David Lynch brought the surreal to the big screen with mind-bending films such as Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. He then brought it to the small screen with the cult classic TV series Twin Peaks. In his work he mined the darkness of the human psyche with absurd imagery, alter egos, and senseless murder in an idyllic American town. Within this recognition of evil, his work touched on the spiritual as well—illuminating the full spectrum of humanity. Look through a radically original lens with his work and works about him, listed below.
Movies
DVD BLUE VELVE
Blue Velvet
A college student stumbles across a bizarre mystery and wants to know more. The strange world he’s found lurking beneath his hometown picture-postcard veneer is about to become much stranger.
DVD ELEPHANT M
The Elephant Man
Based on a true story, the film examines the complex emotional experiences faced by John Merrick, the “Elephant Man” when he is discovered by a dedicated surgeon. Rescued from his degrading life as a circus freak, Merrick is given a chance to live his last years with comfort, respect, and dignity.
DVD ERASERHEAD
Eraserhead
A nightmarish collage of images which blends the grotesque and the absurd, the deeply disturbing and the darkly humorous. Henry is the nerdish central character who lives in a squalid apartment with a strange girl and their monstrous baby. The extraordinary special effects create an eerie, dream-like world with a logic all its own.
DVD MULHOLLAND
Mulholland Drive / Standard Edition | Criterion Collection
After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.
DVD STRAIGHT
The Straight Story
Based on a true story about 73-year-old Alvin Straight who embarks on a dangerous and emotional journey to make amends with his 75-year-old brother Lyle before his brother dies. Alvin can no longer drive a car because of his eyesight and has to walk with 2 canes, but he climbs aboard his 1966 John Deere lawnmower and drives the 260-mile course from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wis.
DVD WILD AT HE
Wild at Heart
After serving prison time for a self-defense killing, Sailor Ripley reunites with girlfriend Lula Fortune. Lula’s mother, Marietta, desperate to keep them apart, hires a hit man to kill Sailor. But he finds a whole new set of troubles when he and Bobby Peru, an old buddy who’s also out to get Sailor, try to rob a store. When Sailor lands in jail yet again, the young lovers appear further than ever from the shared life they covet. Based on the first of Gifford’s novels about Sailor and Lula.
DVD 791.4372 LYN
Lynch/Oz
The themes, images, and cultural vernacular of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz continue to haunt David Lynch’s filmography from his early short The Alphabet to his recent television series Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch/Oz helps us reexperience and reinterpret The Wizard of Oz through David Lynch, delivering new appreciations of both. Also available for streaming in Kanopy.
TV DVD TWIN PEAKS
Twin Peaks [1990-1991]: definitive gold box edition
Follows Special Agent Dale Cooper as he investigates the death of Laura Palmer in the strange town of Twin Peaks.
TV DVD TWIN PEAKS
Twin Peaks [2017]: a limited event series
Picks up 25 years after the inhabitants of a quaint northwestern town are stunned when their homecoming queen is murdered.
Books
158.125 LYN
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity / David Lynch
Filmmaker David Lynch provides a window into his methods as an artist, his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.
791.4302 LYN
Room to Dream / David Lynch
Part-memoir, part-biography, Room to Dream interweaves Lynch’s own reflections on his life with the story of those times, as told by Kristine McKenna, drawing from extensive and explosive interviews with ninety of Lynch’s friends, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and collaborators. Lynch responds to each recollection and reveals the inner story of the life behind the art.
791.4372 EVR
A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune: An Oral History / Max Evry
As the hot young filmmaker commanded a cast with 42 major speaking parts as well as a crew of 1,700 (plus over 20,000 extras) on 80 sets built on 8 sound stages in Mexico, what happened next became as wild, complex, and full of intrigue as Herbert’s novel itself. Film writer Max Evry goes behind the erratic ride of David Lynch’s Dune like never before, with a years-in-the-making oral history culled from a lineup of new interviews with the film’s creatives, film executives, and insiders – not to mention Lynch himself.
BIO LYNCH
David Lynch / Thierry Jousse
Jousse , former editor in chief of Cahiers du cin é ma, examines the career of Lynch. Although his “conventional” films (The Elephant Man; The Straight Story ) have met with some success, he is justly acclaimed for his more personal films (e.g., Blue Velvet; Lost Highway ).
