All 12 David Lynch Films and TV Shows, Ranked
With the announcement that the great David Lynch died on January 16, the world hasn’t just lost one of its greatest filmmakers: It’s lost one of its greatest artists, period. The work of a filmmaker whose sensibility was certainly not for the masses, the best David Lynch movies nonetheless had the ability to make people feel seen in their splintered, strange singularity. He’s one of the few directors whose name can be used as an adjective — Lynchian — without it feeling unearned. At the same time, when would you say “Lynchian” to talk about any film aside from his own? Despite his widespread acclaim, and the scores of filmmakers today who were influenced by his work, Lynch’s works remain unclassifiable, films that simply are incapable of being duplicated.
Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, to a Department of Agriculture researcher father whose work caused his family to move across the country several times during his childhood, Lynch lived a life of classic Americana growing up that his work often depicted and subverted: His mother was a housewife, he was popular in high school and a member of a fraternity, and in his younger years he was an Eagle Scout and attended — along with his troop — President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. As a young man he went to college to study painting before eventually finding his way to filmmaking, and at the American Film Institute Conservatory he produced his first feature film, “Eraserhead.”
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Although just a small, scrappy student project, “Eraserhead” is a pure vision of a remarkably formed and developed filmmaker. Surreal and nightmarish, but subtly quite playful and funny, “Eraserhead” is a domestic fable that channels fears of parenthood and modern American life into a crushing industrial wasteland tragedy. The immersive and haunting sound design, the stark filmmaking, the droll humor and the trust in the audience to take the dreamlike adventure as an emotional experience rather than a purely narrative one: all of that can be found in his first feature, and his ethos and worldview would, over the course of a career that spanned decades, produce classics like “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet,” and the entire “Twin Peaks” saga.
While the surrealist qualities of Lynch’s works are what made him famous, they weren’t quite what made him special. By all accounts, the man himself was a deeply kind person, and that worldview bleeds into his films. On the surface, most of his work is dark and despairing, but there’s an obvious empathy and emotion within them that lights a pathway forward. Lynch was a filmmaker with a genuine earnestness to his touch, and that earnestness made his work feel tactile and alive.
As the film community mourns the loss of Lynch, IndieWire is taking a moment to celebrate the work that made the man a legend. While some of his work is more beloved than others, all have their fans — and all are worthy glimpses into the mind of a visionary whose perspective has often been aped but never matched. Considering its influence and cornerstone status in Lynch’s filmography, this list includes “Twin Peaks” — both the original 1990 ABC series and the 2017 “Return” Showtime series — along with his theatrical feature film. Read on for David Lynch’s films and TV shows, ranked.
With editorial contributions from Christian Blauvelt, Alison Foreman, and Christian Zilko.
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