For all the far-from-unearned talk of the impenetrability of David Lynch’s films, each of his ten features is harnessed to a vaguely familiar memory of the movies. Much has been made of the Wizard of Oz references in Wild at Heart and one can make out traces of Hollywood melodramas like A Life of Her Own encoded within Mulholland Drive. The mood of menace that powered noirs like Gilda or Laura is amplified and turned frenzied in Blue Velvet, Inland Empire, Lost Highway, and also Wild at Heart to varying degrees. The lovers and criminals that so often show up in these films might have spent a previous life in Sam Fuller joints or Jules Dassin’s early work and in Lynch’s world, they’re tainted by fear, wild desire, and an untamable kind of rage that tears into the very fabric of their existence.

twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-2
Image via New Line Cinema

Indeed, horror is a crucial part of Lynch’s imagery and points toward his fascination with the corrupting element of repression. A severed ear uncovers a world of drug-addled maniacs in Blue Velvet. The brutal butchering of Patricia Arquette’s femme fatale fuels the identity crisis at the heart of Lost Highway. Nicolas Cage’s Sailor doesn’t say more than a few words before he beats a would-be hitman to death in Wild at Heart. And needless to say, the ecstatic, near-unbearable terror of Laura Palmer’s death hangs like a neon glow-in-the-dark bull skull over the happenings in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. The ugly and the perverse weigh equally with violence in Lynch’s mind but it’s in the bloodied acts – and the dubious memory of them – that Lynch often reveals the lacerating emotions of the confused artists, lunatics, and demented loners he has created.

Despite this, it’s wrongheaded to consider Lynch simply in horror terms. Any attempt to fit Lynch into an established genre is a fool’s errand and undermines the mesmerizing effect that his dreamscapes evoke in their messy, illogical, and intoxicating style. Early on in Lost Highway, Bill Pullman’s fearful saxophonist opines that he doesn’t want to remember things as they were but how he remembers them, no matter the factual inaccuracies, and one can feel those ethos bubbling up and burping underneath nearly every scene he’s shot. This is as true of the midnight-movie classic Eraserhead as the latest run of Twin Peaks episodes, which begins this coming Sunday on Showtime. In honor of Lynch’s return to the small screen, I decided to rank his ten features, each one of which quickly disarms traditional analysis and opts for overwhelming, visceral experience over familiar storytelling or even narrative clarity.

10. 'Dune'

dune-image-1

In adapting Frank Herbert's beloved science-fiction classic, Lynch made something of a mess, but the source material has a history of being difficult. There were numerous false starts on an adaptation in the years leading up to Lynch taking the project, including one from Lynch's stylistic forefather Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose struggles with Herbert's novel and the major studios were documented in the excellent Jodorowsky's Dune. For what it's worth, Lynch's visual ambitions are not diminished in his attempt to render the fight between House Atreides and the Paridishah Emperor into something legible, and the entire film still looks fantastic. The story's original beats, however, are clearly of no interest to Lynch, who made more than a few changes to the source material. His lack of fidelity seems to be his biggest crime here but there's still no denying that this is his weakest feature by a measure. That Dune remains more fascinating, audacious, and thoughtful than the glut of modern science fiction should act as a testament to just how alluring and satisfying it is to simply watch Lynch do his work.

9. 'Inland Empire'

inland-empire

The tagline for Inland Empire reads “a woman in trouble,” and after seeing what may very well be Lynch’s final film three times, that’s still just about all I know concretely about Inland Empire. Laura Dern is featured extensively, seemingly being interrogated in some random room, while a homeless Lena Olin threatens murder on the streets of Los Angeles. The whole movie comes off as experiential, the murky, disquieting imagery poking and prodding at the senses and psyche, but not much of it remains in the bloodstream after the film has finished. Many have taken the movie as a reaction to the digital age of filmmaking, but that’s not what jumps out at you when you first encounter this behemoth. What sticks with you is the feeling of being lost in the ethereal terrors of Lynch’s dream-state, a world of echoing, ugly darkness and rabbit people. If nothing else, it’s a movie that demands to be seen…once.

8. 'The Straight Story'

the-straight-story-sissy-spacek
Image via Miramax

Lynch has made two movies that can be considered sober-eyed in comparison to his more notoriously hallucinatory works: The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. The former speaks directly to Lynch’s feelings of alienation and beautiful malformation in its detailing of the life of John Merrick but The Straight Story is different, if not exactly as much as people make it out to be. It’s easily Lynch’s most straightforward narrative, following the true-lifestory of a voyage of Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin, a lonely farmer, to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton) via his old, gas-guzzling rider lawnmower. For all of Farnsworth’s tremendous charm, death and the struggle to come to terms not only with one’s own decay, as well as the perishing of those we’ve loved and shared experiences with, is at the heart of the seemingly placid film. A stop-off at a bar causes Farnsworth’s retiree to reflect on his time in the military and his relationship with his disabled daughter (Sissy Spacek in fine form) reveals a tenderness that rarely comes to the fore in Lynch films. Then again, it’s only a popular myth that Lynch can’t be bothered to focus on human struggles and prefers to fetishize oddities than confront something honest about himself and the world. Much like Alvin, who sets out to do something deeply human and humane, Lynch is revealing himself and ruminating on mortal, urgent issues in The Straight Story. He just happens to be doing it in his own particular way.

7. 'Lost Highway'

lost-highway

Even die-hard Lynch fans had some trouble getting acclimated to Lost Highway. The legendary Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, a stalwart believer in Lynch’s art, dismissed it wholesale as a debacle and listed Inland Empire, a far more unhinged beast, as one of the best movies of 2006. Upon revisiting the film, which focuses on a saxophonist (Bill Pullman) and an auto-mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who are consumed by jealousy, confusion, and paranoia, it’s far more fascinating than I had originally felt. To be honest, the first time around was primarily as a fan of the soundtrack, which features rare cuts from Trent Reznor, Smashing Pumpkins, and Marilyn Manson.

Lynch presents desire as an all-consuming plague here, one that can as easily be summoned by protective goals as feelings of misguided ownership or envy. Patricia Arquette plays two femme fatales – one blonde, one brunette – and her actions bring out the worst out of both men, who enact grotesque acts of (possibly imagined) murder in response to their yearning for these women. What Lynch seems to be picking at is the inherent ugliness and uncontrollability of desire and masculinity, how even the most seemingly altruistic or reasonable intent can cloak corrosive impulses, grown out of scattered, malformed memories or dreams.  Supporting turns from the likes of Gary Busey, the late Richard Pryor, and a sensationally unsettling Robert Blake only amplify the bewitching feeling of dread that runs through this unreal work.

6. 'The Elephant Man'

the-elephant-man-image

Aside from the dark wonder of Eraserhead, there may be no more clearly personal work on Lynch's resume than The Elephant Man. Telling the story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a brilliant young man who must contend with loneliness, stigmatization, and objectification thanks to severe physical deformities, Lynch focuses on Merrick's relationship with his friend and doctor, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who tends to him when the freak-show barker who cares for him beats him one night. What ensues is the bringing of Merrick - based on the real-lie Joseph Merrick - out into the public as a scientific object, rather than a person.

"I am not an animal," screams Merrick in the famed climactic scene and in this, one can see Lynch speaking to critics as much as studios. Lynch's unique perspective and style is not meant to be picked apart clinically, nor should it be used to simply sell someone else's ideas. Lynch, like Merrick, is different but his concerns and emotions are not isolated or corrupted. When he makes movies, his ends are not to simply freak the viewer out - well, not just that, anyway - but to relate his intimate feelings and opinions in his own way. Aided by a fantastic cast and producer Mel Brooks, Lynch makes something like a populist biopic here but he does so without compromising his outlook for a second, which is a tremendous feat in and of itself.

5. 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me'

twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me
Image via New Line Cinema

In which Lynch unveils what happened to Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer in the days preceding the beginning of Twin Peaks. Surprise: it’s not pretty in the slightest. The movie received waves upon waves of boos upon its premiere at Cannes for reasons that now seem completely alien, as Fire Walk With Me has proven to be Lynch’s most visceral film to date in the years since its release. What begins with apparitions of David Bowie and the case of a dead prostitute in Deer Meadow, looked after by Kiefer Sutherland’s nerdy Agent Stanley and Chris Isaak’s Agent Desmond, ends with arguably one of the most frightening sequences of events to ever be put to screen, complete with strobe lights and ear-shattering screams.

To attempt to concisely explain the narrative itself would to do the film a disservice as its most potent element is in Lynch’s direction and his ability to summon the catastrophic and truly horrific feelings of finding out someone you trust is a deranged killer of women. How betrayal, desperation, and disbelief conflate in such revelatory moments is something that Lynch miraculously is able to express with shaking effectiveness and his build-up to the crescendo underlines his tendency to give melodrama just the right balance of the genteel and the subversive. Decades after it was ignored by nearly everyone, Fire Walk With Me feels at once like a psychological horror classic just finally getting its due, and the best evidence yet that one can bring TV to the movies rather than the other way around.

4. 'Mulholland Drive'

mulholland-drive-justin-theroux

Naomi Watts comes to Hollywood, where she becomes a star, loses her identity, and finally relocates herself in a phasmagorical swirl in Mulholland Drive. To go beyond that vague summation is to risk getting ensnared in one of the all-time most annoying film dialogues to ever take place on the Internet and off. To even attempt to pin down a concrete meaning in Lynch’s hallucinatory undead melodrama is to step willingly into quicksand. And yet, it is impossible to resist attempting to poke at Lynch’s sensational day terror in all its malformed, angry parts. The dirty, scary monster in the alley; the cowboy waiting for the filmmaker at the ranch; the lovers coming together and falling apart, crying at the opera; and a Hollywood tale constructed from the chopped parts of a failed TV project. The most straightforward reading is something like a ghostly variation on the A Star is Born formula, in which a haunted West Coast sets the scene for the troubled romance between Watts’ star-in-waiting, Laura Harring’s amnesiac, and Justin Theroux’s director. What comes through is a warped, wondrous vision of lost, repressed Hollywood in the guise of a nightmarish “starlet” picture. In 2017, there’s still nothing even remotely like it.

3. 'Blue Velvet'

blue-velvet-isabella-rossellini

Kyle MacLachlan takes the back way to go home one day and finds a grotesque bit of evidence: a severed ear being eaten away at by insects. Amongst the idyllic suburban neighborhoods that flourished under Ronald Reagan were sickening crimes, incalculable desperation, madness, and torment, all kept at bay by the tailored image of normalization. MacLachlan’s teen soon finds himself entangled with a seductive, tortured songbird (Isabella Rosellini) and her nefarious overlord (Dennis Hopper) with the oxygen tank and the taste for Pabst Blue Ribbon. To witness this for the first time is to be affected, for better or for worse, and there’s never even a hint of overexertion in bringing you there.

The legacy of Blue Velvet is that it went off like a hydrogen bomb when it arrived in theaters, causing otherwise estimable critics to lose their collective shit in offense to Lynch’s galvanizing masterwork. It remains a rare message from the underneath sent in filmic code, invoking the spirits of Val Lewton, Fritz Lang, and other masters of the dark arts. Once one comes in contact with the corrupted world, there is no saving you from its pull, and Lynch gives the curtailed suburban world a feeling of unmistakable, overworked falseness. Its hideousness only becomes crystal clear when it becomes the stage for the wildly disturbing final encounter between the young man and the tormented woman from the other side. Its only when the unshakeable ugliness of neglect is faced that the costly homes with the perfect, manicured facades look like a horror show.

2. 'Wild at Heart'

wild-at-heart-laura-dern-nicolas-cage

A pair of violent, disturbed twenty-something lovers, played fearlessly by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, hit the road into the wild blue yonder, emphasis on the “wild” bit. On their tale are assassins hired by Dern’s Lula’s mother (Diane Ladd), who wants Cage’s Sailor dead for refusing to fuck her in a bathroom stall. The movie opens with Sailor beating and bludgeoning a man to death and it hardly lets up in the ensuing 105-or-so minutes that leads Sailor and Lula into the realm of Willem Dafoe’s flamboyant, freakish pimp and Crispin Glover’s uneasy loner. It’s also one of Lynch’s most straightforward films, though there’s never once a feeling of compromised vision. Casting Cage as a Elvis-wannabe-cum-metalhead-parolee is a coup on its own and Dern, Lynch’s longtime muse, commands the screen without an iota of detectable exertion. It’s still unmistakably Lynch and the focus again is on the corrosive power of repression, but Lynch’s pacing picks up here and the ecstatic expressiveness of his performers brings an electrifying element of physical presence and energy to some of Lynch’s most memorable sequences, including Dafoe’s astonishing introduction. As the follow-up to Blue Velvet, the undisputed masterpiece of the director’s career, Wild at Heart is easy to neglect but its disarming directness reveals an often eclipsed side of Lynch as an unhinged romantic, unable to tame his desire to indulge passions or the disastrous fallout of his failures for much time at all.

1. 'Eraserhead'

eraserhead-movie

What must it have been like to attend one of the first midnight screenings of Eraserhead in New York or Los Angeles? How does one recover from such a thing? My film history professor in college unleashed Lynch’s staggering debut on a small, unsuspecting group of die-hard cinephiles (including myself) on a Friday night in November, right before Thanksgiving break. Few subjects other than Eraserhead made their way to the forefront of my thoughts that Thanksgiving and I don’t think I really remember seeing any other movie until Christmas break. Witnessing the titular character, played by Lynch axiom Jack Nance, caring for the wailing, monstrous baby and make something of a life in a black-and-white industrial wasteland was like witnessing the excavation of a vast, troubled soul that had been caged for too long. 34 years into my life, the only touchstone I can surmise for this masterpiece is another unparalleled, nightmarish swirl: Dreyer’s aggressively bewildering and quite beautiful Vampyr.

Lynch’s debut so easily beguiles that it’s difficult to keep in mind just how personal the film is for Lynch, who has never been short on vision or emotional oomph. It’s easy to get sidelined by the pile of dirt and tree on Nance’s nightstand, the woman with the puffy, diseased cheeks on the stage, and, well, the alien-baby, and that can aide the false notion that Lynch is just being weird to get a rise out of the audience. The truth is that Eraserhead doubles as an artistic manifesto, a confident, moving, and engagingly bizarre defense of owning who you are and what you love. The end for the alien-baby is not pretty but Nance cares and nurtures the pestering being with genuine warmth and concern. Sometimes your obsessions and imagination drudge up ugly, frightening creatures or ideas from the much but that doesn’t mean that they should be ignored or be treated with disdain, for that matter. Even the demented and the grotesque deserve their devoted advocates.