David Lynch: The Surrealist Master's Greatest Movies and Shows, and Where to Watch Them

David Lynch, Hollywood's most prominent surrealist filmmaker, died this week, leaving a void in our world that probably won't be filled any time soon. Lynch was simply too singular of a personaltiy — making extremely bizarre stuff that most people can't parse at all is not usually a path to stardom, but somehow that's exactly how it turned out for David Lynch.

And boy are we grateful for that. Lynch's career produced many films that are simultaneously very relatable on an emotional level and otherwise completely inscrutable. Challenging works that we can feel the meaning of much better than we can know them.

It's only natural, then, to feel the urge to honor Lynch's life by revisiting some of his incredible work. And we're here to help with that — scroll on for discussions of Lynch's work, as well as all the info you need on where to watch them. Just keep in mind that most of Lynch's movies are nearly impossible to describe in an accurate way to people who haven't seen them, so please don't hold our reductionist summaries against us.

Eraserhead (1977)

Lynch's cheap first movie, a body horror flick about a guy who has to take care of a really weird baby, had no obvious appeal or box office prospects, but became a cult sensation via years of midnight screenings in the late 1970s. It was a slow-burn, viral start to his career that probably couldn't be replicated in today's much faster-paced social media environment.

The Elephant Man(1980)

Lynch's second film, a biopic of famously deformed 19th century Englishman Joseph Merrick, might be his most normal and mainstream work, demonstrating quite clearly that Lynch had some immense filmmaking chops. The Elephant Man managed to earn 8 Oscar nominations, and was the reason the Academy added an award for makeup artists the following year.

Dune (1984)

Before Denis Villeneuve managed to put together a big-screen version of Dune that everybody loves, we had David Lynch's famously troubled take on the epic novel. Lynch mostly disavowed the final film — he thought he was selling out when he made it, apparently. But while the finished film was chopped to pieces by the producers, Dune still has enough of Lynch's hallmarks that it kinda works. And since Lynch has not ever been big on traditional narrative storytelling anyway, the chopped-up-ness of it is not inherently a problem the way it might be for regular filmmaker.

Blue Velvet (1986)

A college kid played by Kyle MacLachlan finds an ear in a field, and this discovery sends him down a noir rabbit hole in which a fiery Dennis Hopper ends up screaming at him for liking Heineken. It's here that Lynch found his noir-focused groove that he came back to frequently over the rest of his career.

Wild at Heart (1990)

Lynch contained multitudes, and his next film was this somewhat goofier black comedy chrime thriller starring Nic Cage and Laura Dern, whose characters Sailor and Lula decide to run away together and are then hunted by gangsters hired by Lula's mom. Wild at Heart isn't one of Lynch's most beloved works, but it remains confusingly charming just like the rest of Lynch's works.

Twin Peaks(1990-1991)

Amongst his career full of movies, shorts, and music videos, Lynch also did some TV in the early 1990s — most notably co-creating, along with Mark Frost, the cult classic ABC series Twin Peaks, a surrealist murder mystery which ran for two seasons and became a national phenomenon. Lynch only directed six episodes during the original run, but the series is nonetheless imbued with this strange sensibilities throughout.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me(1992)

Lynch also made this prequel film to the series, which told the story of the final week of the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose murder sparks the events of the rest of Twin Peaks. It has a much more serious and dark bent than the show did, and it frequently has the air of one of Lynch's music videos. It's quite a ride.

Lost Highway(1997)

Everybody knew by this point that Lynch was a very unusual filmmaker, but he really kicked it up a notch (bam!) with Lost Highway, a movie I genuinely don't know how to summarize with a blurb. But it stars Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette, it rules, and it's the first part of a de facto trilogy of surrealist LA movies that Lynch put out over the next decade, which includes Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

The Straight Story(1999)

Lynch followed up the absolutely mad Lost Highway with a Disney movie about a guy who drives a tractor 200 miles, at 5 mph, to visit his terminally ill brother before he dies. As was usually the case when Lynch made something more mainstream, The Straight Story was acclaimed right out of the gate and considered one of his best movies. But I've always suspected that he at least partially made this movie because it's pretty funny for this specific story, with this specific title, to be his follow-up to the labyrinthine Lost Highway.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

A woman (Laura Elena Harring) gets in a car accident on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, hits her head hard enough to get amnesia, and stumbles into a nearby apartment, where she meets an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) from Canada. And then many, many weird things happen, including one of the greatest jump scares in cinema history. 

Inland Empire (2006)

Lynch's final feature film follows an actress, played by Laura Dern, who auditions for a cursed movie and slowly becomes the character she's supposed to be playing. Inland Empire might be Lynch's most inscrutable and difficult film, a fact that was initially very frustrating but which has actually increased its appeal over time. 

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Lynch's final opus, however, was this 18-episode revival of Twin Peaks on Showtime that picked up where the ABC series left off decades earlier. Lynch directed every episode, and co-wrote the whole thing with his original Twin Peaks collaborator Mark Frost. This series is a treasure the likes of which is all too rare in TV — auteurs just going absolutely hog-wild in a way that would make most TV producers have a mental breakdown. The result is that Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the greatest seasons of television we've ever seen.

Honorable mention: David Lynch's Comic-Con Message (2017)

David Lynch is not usually somebody you'd expect to pop up at San Diego Comic-Con, but Showtime booked a panel for Twin Peaks on the massive, 6,000-seat Hall H main stage in 2017. While Lynch did not appear in person, he sent along a two-minute video that remains my favorite memory from all my years covering SDCC.