I Had David Lynch All Wrong, Part 1: The Films

On January 16^th of this year, writer/director/artist David Lynch left our world behind. His body of work is immense and wide-ranging, and includes countless paintings, short films, abstract commercials, 10 feature films, and one of the most influential TV series of all time. If you’re looking to read an obituary on Mr. Lynch’ life and impact from the perspective of a long-time fan, I strongly encourage you to read the one on this site here from our own Robert Hamer.

This is not that essay. This is not that perspective.

This is more like a confession. And perhaps the critical equivalent of eating some humble pie. Because you see, right up until his passing, I would not have considered myself a fan of David Lynch’ work. In fact, if you’d asked me to come up with my two least-favorite films of all time, I’d probably have answered with Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive. To be clear, this disdain never extended to the man himself, whom I always found both charming and absolutely necessary as an independent artistic voice, even if his stuff just wasn’t for me.

In the wake of his passing, there was an outpour of love and sadness that should be expected for any well-regarded public figure. But something about this was different. I couldn’t tell you what specifically, and maybe it was just my perception. People genuinely devastated that someone they looked to as a kind of hero or mentor was no longer with us. More posts and comments and think-pieces about his individual projects and how much each one of them had meant to different people.

If you’ve ever had a strong emotional reaction to a piece of art, you may find it easier to recognize that same feeling in other people when they talk about the things that they love. And that was the overwhelming sensation I was getting, that these folks didn’t just love the man’s films, but that these films had connected with them on a deep, psychological, sometime spiritual level. The way I think about some of the most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and why they make me feel that way. How something like Synecdoche, New York (my personal favorite) seems to be manifesting all my deepest creative and emotional insecurities while offering the somewhat comforting notion that these horrors are more universal than we realize.

In any event, seeing how much genuine passion people had for a series of films that I’d largely written off as inaccessible gave me complicated emotions that I wasn’t sure how to grapple with. Maybe it was simple curiosity, maybe I felt an obligation to the man himself. But I decided that I needed to give his work another try. Not counting a befuddled viewing of his Dune immediately in the wake of Denis Villeneuve’s versions, I hadn’t attempted to watch a David Lynch film for almost two decades. I resolved to find one that is considered more accessible and perhaps more broadly popular, and ultimately settled on Blue Velvet. Though wanting to give the film a fair shot, I couldn’t help bracing myself for the unpleasant bleakness that had turned me off in the first place.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

Boy, did my wife and I play this right by starting here. Not only is it still her favorite of Lynch’s films, but I fully believe people when they say that this is the one that made his filmmaking “click” for them. In broad terms, it is telling a fairly digestible story about a young man (Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan) whose innocence is gradually shattered as he investigates a severed ear, a kidnapping scheme, a traumatized lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini), and a gas-huffing maniac (Dennis Hopper in one of his most memorable roles).

The themes of an insidious darkness hiding just below the surface of 50s-esque suburban Americana are vivid and evocative, punctuated by a distinct color palette and visceral nature imagery. The performances (including a very young Laura Dern in her first collaboration with Lynch) are uniformly excellent, and the musical choices throughout are stimulating. There’s plenty of weirdness on display, most memorably a sequence that features Dean Stockwell lip-syncing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a work light, but it never feels overwhelming or like it’s distracting from the core narrative.

Indeed, the handful of mysteries and ambiguous visuals that are here only enhance the experience. This is a film about young, sheltered people experiencing true evil for the first time, and what a soul-shaking effect that can have. I found myself surprisingly moved by the protagonist’s line “Why is there so much trouble in this world?” The awkward, clumsy phrasing paired with the sincerity of MacLachlan’s delivery really struck to the core of how scary it can be to peer into the void. Which makes Dern’s response, a story about a dream in which symbolic robins represent a respite from the darkness, feel both surreal and strangely reassuring.

That, I’ve come to realize, is the real trick with a lot of these film. My initial dismissal of them was largely based around the notion that they were weird for the sake of being weird, upsetting just for the sake of being upsetting. I didn’t appreciate what Lynch was really getting at with his arhythmic dialogue exchanges and oppressive audio mixing. The goal is not so much to make something look like a dream, but to capture that intangible sensation of actually being inside of a dream, and what that would feel and sound like as much as what how it would appear.

In dreams, anything can be a metaphor for anything. Sometimes with an obvious manifestation of a person or place, sometimes by pulling at various unrelated stimuli to create an overall tableau that’s both nonsensical and follows its own train of logic. So it is with Lynch: the goal is not to outsmart the movie, or to “figure it out” in the traditional sense. The goal is to submit yourself to the dreamscape and utilize your own intuition to make sense of what’s there. This is partially why I think Lynch was always so hesitant to discuss the meaning behind his work. If you engage with it the way it’s asking to be engaged with, then the film itself becomes the explanation.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

I first became aware of David Lynch through an article on some long-forgotten film blog, which included Mulholland Drive on a list of films with really memorable plot twists. The other films being mentioned were some of my favorites at the time (Memento, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, etc), so high-school me knew I needed to check out this other film if it was being compared to those. Anyone who’s seen Mulholland Drive will know that while there is a pretty major third-act revelation that redefines everything that came before, selling this as a “plot twist movie” in the same vein as The Sixth Sense does it something of a disservice.

At the time, I remember being on board with the movie up to a point (with Naomi Watts’s performance in the audition scene being especially memorable) but turning on it aggressively once it started to reveal its hand. Without going into specifics, this seemed to me like a bog-standard “it was all a dream” twist, which completely deflated the experience for young me and left a sour taste in my mouth.

However, after the unexpected success of our Blue Velvet screening, my wife and I were more curious than ever. Had I just wildly misjudged this man and his filmography all these years? Was there a ton of hidden depth here that I’d simply failed to appreciate? Or was Blue Velvet perhaps the exception that proved the rule? The one time that this style genuinely worked. Well, there was an easy way to find out. I had long considered Mulholland Drive to be among my most hated films, so surely a rewatch would be illuminating. If we hated it, that was probably a sign to stop there and leave the rest alone. If we loved it, well…

As of this writing, Mulholland Drive is currently my favorite of David Lynch’s films. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a profound 180 degree turn in my opinion on anything like this before. It was borderline profound, the idea that such a foundational touchstone of my own taste could have been so miscalculated, but there it was. Not only do I no longer despise this film, I kind of think it’s a masterpiece. An incredible portrait of the ways in which Hollywood and the illusion of stardom can deteriorate a person and create an inescapable moral rot that’s ever present but just out of sight, not unlike the enigmatic homeless man just outside of Winkie’s.

Not only was this contrast in perspective on an ultimately unchanged film more than a little surreal to experience, but the framing through which I began to rewatch these surprisingly familiar scenes hits at the core of what I had so wrong when it comes to Lynch’s work. The old adage about a film with hidden depths or twisty narratives is that you pick up on new things every time you watch it. Even though I hadn’t seen or largely thought about this film for almost 20 years, I was amazed at just how much of it had clung to my psyche.

No longer do I consider it an exercise in style over substance, with a random grab bag of sequences and plot thread that don’t go anywhere or tie together. Now it seems like an aching mosaic of a city whose inhabitants have been lifted up and brought crashing down by the most despicable aspects of the Hollywood industry, and of the rotten underbelly that festers when too many desperate people live together in such a state. 

This is ostensibly a story about an aspiring actress (Watts) and how she gets sucked into that underbelly, but through its myriad colorful side characters (some of whom might be real, some of whom are played by notable character actors like Dan Hedaya and Robert Forster but only show up for one scene) it begins to create a tapestry of the people who live on one side of the titular drive, slowly destroying themselves while yearning for the glitz and glamour on the other side. The doomed love story that is eventually untangled from the malaise of amnesiac mystery just brings the personal pain of this experience to the forefront, and is beautifully explored by Watts in a career-defining performance.

But then again, that’s just what I got out of it.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

With my initial round of hesitations swiftly dismantled by two of the best films I’ve watched in years, my curiosity grew ravenous. There was a whole oeuvre here that I’d never tried to explore. What further wonders might be contained within? I had to go deeper. So, we decided to cast out randomly at one that I knew virtually nothing about, and we landed on Lost Highway.

While certainly a step up in terms of surrealist imagery and kinetic soundscapes, we found that after some light rumination that we were more or less able to make sense of what occurred, at least insomuch that the individual elements have meaning to divine regardless of whether it all comes together. Like dreams, these films don’t offer easy explanations. They defy any singular interpretation, and in fact they encourage a more personalized viewing experience, where everybody watching might get something a little different out of it.

The broad strokes deal with a frenetic jazz musician (Bill Pullman) being driven mad by jealousy over his wife’s (Patricia Arquette) possible infidelity. He is also haunted by increasingly personal videotapes at his doorstep, seemingly recorded by a pale man (Robert Blake) who might be a figment of his imagination, might be the devil, or might just be a passionate stalker.

That’s all strange enough, but things compound when the protagonist role mysteriously shifts to a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who gets embroiled in the illicit dealings of a local crime boss (Robert Loggia) and his seductive spouse (also Arquette). Though these differing but overlapping strands do eventually converge in a satisfyingly ambiguous way, I do feel that the switch in focus from Pullman’s brooding intensity to Getty’s dopey haplessness does the film a disservice.

The whole thing is also a little bit cursed, from the rampant themes of psychosexual voyeurism (not exactly uncommon in Lynch’s work) to the fact that at least three members of the cast have been either charged or had allegations brought against them ranging from sexual assault to outright murder (look it up). These meta-textual aspects give the film an unsettling aura, like you’ve discovered something dark and dangerous not necessarily meant for human eyes. Even more so than in the first two we watched; Lost Highway really contains the feeling of film language being used to communicate the terror of being inside a nightmare.

If this one sounds bleak, it can feel that way at times. But while there’s less heart overall than in Velvet or Drive, there’s still plenty of quirky touches to stimulate the imagination. The soundtrack is populated with decidedly grungy, alt-rock musical selections (as someone who has seen the Jason X trailer an embarrassing number of times, I felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu at one recurring inclusion). Seemingly unremarkable minor roles are populated by larger-than-life actors like Gary Busey, Richard Prior and early Lynch collaborator Jack Nance; the latter two giving what would be their final performances. Even when excavating the pitch-black muck that can manifest within the human soul, there’s just enough humor or entertaining flourishes that the darkness never fully consumes the experience, even if the film itself is intentionally lost to it.

ERASERHEAD (1977)

Three films down, three films that we either really enjoyed or full-out loved. At this point, the works that I cared for now outnumbered the entries I thought I despised. If we were going to really get to the core of my foundational hatred of this man’s films, we couldn’t put it off any longer. We were going to have to engage with Eraserhead.

This is the film that my wife was perhaps the most nervous to watch, if only because I had hyped it up over the years as being the single worst film-going experience that I’d ever gone through. When I saw it for a Film Studies class in college, I remember feeling trapped in that room, flummoxed by the film’s refusal to explain any aspect of itself. The hauntingly oppressive industrial soundscape proved a little too effective at putting me on edge, to the point where I rejected the atmosphere altogether. 

My initial conclusion was that this was a film too unpleasant to be worth sitting through, too aimless and pointless to warrant any discussion of some deeper meaning. It was, in short, a nasty mess that I wanted no part of. And such was my surface-level reading of filmmaker David Lynch solidified, where it would harden into concrete and result in my abject refusal to even consider any of his other work. But as this essay will bear out, things are a little different now.

Even with my unanticipated positivity towards this whole marathon, I couldn’t have guessed how my most-hated film of all time would transform into a delightfully kooky horror-comedy before my very eyes. All the jagged edges and nonsensical details took on a lovingly homemade quality: every frame is infused with the passion that drove Lynch to live out of disused stables for at least part of the 4-5 years it took to make the film. It helps that these stables doubled as the sets and production offices, allowing him to spend months at a time just fully immersed in the world of Eraserhead.

In many ways, despite being his first feature, I think that when people try to distill Lynchian weirdness into its simplest form, they’re mostly pulling from this film. It takes place it its own universe where the laws of time and space only occasionally reflect our own. In his first outing with the director, Jack Nance wanders through a desolate wasteland with an endearingly beleaguered quality. He’s just trying to get through his day-to-day existence in a Philadelphia-inspired labyrinth of monochrome, and then he finds out that he’s the father of a disgusting little creature that looks like E.T. with syphilis. It doesn’t take the mother long to bail, leaving this bewildered office drone in a mold-infested apartment with a screeching infant.

There are varying accounts of just how much Lynch inserted his own insecurities about fatherhood into the production, but in many ways the proof is in the pudding. While it does suffer from pacing issues typical from a first feature, and I do still think the sound mix goes a bit too far at times, I now see the film’s many enigmatic qualities in a far more positive light. Elements like the man in the moon and the woman in the radiator don’t lend themselves to any simple explanation, and the mystery behind their possible purpose is not necessarily something to be solved, but is in itself very much the point. The real world doesn’t always click together on first blush, and embracing the unknowable can be an invaluable tool when it comes to making peace with that.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

With our taste palette fully reset, there was no longer any doubt on the matter: we were David Lynch fans, through and through. The only thing now was to keep going. To continue diving headfirst into the inner realms of this man’s cinematic consciousness, to further uncover whatever treasures lay within. Many of his remaining features were among the more relatively grounded, or had come highly recommended enough that we weren’t worried about whether we’d enjoy them. But we weren’t quite done with dreamland, and we knew there was one major Rubicon to be crossed.

For my part, there was now a sense of making up for lost time. It felt like I could have and should have been a fan of this stuff for years, but because it bounced off me at the wrong point, I had just dismissed it all, despite knowing how many of my peers loved it deeply. Just by virtue of traveling in film circles, I’ve absorbed a fair number of context-free images and plot details throughout the filmography, and there’s now a hunger to make sense of all these images, or at least to experience them in their native form.

For example, all I really knew about Inland Empire going in was that I had seen the still image of Laura Dern’s face blown up and distorted (which didn’t prepare me for the fact that this is actually one of the film’s most potent jump scares), and I knew that Lynch had mounted an iconic low-budget Oscar campaign for her performance by hanging out on Hollywood Blvd in a director’s chair next to a massive For Your Consideration poster and a live cow. A budgeting necessity that didn’t necessarily pay off in terms of a nomination, but on the other hand, it’s still remembered very fondly in awards circles.

For whatever my reservations about this film, and I do have a few, the one aspect I can fully get on board with is Dern’s performance. The narrative, which often feels like it’s being conceived as you watch it (not too far from how it was actually made), pulls her character(s) in all sorts of directions, asking her to go to all manner of emotional extremes, and she meets every challenge with grace and commitment. This is probably the hardest Lynch film to recommend, but if there’s one ever-shining element that makes the rest worth watching, it’s her.

If it seems like I’ve been dancing around discussing the film itself, that’s because this one has proven the toughest to crack. By Lynch’s own admission, it was filmed in pieces without any sense of a connecting narrative until one was discovered further down the road, and at times I could really feel that. While the overarching plot eventually comes into just enough focus that you can sort of puzzle the rest together if you try, it still leaves you with a somewhat unsatisfied feeling, like you had to meet the film a little more than halfway.

Beyond the pretzel-like nature of the story (which loosely follows an actress getting consumed by a role in a potentially cursed production, based on a Polish folk tale that may also be taking place simultaneously), the other major aspect holding Inland Empire back is the visual treatment. Shot on consumer-grade digital cameras, one can easily see why the pixelated imperfections that would result in the footage appealed to Lynch’s dreamy sensibilities. 

While the look can be quite effective at times, for large stretches of the 3-hour runtime, an insistence on lingering close-ups, blown-out lighting, and shallow focus creates a muddy aesthetic that’s just unpleasant to look at. Without as many impeccable craft elements that bring the various abstractions together, some of the magic is admittedly lost. Even with those limitations, I would still consider this an essential and worthwhile entry in his catalogue, and one that I may revisit in a few years to hopefully gain a deeper appreciation of.

THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

Even with the labyrinthian nature of Inland Empire as a potential stumbling block, Kelly and I still felt compelled to continue our journey. We were past the halfway mark of Lynch’s filmography, and well past the point of no return. So now that we’d hit on many of his more famous pieces, it was time to experience something of a deeper cut. We went over to Disney+ (which was surreal in its own way) and looked at The Straight Story, a G-rated biopic that Lynch referred to as his most “experimental” film.

In the sense that it is a straightforward telling of a linear story with no prominent abstractions or ambiguities that are normally hallmarks of Lynch’s films, I’m sure it was quite experimental for him. Rather than allow himself to be guided by an idea-based dream logic and follow from there, this was a rigid narrative following a cross-country journey pulled from real events. By giving himself more limitations than usual, Lynch was able to tune his considerable skillset towards a different kind of experience.

Different enough that I’ve heard this film largely dismissed among discussions of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Though it may not tap into the same kind of bizarre images and unsettling sounds we know and love him for, the film is far from inessential. Indeed, this was the one that really helped me tap into what it was that had so thoroughly helped to change my perspective of Lynch as an artist. In many ways, the answer was staggeringly obvious. The answer was the man himself.

Many intrepid filmgoers before me have gone to the source, hoping to gain some additional insight or wisdom on the inner workings of Lynch’s work. Though he was happy to share amusing anecdotes from the set here and there, he was famous for refusing to come out and explain any of his films on an interpretive level. A strong advocate that the film should stand on its own, with nothing added or subtracted, Lynch firmly believed that everyone’s personal experience with the films was a pure and sacred thing, regardless of whether they liked it. So going to him for simple answers would prove to be comically frustrating for most who tried it.

However, there’s something I’ve neglected to mention until now. I haven’t just been watching Lynch’s movies all this time. I’ve been consuming just about as much content around him as I can get my hands on. I’ve watched dozens of interviews with him throughout the years. I’ve watched the TV commercials he’s directed, which are fascinating and frequently surprising, yet also exactly what you’d expect. I’ve read through his book, Catching the Big Fish, where he discusses his experiences with meditation and how that feeds into his creative process. I’ve seen the documentaries Pretty as a Picture and The Art Life, both focusing on different stages of his career. I’ve even taken his masterclass.

And here, dear readers, is where I found the key to unlocking the art. Lynch doesn’t possess this key: he is the key. He was a man with boundless curiosity, with morbid fascinations, with childlike wonder and with rigorous artistic discipline. He prioritized the purity and freedom of any creative process he chose to apply himself to. He cared about other people and their lives and problems and joys and sorrows and everything in between. He believed in ideas as the singular guiding principle behind everything we do, and that there was so much beauty to be found both in these stories and in the act of telling them.

He was not, as I had imagined for years, an arrogant prankster who simply concocted weird visuals in order to mess with people. He possessed a boundless empathy, which extended to both his characters and to the people around him. Despite their frequent plunges into dark and lurid subject matter, there is always a beating heart under the surface of his films, always a sense of exuberance at the highs of life and heartbreak at the lows. This is a major part of what opened these films up to me, and nowhere is it laid barer than in The Straight Story.

Chronicling the true story of Alvin Straight (played impeccably by Richard Farnsworth), we follow this retired farmer and veteran as he sets out to visit his long-estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). The latter has suffered a stroke and may not have long to live, and the former lives several states away with no driver’s license. His solution is to take a riding mower and drive it from Iowa to Wisconsin, which the rest of the cast takes every opportunity to tell him is crazy and unnecessary once he has multiple volunteers to drive him.

Yet Alvin insists upon getting to his brother in his own way, a stubbornness that gradually reveals a deep well of regret within him. This journey is perhaps his last chance to make things right with Lyle, and while I don’t want to spoil the specifics of the final scene, I will say that it does a phenomenal job of wordlessly expressing everything you need to understand the rift between these brothers, and the significance of Alvin’s effort to mend it. The whole film is brimming with warmth and humor and emotion, but these last moments really tie the whole thing together.

DUNE (1984)

While I’ve gone into great depth about my own history with Lynch so far, I do want to take some time to address my wife’s part in this strange and unexpected odyssey. One of the many things I love about Kelly is that no matter how weird and out-there some of the things I show her are, she’s always open to trying something new. Initially I thought that Lynch’s work might be a real test of that, but after she fell in love with Blue Velvet and was able to wrap her head around Mulholland Drive in a single viewing, I could tell she was on board.

Curiously, the only Lynch film we’d ever seen together before this whole excursion was just over a year ago, when we sought out his original adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune as a point of comparison against the two spectacular ones we just got from Denis Villenueve. At that time, we were still very much feeling the anti-Lynch sentiment, and we were also comparing it directly to a far more successful adaptation, so it was difficult for the film to stand much of a chance.

And not without good reason: most Lynch fans would agree that if there is any one bad egg in the carton of his filmography, it’s this one. Even the director largely disowned it, disappointed with the compromises he had to make to get it finished and his inability to fully execute his vision, due in part to a mandated runtime and a lack of final cut. So, while Kelly and I no longer needed any convincing as far as Lynch’s overall talent, surely if there was any of his films we’d still feel negatively about, it would be this one. Right? Surely our critical re-evaluation wouldn’t go as far as the one entry that even he doesn’t like. Right?

Right?

Listen, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that 1984’s Dune is some underrated masterpiece that demands your attention. There’s plenty that still doesn’t work; you can feel the compromise in the story structure, with big swaths of plot being transparently cut out or reduced for time. This only grows more prominent towards the end, as the entirety of last year’s Dune: Part Two gets unceremoniously crammed into the final 30 minutes or so of this version. The cast is also a mixed bag, with plenty of skill to go around but not exactly a universal handle on the material’s complexity.

But that said, if you’ve gotten onto the filmmaker’s wavelength as we have, there is also a lot to like here. Lynch taps into the spiritual vibes of the story in a way that is different from how Villenueve handles it, and while certain aspects are streamlined to the point of nonsense, the overall package does still tell a complete story in a way that neither Part One nor Part Two of the newer iteration can, by virtue of being split up. The storytelling is elliptical and reliant on voiceover, but it also grants us a more intimate look at perspectives from the entire cast, not just Paul (played here by Kyle MacLachlan in his first major role).

The real highlight is the craft on display. The production design, costumes, and sci-fi aesthetics are all distinct, memorable, and lived-in. The inclusion of the guild navigators in all their bloated glory, the tactile nature of the sandworms, and the decision to really lean into the disgusting appearance of the Baron (Kenneth McMillan) help give the world a proper sense of texture. It allows the film to step out of the shadow cast by Star Wars somewhat and forge its own identity. Perhaps the single best element are the musical themes created by Toto and Brian Eno, which simultaneously date the film and give it a sort of timeless epic quality.

If you’ve already seen this version and you know that you hate it, I’m not going to say that you’re wrong. But I do think your perspective on Lynch going in is a vital component to what you take away from it, so if you’ve been working through his catalogue and coming around like we have, it might be worthy of re-examination.

The easiest example of this I can find is in the film’s opening, where Virginia Madsen’s floating head does its best to fill viewers in on the lore of Dune. The first time we saw this, my wife gave the loudest groan I’ve ever heard less than 30 seconds in, an early indicator that this was going to be a slog for her. Rewatching it this time, however, and that same sequence resulted not in boos, but in cheers from the same woman who had so resented the same scene just one year ago.

This is the phenomenon that I’ve been experiencing since we started, but now for the first time, Kelly was able to really feel it for herself. The idea that you could be so sure you hated something, that it just wasn’t for you and that’s all there is. Then suddenly, one day you watch it again with a different mindset, a different perspective, and the exact same movie transforms before your eyes. This is what it’s like to truly catch Lynch’s vibe.

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)

With any lingering doubts now firmly in the rearview, all that was left was to enjoy the small handful of films remaining, which now felt like previous gemstones given their limited quantity. One of them is part of a larger monolith that I’ll discuss in a moment, and one was a personal recommendation from a Hollywood screenwriter, but since we could do no wrong anyway, we decided to go with the only entry that Kelly had already seen, but I hadn’t.

The Elephant Man is that film for a lot of people. Long thought of as Lynch’s most accessible and mainstream offering, it was a big jump for him from the scrappy DIY style of Eraserhead to a major studio picture executive produced by Mel Brooks (an early champion who saw Lynch’s potential and protected his vision throughout the process). Yet while it is certainly a classical, handsomely mounted film that you could show to your grandparents, it is also 100% a David Lynch film if you know what to look for.

Based on the true story of the heavily disfigured John Merrick (John Hurt, giving a masterful performance through some masterful makeup) who is rescued and cared for by a surgeon (Anthony Hopkins) in Victorian-era London. Though his initial interest in his patient is in the name of science and academic research, his heart quickly softens as he realizes the horrendous quality of life the man has endured, and the beautiful spirit he has maintained underneath it all. John Gielgud and Anne Bancroft also shine as fellow members of the societal elite who are moved by Merrick’s humanity and resilience.

I think I had always assumed two things about this movie: that I would probably still like it even though I was decidedly not a fan of the filmmaker until recently, and that because it was such a well-regarded film (8 Oscar nominations, not for nothing), much of Lynch’s stamp would be absent. Though it is certainly easier to process than most of his work (give or take The Straight Story), the empathy and love that radiates from his best work is fully present here. The film opens and closes with a pair of surrealist montages that feel like classic Lynch even before many of his hallmarks had been established. And the still-stunning black & white cinematography creates a natural extension of Eraserhead’s visual palette.

There are many great scenes peppered throughout The Elephant Man, which rightly retains its beloved status to this day (making its limited availability on both streaming and physical media deeply frustrating). But the one that has stuck with me, and likely will for the foreseeable future, is the last one. I won’t give away more than necessary if, like me, you somehow still haven’t seen it. But the sight of a man getting ready for bed left me emotionally devastated in a way that precious few films are capable of.

WILD AT HEART (1990)

If you listen to the frequently excellent Awards Radar podcast that I co-host along with our intrepid editor Joey Magidson, you may remember a few years back when screenwriter Michael Kennedy (Freaky, this year’s Heart Eyes) appeared as a guest to discuss his Christmas slasher It’s a Wonderful Knife. At some point in our conversation, my disdain for Lynch’s films (at the time) happened to come up, and Mr. Kennedy advised that I try Wild at Heart. That I might like it even if I don’t care for the rest.

I had always intended on following up on that suggestion, even before I began this retrospective. But now that the past few months have molded me into a David Lynch obsessive, this viewing took on near-reverent levels of anticipation, to say nothing of the fact that it was one of only two remaining entries we had yet to see. And while I do think that I would have appreciated it and probably even enjoyed it before my conversion, now that I’m something of an acolyte I’ve found that it’s one of my favorites.

Indeed, the closest thing I have to a hot take is that I think Wild at Heart is genuinely one of Lynch’s best. Oozing with passion and romance from every corner, it’s an unhinged road trip following two lovers on the run before a violent past catches up with them. This basic descriptor may conjure up images of Bonnie & Clyde or Natural Born Killers, but Wild at Heart is very much dancing to the beat of its own drum. In many ways it’s an ideal blend of coherent narrative and Lynchian strangeness, with neither aspect fully dominating the picture, yet both feeling fully served.

The love story at its center is also deeply felt and beautifully performed, with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern delivering some of the best work of their respective careers. Indeed, if you want to really appreciate Dern’s range, watch this back-to-back with Blue Velvet and marvel at just how different her characterizations are. Meanwhile Cage has possibly never been sexier, giving rock star-energy in a snakeskin jacket. His heartfelt rendition of “Love Me Tender,” despite being partially obscured by credits, is a high point in a career that’s dense with them.

The colorful supporting cast all make the journey vivid and intriguing. Dern’s real-life mother Diane Ladd plays her on-screen mother as a barely contained geyser of over-protective malice. Willem Dafoe is present for maybe 20 minutes but makes an indelible impression as an especially lascivious criminal; he has one of the craziest final moments I’ve seen for any film character in recent memory. Lynch regulars like Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nance are on hand to bark like a dog and monologue about a hypothetical dog, respectively. Even Crispin Glover has the briefest of cameos in a role that’s hard to forget.

The music is also a driving force here, from the reliably gorgeous compositions by Angelo Badalamenti (who scored all of Lynch’s films starting with Blue Velvet), to the eclectic soundtrack ranging from Powermad to Chris Isaak. With plentiful scenes of them dancing and singing, it feels like music is a real source of fuel for this rebellious couple. Another is their shared love of The Wizard of Oz, which has served as a consistent reference point in many of the director’s films (as explored in the documentary Lynch/Oz). Here it becomes such a core part of the narrative framework that it’s hard to imagine the film without it, especially when Glinda the Good Witch shows up played by Sheryl Lee.

As with many of these films, Wild at Heart going to be for everyone, even among fans. The emphasis on violence, sexuality, and the disturbing intersections between the two are just as present here as they were in Blue Velvet, but with a big more edge. Some might say the plot is too meandering and that the various criminal subplots don’t all seem to go anywhere. But if I’ve learned one thing from this whole experience, it’s that sometimes you’ve got to surrender yourself to the madness and feel your way through it.

I recognize in writing this that I am decades late to the proverbial party. I realize that many of my observations about David Lynch and his films may be seen as obvious by those more familiar, and that’s fine: I’m sure I have much deeper left to dive. If you’ve already seen and loved these films for years, you don’t need me to tell you how great they are.

But as discussed up top, this has been a form of penance for me. As a member of the critical sphere and the film community at large (even in the vestigial way that I am), I have repeatedly failed to show proper respect to an artist that showed us a different way of looking at the world. An acquired taste perhaps, but once you’ve acquired that taste it’s hard to let it go.

I wasn’t “wrong” for disliking Lynch’s films, any more than anyone who dislikes any film is wrong. Art is subjective after all. But I was wrong to dismiss his artistry out of hand. I was wrong to spend so much energy over the years spouting bile and resentment at these masterworks that simply hadn’t clicked with me yet. I was wrong to assume bad intentions from the filmmaker just because his work hadn’t connected with me. I was wrong to think that a single viewing was all I’d need to fully process his work.

If you’ve never seen any of these films before, it should go without saying at this point that I highly recommend doing so. Either The Elephant Man or The Straight Story are going to be easy enough to engage with if the more surrealist tendencies intimidate you, but if you’re ready to take the plunge into to stuff that’s truly “Lynchian” then Blue Velvet is probably the best place to start.

But more so than Lynch specifically, if you have any director, actor, genre, or style of movie that you’ve spent years dismissing as “too weird” or “not for me,” I hope you’ll maybe be inspired to give them another chance. If I can write over 7000 words (sorry Joey) about a guy who I’ve spent most of my life thinking of as my least-favorite filmmaker, then maybe, just maybe, that thing you think you hate so much might have some hidden depth to it. Might just be worth a rewatch.

As for me, this emotional and psychological journey into the wild world of David Lynch’s mind only has one more stop, but it’s a long one. Such a long one, in fact, that I’ve decided to give that final entry (and all its related media) a whole separate essay just to do it justice. So, check back in a few months or so for Part 2, where I will document our trip into this mysterious little town. Five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line. I hear they serve damn fine coffee there. And I’ve never seen so many trees in my life.

To Be Continued…