Where to start with David Lynch: Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and MORE!

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Wild at heart, weird on top and even stranger if one starts to sink into his dreamlike fables, the cinema of David Lynch is not for the literal-minded or easily spooked. He’s one of the most distinctive, lauded filmmakers of the past 40 years, and his 10 features – and one revelatory TV series – encompass an uncompromising body of work.

They are explorations of nature’s dark side that twist everyday sights and sounds – suburban picket fences and shimmering 1950s and 60s pop tunes – into disorientating terrains teeming with sudden, visceral violence, sexual menace, sneaky, off-kilter humour and thrumming, disquieting soundtracks.

Lynch’s fascination with Americana (all but 2 of his films are set in the US), and his own awkward blend of wholesome boy-scout persona and disquieting predilections, led comedian-producer Mel Brooks – who hired Lynch to helm his 1980 prestige biopic The Elephant Man on the strength of his singular, avant-garde debut Eraserhead (1977) – to famously dub him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. It’s a neat one-liner from a consummate gagman, but it’s also perhaps misleading. Rather than being some extraterrestrial, Lynch is, if anything, an intra-terrestrial. His otherness doesn’t come from the outside, it comes from within.

Just as his longstanding advocacy for transcendental meditation (TM) is all about delving down into the subconscious and, creatively speaking, “catching the big fish” (the title of his personal TM guidebook), Lynch takes us on journeys deep inside ourselves, unearthing primal, often shocking fears and desires.

It’s hard to think of another filmmaker capable of conjuring up such oneiric visions; films as haunted, liminal spaces where the real and surreal merge. And while his obtuse, often non-linear storylines attract those obsessively looking to ‘solve’ his mysteries, such amusing pastimes generally miss the point. Though one can, in fact, often eventually decipher the dislocated narrative puzzles, their true power comes from a more intangible place, where words and logic cede control to intuition and emotion.

Lynch himself is notorious for good-naturedly fending off attempts to define his films’ meanings. And if the term ‘Lynchian’ embodies an unmistakable audio-visual style (with rare outliers, detailed below), some have found his more uneven efforts verging on self-parody.

Yet, at his best, Lynch is a visionary artist – one also active in painting, sculpture and music – tapping into cinema’s potential to linger with, and within, you long after the screen fades to black.