of them, or the countless film-makers he inspired, we’re just going to leave you with a starter pack of some of his greatest, to be enjoyed in a dark room with a big cup of black coffee. As his family said in a statement: “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole.’”

Eraserhead

David’s surreal 1977 feature played the midnight movie circuit for years, slowly and steadily earning its reputation as a bona fide cult classic. Its most famous scene features a Kewpie doll emerging from a radiator wearing prosthetic … things on her cheeks, shyly singing “In Heaven,” a song Lynch wrote with the musician Peter Ivers. It’s an image that you can’t forget, even if you would like to.

Eraserhead set the tone for what we now think of as “Lynchian” cinema: dream logic, stylistic nods to earlier eras and a pace that can be either spastic or glacial. (Some fans have pondered the meaning of pauses in dialogue that lasted 13 seconds.) In a 2007 Bafta interview, David said Eraserhead was his most spiritual movie. Asked to elaborate, Lynch responded, “No, I won’t.” The film’s reputation helped set the stage for his next film, The Elephant Man, one of the more accessible Lynchian movies that earned eight Oscar nominations.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet earned David his second Oscar nomination for directing, with its controversial depiction of Isabella Rossellini as a nightclub singer suffering at the hands of a gas-huffing sadist played by Dennis Hopper. Pauline Kael loved it. Roger Ebert did not. “Lynch shows us Rossellini naked and humiliated, and then cuts to jokes about the slogans on the local radio station,” Roger wrote.

He has a point about tonal whiplash: The film opens with Bobby Vinton’s schmaltzy recording of the song Blue Velvet played over slow-motion scenes of quaint Americana before the camera lingers on a severed human ear being devoured by insects. Its depiction of suburbia’s kinky underbelly preceded films such as 1999’s American Beauty. Its depiction of complicated female masochism anticipated 2024’s Babygirl.

Twin Peaks

Long before anyone had heard the phrase “prestige television,” David pushed the boundaries of cinematic television with the series Twin Peaks, which debuted in 1990. The show followed Kyle MacLachlan, a detective who arrives in Twin Peaks, Washington, to investigate the death of a beloved local teenager.

Audiences were captivated by the question of who killed Laura Palmer and mystified by quirks such as the “Log Lady,” who received messages from a piece of wood. The dream sequence that ended Season 1, with its subtitled dialogue played backward, red curtains and jazzy soundtrack, would later be parodied on The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street. Its theme song, written by David’s frequent collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, remains a dreamy synth classic. David revisited the show in 2017, a testament to its enduring popularity.

The Straight Story

In 1999, David did the unthinkable: He made a G-rated feel-good family movie released by Disney. The Straight Story tells the tale of a man driving 380km on a ride-on lawn mower to visit his brother who has had a stroke. Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet were about how bucolic scenes of Americana could cloak sordid horrors. The Straight Story had no such subterfuge.

The film is a joy to watch and points to the complexities of David. He was certainly a master of creepiness and aporia, but he also made visual art, wrote about creativity and devoted much of his life to Transcendental Meditation. “A film-maker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering,” David famously said. “You just have to understand it.” David also understood sweetness and simplicity.

Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive is a fantasia of Hollywood, where dreams and promises become threats and nightmares. It remains the only film that features both Billy Ray Cyrus and Ann Miller. Lynch plucked Naomi Watts from obscurity after pulling her headshot from a pile of photographs. Watts rose to the challenge of the lead role, which demanded the fresh-faced innocence of a Midwestern ingenue; the bitter steeliness of a jilted, jaded lesbian; and a scene in which she turns a schlocky script into an unforgettable psychosexual audition.

That scene could be a short film unto itself and effectively served as Watts’ audition for the real-life role of “New Hollywood leading lady”. The climax of Mulholland Drive takes place at a nightclub called “Silencio,” a name Lynch used for the real-life nightclubs he opened in Paris and Manhattan. Yes, in addition to everything else, David Lynch also opened two nightclubs. The New York location was decorated with red curtains.

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