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— David Lynch
While studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, David Lynch was painting alone in his studio one day when he felt a faint gust of wind. Suddenly, the leaves painted on his canvas appeared to move, rustling in the breeze. He would later describe this moment as the beginning of his interest in filmmaking: the idea of making a painting move. What began as an attempt to bring his artworks to life developed, over the next four decades, into one of the most distinctive bodies of work in American cinema. Following Lynch’s death in 2025, and alongside a recent BFI season devoted to his films, this short essay and accompanying free-to-view content look back over the career of one of cinema’s most original directors.
During his time at art school in the late 1960s, Lynch established himself as an artist working firmly within the modernist tradition, influenced by artists such as Man Ray, Francis Bacon, and Max Ernst. Film critic Pauline Kael’s description of Lynch as the “first popular surrealist” offers a useful shorthand for his filmmaking style. In Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema (1999), Geoff Andrew notes in his chapter on Lynch, “like that of the Surrealists, Lynch’s work exhibits an abiding fascination with the unconscious, with the inexplicable, and with uninhibited emotional responses to sex and death”. Lynch began to work through these preoccupations in a series of experimental works made while he was still a student. The earliest and most provocative of these is Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), a sixty-second loop in which crudely animated, half-organic figures repeatedly retch and burst into flames, accompanied by the blare of a siren. Conceived as a way of making a painting ‘move’, the short film already demonstrates many of Lynch’s lifelong artistic concerns: the body as a site of anxiety and malfunction, the transformation of internal distress into grotesque spectacle, and the creation of a sealed, ritualistic world governed by repetition and dread. Neither narrative nor abstract, it occupies an uneasy space between cinema, painting and performance, closer in spirit to surrealist experiment than to conventional filmmaking.
These early experiments led to several more shorts during Lynch’s time as a student, including The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970), which made enough of an impression to earn him a scholarship at the American Film Institute (AFI). With this modest support in place, Lynch began work on his first feature, Eraserhead (1977).
As Claire Henry writes in ‘Traces of Eraserhead’, a chapter from her BFI Film Classic on the movie, Eraserhead’s “legacy within Lynch’s own oeuvre was to establish key aspects of aesthetics, structure, mood and motifs traceable through his later work, originating characteristics that later became identified as ‘Lynchian’”. Rather than abandoning the early experimental aesthetic of Six Men Getting Sick, Eraserhead doubles down, developing its disturbing imagery and oppressive soundscape into an exploration of bodily anxiety and psychological unease within a bleak, industrial setting. Like recalling a dream, summarising the plots of Lynch’s films can be tricky. At its simplest, Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer (played by Jack Nance, one of many recurring actors in Lynch’s oeuvre), a man who is left to care for a grotesquely malformed child in a decaying and nightmarish industrial environment. This wiry narrative functions largely as a framework for the film’s sustained exploration of anxiety around sex, parenthood and domestic responsibility.
Lynch created Eraserhead through close collaboration with figures who would remain central to his work, including sound designer Alan Splet, production designer Jack Fisk and cinematographer Frederick Elmes. As Geoff Andrew observes, “the film inhabits a strange grey area lying between genre pastiche and personal confession, nightmare fantasy and social satire.” Influenced by his time living in Philadelphia with his first wife Peggy Lentz, Eraserhead emerged from Lynch’s psyche straight into the American subconscious, becoming a staple on the midnight movie scene of the 1970s. The film’s unlikely journey from intractable personal project to cult phenomenon also marked the beginning of Lynch’s emergence into the mainstream.
On the strength of Eraserhead, Lynch was invited by comedic legend Mel Brooks to direct The Elephant Man (1980), a project Lynch reportedly accepted because he liked the sound of its title. At first glance, the film seemed far removed from his freaky debut, yet it allowed him to transpose many of its concerns into a more traditional Hollywood picture. Its critical (eight Academy Award nominations) and commercial success led to his brief immersion in big-budget studio filmmaking, including the schlocky sci-fi Dune (1984), before giving him the freedom to return to more overtly Lynchian territory with Blue Velvet (1986). If Dune proved to be an unhappy detour into large-scale studio filmmaking, a film Lynch ended up disowning, Blue Velvet marked a decisive return to form. Back on familiar ground, Lynch reworked the collision between innocence and horror first glimpsed in Eraserhead into a lurid vision of small-town America, creating what has since become one of the defining films of his career.
Throughout his filmography, Lynch fused a surreal, dreamlike sensibility with his homespun vision of Americana. The opening of Blue Velvet, in which an idyllic, Rockwellian suburb is abruptly shattered by a heart attack and a nightmarish swarm of insects, all while Bobby Vinton’s crooning title song plays, distil the essential elements of his style in the span of a few minutes. The scene that follows, in which the young Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Lynch’s lifelong collaborator and friend Kyle MacLachlan) stumbles across a severed human ear crawling with ants, offers another quintessentially Lynchian image.
The term ‘Lynchian’ was perhaps best defined by David Foster Wallace, who explained that it “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997). Blue Velvet is a perfect illustration of this idea, finding its distinctive tone in the uneasy coexistence of picket fences, polite smiles, and scenes of extreme brutality and weirdness. In his BFI Film Classic on the film, Michael Atkinson brilliantly captures its significance:
Taken on any level, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) is an utterly unique act of cinema: an 80s Hollywood studio film as radical, visionary and cabalistic as anything found in the avant-garde; a mysteriously symbolic and subterranean ‘cult’ movie that nevertheless has recognisable stars and was broadly distributed; a genre piece with the ambience of a fearsome, hypercomposed nightmare; an American ‘art film’ by Hollywood’s only reputable ‘art film’ director – a startling anomaly in itself, and if the label seems inappropriate, find another.
The impact of Blue Velvet was not just confined to cinema. Lynch would soon carry this same sensibility over to television with Twin Peaks (1990–91), a series that transposes its collision of wholesome surfaces and lurking horror into the long, open-ended form of serial storytelling, and in doing so brought the ‘Lynchian’ into the living rooms of a mass audience.
In The Oneiric in the Films of David Lynch (2024), Raphael Morschett argues in his chapter on the show that Twin Peaks’s true innovativeness lay in its “willingness for experimentation. This quality is already visible in its curious blend of genres, which was all the more unconventional in the conservative medium of television: soap opera, crime/mystery, coming-of-age story, and psychological horror”. First broadcast in 1990, the series begins as an investigation into the murder of the homecoming queen Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee), but quickly expands into a sprawling portrait of a small town whose everyday rituals and eccentricities coexist with, and are ultimately inseparable from, a far darker and more mysterious reality.
Against expectations, Twin Peaks became a genuine popular phenomenon, introducing millions of viewers to a level of narrative strangeness, dream logic, and surreal imagery that had rarely, if ever, been seen on mainstream television. It is this combination of mass appeal and radical strangeness that has made Twin Peaks so enduringly fascinating. As Sarah Hatchuel writes in her chapter ‘Screening dreams: Twin Peaks, from the series to the film, back again and beyond’:
Twin Peaks is a dreamlike series not only because it includes sequences of hallucination and magical vision, but because it presents itself openly as a fiction where illusion and reality merge, creating a world of uncertainty and doubt, and playing on the idea of alternate universes and narrative bifurcations where cinematic references abound.
After leaving the second season on an unfathomable cliffhanger, Lynch decided to go backwards rather than forwards, subverting all expectations with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), a prequel exploring the life of Laura Palmer leading up to her death. On its release the film was met with bafflement and often outright hostility from critics and audiences expecting resolution or closure, but it has since been widely reappraised as one of Lynch’s most powerful and disturbing works, and an essential key to the Twin Peaks universe. Lindsay Hallam argues in her book on the film, that part of the film’s force lies in its refusal to offer the viewer any distance or comfort; by immersing us so completely in Laura Palmer’s final days, Fire Walk With Me denies the possibility of easy viewing. Laura’s fragmented and traumatic experience offers insight into Lynch’s "vision of reality, which goes beneath the surface and encompasses a deeper cosmic realm, very much in keeping with a wider worldview that connects all of Lynch’s works”.
The film’s initial failure was a huge blow for Lynch, marking a low point in his career and ushering in a period of reassessment that would eventually lead, on the one hand, to the bleak, fractured noir of Lost Highway (1997) and, on the other, to the unexpectedly gentle and reflective detour of The Straight Story (1999). This period of uncertainty and experimentation ultimately gave rise to a new phase in Lynch’s career, crystallised in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), films that return to, and push even further, his lifelong preoccupation with doppelgangers, dream logic, and the unstable boundaries between reality and fantasy.
Mulholland Drive, another Lynch film born out of his obsession with the world of Twin Peaks (the project originally began life as a loose spin-off from the show), ultimately became one of his most celebrated works, a haunting meditation on Hollywood, desire, and the seductive cruelty of dreams. Its status was confirmed when it was ranked number one in the BBC Culture poll of the greatest films of the 21st century. Lynch pushed even further into formal and technological experimentation with Inland Empire (2006), his first feature shot entirely on digital video and a film that further explores his interest in fractured narratives and unstable identities. Featuring Laura Dern in a punishing central performance, the film stands as Lynch’s most uncompromising exploration of cinema as a kind of waking dream/nightmare. This long period of experimentation found its fullest expression in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a work that draws together the threads of his career across film and television and stands as a fitting and extraordinary culmination of his lifelong obsessions.
While a long-rumoured final Lynch film was reportedly in development before the director’s death in 2025, it is fitting that Twin Peaks: The Return should stand as the closing chapter of his career. Conceived as a long-awaited continuation of the original series, the show also functions as a kind of summation of Lynch’s working life, bringing back not only familiar characters but many of his long-standing collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. Regular performers such as Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts and Grace Zabriskie appear alongside a host of returning faces from the original Twin Peaks, while key creative partners, including composer Angelo Badalamenti and producer Sabrina S. Sutherland, also returned. In this sense, The Return does not simply revisit an earlier success, but gathers together the people, themes, and methods that had defined Lynch’s work for decades, giving his career an ending that feels both deliberate and complete.
In Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts: Twenty-First-Century Screen Horror and the Historical Imagination, Martin Fradley and John A. Riley suggest that The Return does more than simply revisit familiar characters and settings. In their chapter ‘Brings back some memories’: Spectres of history in Twin Peaks: The Return, they describe it instead as an “inimitably oneiric eighteen-hour meditation on historical recurrence, Gothic temporality and the closed futurity of nostalgia.” In this sense, The Return continues the line of thinking already explored in Fire Walk With Me, rejecting any comforting idea of closure or explanation and instead insisting, as so often in Lynch’s work, on the inescapability of trauma, the repetition of history, and the refusal of narrative resolution as a form of reassurance.
Lynch consistently resisted the idea that his films and television series could, or should, be explained. He argued instead that trying to pin down their meanings was like trying to explain a dream: the experience matters more than any single interpretation, and each viewer encounters a logic that remains elusive and personal. This emphasis on ambiguity and personal interpretation has been a recurring theme in the critical writing on Lynch’s work. In her chapter, ‘Mulholland Dr.: Hollywood, Hollywood, Fabulous Hollywood’, Rona Murray writes:
Lynch can be strange, impossible, obsessive, or rather imaginative, enigmatic, passionate. Language is slippery and moveable – but then isn’t that just what Lynch is proving to us time and again? His films can be likened to poetry as they invite a personal reading and allow many different layers of meaning and interpretation.
Over more than four decades, Lynch made ten feature films, a landmark television series, numerous shorts, and a substantial body of work in music, painting, photography and design, building an oeuvre that is as varied in form as it is instantly recognisable in style. Taken as a whole, Lynch’s films and series insist on being experienced rather than explained. It is this openness to uncertainty, and this trust in the logic of dreams over the logic of answers that keeps his work alive to new viewers and new interpretations.
The chapters discussed here can be found in the Film Studies Reference, Bloomsbury and Faber Screenplays and Criticism, BFI Film Classics, Television Genres, Form and Aesthetics, and Auteur Film Studies collections. Territorial restrictions apply. If you would like to explore these collections further and your institution does not yet have access, please ask your librarian to contact us to arrange a free trial.
Homepage banner image: Lynch in his studio in Hollywood, California (2005) © HECTOR MATA/AFP via Getty Images.
