With the announcement that the great David Lynch died on January 16, the world hasn’t just lost one of its greatest filmmakers: It’s lost one of its greatest artists, period. The work of a filmmaker whose sensibility was certainly not for the masses, the best David Lynch movies nonetheless had the ability to make people feel seen in their splintered, strange singularity. He’s one of the few directors whose name can be used as an adjective — Lynchian — without it feeling unearned. At the same time, when would you say “Lynchian” to talk about any film aside from his own? Despite his widespread acclaim, and the scores of filmmakers today who were influenced by his work, Lynch’s works remain unclassifiable, films that simply are incapable of being duplicated.
Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, to a Department of Agriculture researcher father whose work caused his family to move across the country several times during his childhood, Lynch lived a life of classic Americana growing up that his work often depicted and subverted: His mother was a housewife, he was popular in high school and a member of a fraternity, and in his younger years he was an Eagle Scout and attended — along with his troop — President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. As a young man he went to college to study painting before eventually finding his way to filmmaking, and at the American Film Institute Conservatory he produced his first feature film, “Eraserhead.”
Although just a small, scrappy student project, “Eraserhead” is a pure vision of a remarkably formed and developed filmmaker. Surreal and nightmarish, but subtly quite playful and funny, “Eraserhead” is a domestic fable that channels fears of parenthood and modern American life into a crushing industrial wasteland tragedy. The immersive and haunting sound design, the stark filmmaking, the droll humor and the trust in the audience to take the dreamlike adventure as an emotional experience rather than a purely narrative one: all of that can be found in his first feature, and his ethos and worldview would, over the course of a career that spanned decades, produce classics like “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet,” and the entire “Twin Peaks” saga.
While the surrealist qualities of Lynch’s works are what made him famous, they weren’t quite what made him special. By all accounts, the man himself was a deeply kind person, and that worldview bleeds into his films. On the surface, most of his work is dark and despairing, but there’s an obvious empathy and emotion within them that lights a pathway forward. Lynch was a filmmaker with a genuine earnestness to his touch, and that earnestness made his work feel tactile and alive.
As the film community mourns the loss of Lynch, IndieWire is taking a moment to celebrate the work that made the man a legend. While some of his work is more beloved than others, all have their fans — and all are worthy glimpses into the mind of a visionary whose perspective has often been aped but never matched. Considering its influence and cornerstone status in Lynch’s filmography, this list includes “Twin Peaks” — both the original 1990 ABC series and the 2017 “Return” Showtime series — along with his theatrical feature film. Read on for David Lynch’s films and TV shows, ranked.
With editorial contributions from Christian Blauvelt, Alison Foreman, and Christian Zilko.
12. “Dune” (1984)
The only film in Lynch’s catalog that the director himself has ever disavowed, “Dune” faced production troubles very early on in development, as the process of adapting Frank Herbert’s legendarily dense science-fiction novel into a single feature proved difficult for even a legend like him to handle: The movie’s runtime getting cut down by a full hour didn’t help, and the end result is so incoherent that theaters infamously handed out printed plot summaries with every ticket purchase. The movie entirely killed the early ’80s dream Hollywood had of David Lynch as the next great blockbuster filmmaker (he was also famously offered “Return of the Jedi”), which the man himself likely didn’t mind.
Still, Lynch’s “Dune” wasn’t a wash: It was on the film’s Mexico set where he met Kyle MacLachlan (wonderful as the brooding Paul Atreides), beginning one of his career’s most fruitful creative partnerships. And despite its reputation, there’s much pleasure to be found in Lynch’s psychedelic and hallucinatory interpretation of Herbert’s space saga (the author himself actually quite enjoyed the film), from the elaborate costumes to the mincing performances to the soundtrack by Toto. It’s a bizarre, flawed movie that nonetheless always feels alive and tactile in a way the more recent Denis Villeneuve adaptations often fail to be. —WC
11. “The Straight Story” (1999)
Lynch himself quipped that “The Straight Story” was his most experimental film precisely because it feels so ordinary. In between the hallucinatory visions of “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch was inspired to make a G-rated, straightforward character drama based on true events and distributed by Disney. On paper, this is perhaps an easy one for Lynch fans to discount, but “The Straight Story” is so deeply moving and powerful that it can bowl you over. The story of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, in a gruff and subtle Oscar-nominated performance), as he journeys across America to make amends with his estranged brother, wraps themes of aging, loss, regret, and reconciliation up into a devastating and unforgettable road trip picture. Although Lynch’s eccentricities made him famous, the underlying empathy of his works is what makes them endure. “The Straight Story” lays the director’s generosity as a storyteller bare. —WC
10. “Wild at Heart” (1990)
David Lynch’s obsession with “The Wizard of Oz” reared its head in every project he touched. But he never engaged more directly with Victor Fleming’s film than in “Wild at Heart,” which often feels like Lynch’s attempt to make his own version of Dorothy’s journey home. The darkly comedic romance stars Nicholas Cage as Sailor, a bad boy with a deep belief in personal freedom symbolized by his prized snakeskin jacket. Laura Dern is Lula Fortune, his rock ‘n’ roll-loving girlfriend who waits for him to be released from prison and then throws her life away to be with him.
Like so many Lynch masterpieces, “Wild at Heart” juxtaposes wholesome 1950s imagery — Elvis is alluded to almost as often as Dorothy — with Lynchian peaks into the darkest pockets of humanity. Murder, poverty, and sexual violence line Sailor and Luna’s tumultuous road to domestic bliss, but Lynch ends the film on one of the most hopeful notes of his career, with Glinda herself making an appearance to implore the on-again off-again lovers not to give up on what their hearts both know to be true.
It’s ironic that Lynch won his Palme d’Or for a film that few would place in the upper echelon of his masterpieces. But it’s an essential look into a master’s influences that holds up thanks to the charisma of its two leads and Lynch’s timeless gaze. —CZ
9. “Lost Highway” (1997)
The headlights of a car dart down a dusty highway. An ashen, bugeyed Robert Blake likes to watch. Mobster Robert Loggia goes around offering pornos on VHS. A guy has a glass table rammed straight into his skull like a wedge. There are images in “Lost Highway” as indelible as anything in Lynch’s work, and the deep, crepuscular blacks of Peter Deming’s cinematography are like an oil slick you want to bathe in. This Mobius-strip-like story (does it end at the beginning and start all over again?) about a jazz saxophonist living in the mansion version of Isabella Rossellini’s apartment from “Blue Velvet,” and becoming obsessed with the possibility his wife may be unfaithful, is full of harsh moments and dream logic. And then almost comic cameos from Gary Busey and Richard Pryor. This is one of Lynch’s slipperiest efforts, one best summed up by Patricia Arquette’s film fatale declaration: “And you’ll never have me.” Well, we’ll never have a full handle on “Lost Highway” either, but would we have it any other way? —CB
8. “The Elephant Man” (1980)
From the moment at the beginning when Lynch hazily introduces the title character in a montage also featuring literal elephants you know this is not going to be a standard, straight-ahead biopic. That beginning implies that rampaging elephants struck down his pregnant mother and caused his condition. What you may not expect is just how gobsmackingly moving the film to come will be.
This slightly surreal retelling of the life of Joseph Merrick (renamed John Merrick and played by John Hurt), who suffered from a severe disability that affected the growth of his skeleton, shows the extraordinary mistreatment he suffered in 19th century London — and also the kindness and care and empathy his doctor, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), showed him. As did the actress Madge Kendal (Anne Bancroft), in the touching moment when she reads a scene from “Romeo and Juliet” with Merrick and kisses him. (For what it’s worth, costar John Gielgud actually knew the real Kendal, who’d died almost 50 years earlier.) Where there’s powerful darkness in Lynch’s work, there’s also powerful light. And like some of his later films, there’s even a transcendent quality to the final frames. —CB
7. “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991)
From its introduction of serialized murder mysteries to Lynch’s use of cinematic techniques in an episodic format, “Twin Peaks” influenced television so greatly that the medium’s history could almost be divided into the eras before and after the ABC show debuted. But even if we chose to ignore the show’s ongoing influence, the fact remains that the original “Twin Peaks” is a damn fine piece of television.
The cocktail of offbeat humor, soap opera drama, Pacific Northwest imagery, and Lynchian surrealism is so singular that you couldn’t reverse engineer it if you tried. The show is so perfect that analyzing its formula can feel futile. Lynch and his collaborators simply caught lightning in a bottle.
The show manages to tread an impossibly thin line of parodying tropes of the soap opera genre while sincerely participating in it at the same time. Like a radio transmission from a parallel universe, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost immerse us in a world that’s not entirely unlike ours, but different enough to make us pause. At first, the show is as interested in extolling the wholesome virtues of small-town America as exploring the evils that lie beneath it. That makes the build toward the haunting reveal of Laura Palmer’s killer in Season 2 feel all the more painful, as Lynch almost seems to be reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that the world he built isn’t as perfect as he wants it to be.
The imagery of “Twin Peaks,” wrapped together by Angelo Badalamenti’s career-defining theme music, is so distinct that the show was able to survive low points when Lynch’s career involvement dwindled. Few, if any, shows have such a distinct visual language that’s recognizable within seconds of turning on an episode. Perhaps the only true mainstream success from an artist who happily spent much of his career on the fringes, “Twin Peaks” is a defining cultural artifact of the ’90s and one of the greatest achievements in the history of broadcast television. —CZ
6. “Inland Empire” (2006)
We got “The Return” after it, but it still feels cruel to consider that Lynch’s final feature film is now, definitively, “Inland Empire,” which came out in 2006 when the director was only 60 years old. Still, what a final feature it is. Following up his masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch crafted a Hollywood nightmare that was even more experimental and surreal than what came before, giving Laura Dern a platform to deliver possibly her greatest performance as an actress who comes undone as she adopts the persona of her character in her latest film. Developed without a script on a scene-for-scene basis and shot on low-resolution digital video that gives the events an otherworldly sheen, “Inland Empire” is possibly Lynch’s most challenging film in a career full of them, a mind trip into the blurry line between performance and reality that’s as hard to shake as a night terror. Still, even at his strangest, the underrated humor and sheer beauty of Lynch’s work is evident — only he could film that “Locomotion” dance along. At a time when Los Angeles is burning, “Inland Empire” feels even more poignant, a look at the darkness and the light wrestling within the City of Angels. —WC
5. “Eraserhead” (1977)
Only a parent could have made a film like “Eraserhead.” At the time the director, then a young 20-something, began devising the film while at the American Film Institute, his daughter Jennifer was about two years old, born with clubbed feet that required extensive corrective surgery. Before moving to Los Angeles, he lived with her and his first wife Peggy Lentz in the impoverished Fairmont neighborhood of Philadelphia; in his book “Lynch on Lynch,” he wrote how “There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.”
You can feel that raw, nervous fear within the surreal, nightmarish industrial world of “Eraserhead,” a stark black midnight movie made with such startling skill and vision its astonishing that it can be considered a student film at all. With his electric shock of hair Jack Nance looks like an avatar for the director himself as the film’s hapless hero, who navigates his apocalyptic landscape and the horror and violence inherent within it to attempt to care for the strange monster his child was born as. Lynch himself created the score and sound design for the film, which invades this landscape with such a cacophony of noise that despite the slow pace, there feels like danger in every shot. “Eraserhead” is often dismissed as just esoteric and incoherent, but the film makes perfect emotional sense, a distorted look at the anxieties that come with bringing life into the world, and the dread that you can’t protect your child from the world — or protect the world from your child. —WC
4. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992)
There’s a moment in “Fire Walk with Me” that’s the scariest in the entire Lynch filmography, save for the moment the monster jumps out from behind the bin in “Mulholland Drive.” No, not the ending of this prequel, which finally shows the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in a boxcar amid a fugue of screams. It’s a scene that sets up her doom, when her father, Leland (Ray Wise), who’s been sexually abusing her, obsessively forces her to wash her hands. As if she’s metaphorically unclean. In that moment, Lynch captured the mix of projection and hypocrisy that abusers always embody, and did so with a lucidity that few other filmmakers ever have. And this in a film that also has Kiefer Sutherland and David Bowie as FBI agents. Freed from the content restrictions of ABC, Lynch was able to plumb the depths of his characters’ psychology with abandon, and show that “Twin Peaks” was always about more than cherry pie and coffee. “The Return” really begins here. —CB
3. “Blue Velvet” (1986)
Some directors lure audiences into horror movies like they’re in a haunted house, seductively enticing them to lean in close and parse the screen for clues or jump-scares. Lynch was special because he planted his nightmares inside us and then encouraged them to fester there like rotting roses. Drawing from the subliminal messaging in his own mind — and relying on surrealism to render those terrifying themes as breathtaking realities — Lynch twisted universal human fears into unique abstractions that will forever set the bar for ill-ease experienced at the cinema.
“Blue Velvet” is arguably the director’s scariest film. Supported by all-timer performances from Dennis Hopper, Isabella Rossellini, and repeat muse Kyle MacLachlan (plus, oooh, baby Laura Dern!), the 1986 surreal noir tells a simple yet inexplicable story. When weirdo college kid Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) returns to his North Carolina hometown — only to find a severed human ear in a field — the discovery leads him to the underworld of lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini) and psychopathic criminal Frank Booth (Hopper). As always, the late Angelo Badalamenti augments Lynch’s exquisite with an equally stunning score and the filmmaker’s titanic imagination injects a singular suburban strangeness into this unbelievably upsetting film, brandishing candy-coated flecks akin to John Waters. From that “Sandman” number to those bizarre bird puppets, “Blue Velvet” somehow makes the quaint feel petrifying and unexpected no matter how many times you conquer it. —AF
2. “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017)
David Lynch never attempted to brand “Twin Peaks: The Return” as his goodbye to cinema — in fact, he was actively pursuing new projects as recently as 2024 — but that didn’t stop fans from speculating about what a perfect note it would have been to end on. Now that we know it’s the last narrative project of his career, it somehow doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to call the 2018 limited series the greatest swan song in the history of moving images. “The Return” manages to synthesize the ideas Lynch spent his life exploring while pushing him in new directions, allowing a generation’s most singular auteur to go out on terms that nobody else could have ever conceived.
Working on the blankest canvas of his career, the 18-episode series afforded Lynch the opportunity to bombard viewers with the kind of unforgettable imagery never seen before or since on television. The only thing he didn’t do was give casual “Twin Peaks” fans anything they wanted. The series debuted amid streaming wars that saw endless reboots and continuations of beloved old series that cashed in on cheap nostalgia. Lynch naturally took the opposite direction, getting the old band back together but refusing to let them play any of their hits. Want to see Kyle MacLachlan wear dark suits and drink coffee again? No problem — but instead of playing Dale Cooper, you get to spend the bulk of the series watching him play a borderline nonverbal character named Dougie. Want to see who Audrey Horne ended up marrying? Be careful what you wish for…
“The Return” often feels like an elaborate troll job aimed at “Twin Peaks” devotees who were dying for a blast from the past. But Lynch masterfully uses the rug pull to drive home the series’ larger point: you can’t go home again. In the same way that viewers’ return to a show they loved was met with a cast of characters that were older, sadder, and unwilling to recreate the past, Cooper’s endless attempts to fix his shortcomings end up trapping the very person he wanted to help in a cycle of unimaginable horrors. It was a brilliant pairing of medium and message, providing the perfect coda to Lynch’s lifelong struggle to understand why evil takes roots in the places that he found so beautiful.
In his refusal to deliver the nostalgia that he baited some fans into expecting, Lynch fills the 18 hours with a career’s worth of nightmares. From nuclear blasts and outer space journeys to Michael Cera doing his best Brando impression and a concert by “The Nine Inch Nails,” Lynch managed to guide us through a fever dream that felt just as radical to the 2010s TV industry as the original ABC series did in the 90s. In hindsight, a seemingly minor scene where insurance executives argue over hot beverages seems like a skeleton key to understanding the ethos behind the project and Lynch’s career as a whole. No matter how badly you want a cup of coffee, sometimes what you really need is a sip of the green tea latte. —CZ
1. “Mulholland Drive” (2001)
Lynch stared into the abyss of the entertainment industry several times (hello, “Inland Empire”), but his greatest contribution to Los Angeles romance came in the sordid passions of “Mulholland Drive.” A classic one-of-each lesbian pairing sees the blonde Naomi Watts and brunette Laura Harring opposite each other for a doomed love story about an aspiring actress and an amnesiac who meet in the wake of the latter’s attempted murder.
A lush mystery boasting one of the most memorable neck kisses ever filmed, this ultimately tragic affair plays as slippery as the hairpin turns of the Hollywood Hills. From a very particular Winkie’s (shout out Patrick Fischler) to a glowing final shot even more stunning following Lynch’s death and the Los Angeles fires, the film defies age with its singular combination of longing, fantasy, and wit. It won Lynch Best Director at Cannes in 2001 and redefined the iconic road forever — a testament to his lasting legacy and the staying power of the city’s dreams. —AF
