by Lindsey Romain, Staff Writer

Here is your guide to the second half of Lynch’s filmography through his short films. Read part one here:

To make things a little easier, I’ve gone ahead and linked several David Lynch shorts (and a few commercials) to the feature films and TV projects of his that they best correspond with, in chronological order from the beginning of his moviemaking career. Whether they share thematic DNA, have aesthetic similarities, or simply star some of the same actors, these shorts are a little appetizer to the feast that is a full-length David Lynch movie.

Film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Short to watch: Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1996) — watch here on the Criterion Channel

Fire Walk with Me, the Twin Peaks prequel, was for decades Lynch’s most misunderstood work. It’s not a TV-audience-friendly prequel the way many were expecting and does not play out like some fun Dale Cooper detective story. Instead, its laser focus is on Laura Palmer, the beautiful teenager whose death is the central mystery of the ABC series. In Fire Walk with Me, she’s still alive but not at all well. Though we hear snippets of her very sad life in the show, here we see the striking, haunting reality of her existence—and how a life of sexual abuse turned her into a figure of tremendous tragedy. It’s almost definitively the most gut-wrenching, upsetting, and hard-to-watch movie in Lynch’s filmography, but also one of his very best. The empathy he shows for Laura—and how evil lurks around and clings to beautiful women—would come to inform almost all of his later work.

The Lynch short Premonitions Following an Evil Dead is less than a minute long, but contains within it imagery and themes in tandem with all of Twin Peaks—and film history, too. It was part of the anthology film Lumière and Company, a tribute to the Lumière brothers where modern filmmakers evoked their style, filming on a restored Cinematograph. Premonitions evokes the Lumiéres, but also has obvious Lynch trademarks. Badalamenti provided the score, it has an undercurrent of ambient noise, and, as with Peaks, begins with police discovering the dead body of a young person. It fades into imagery of a woman in a living room, then three other women outdoors, then to a scene of masked men poking at a naked woman in a tube. It then goes back to the woman in the living room, now joined by her husband, as the police from the beginning walk in and start speaking to them—they are presumably the parents of the victim. It’s hard to know what exactly is going on narratively, but it seems to be telling the story of violent men and their victims, including the beautiful woman in the tube, and how that intersects with domestic lives. Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me are about this, too, and watching this short feels almost like opening the door into this corner of Lynch’s storytelling.

Film: The Straight Story
Short to watch: The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988) — available on The Short Films of David Lynch

The Straight Story asks the question: What if David Lynch made a Disney movie? The answer is that he’d make a uniquely special little fable about the joy of ordinary things, ordinary people, and the ordinary lives they live. Based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an Iowa man who traveled on his lawn mower to visit his brother in Wisconsin, it’s by far Lynch’s most accessible work. But don’t be totally fooled—if you desire Lynchian weirdness, there’s plenty of that in here, too. Scenes feel awkwardly overlong, there are some odd and baroque camera transitions, and characters speak with the stunted, practical oddity that’s synonymous with their creator. It’s a gentle-hearted film that reveals something else you’ll come to know about Lynch as you get more familiar with him: despite the darkness of much of his work, he’s one of the more optimistic, joy-infused directors of his ilk. Any interview with the man will tell you as much.

There’s not really any short to concretely to link to The Straight Story, but if you want a taste of joyful Lynch to set the tone, The Cowboy and the Frenchman is a fun watch. Made for the French TV series The French as Seen by…, it follows three cowboys who meet a mysterious French gentleman who teaches them about his culture. It’s slapstick and doesn’t entirely work, but it stars some Lynch regulars including Harry Dean Stanton, who also appears in The Straight Story.

Film: Lost Highway
Short to watch: The Grandmother (1970) — watch here on the Criterion Channel

Lost Highway is another misunderstood Lynch gem in that it was underappreciated at the time of release but has a better reputation among fans these days. It’s set in LA and is about a musician who starts receiving mysterious videotapes of him and his wife shortly before she’s murdered and he’s sent to prison. While in prison, the narrative shifts and suddenly he’s a new man, played by a different actor, living a different life. There’s a lot more to it than that, but we’ve officially entered the “almost impossible to properly describe the plot” era of Lynch’s feature film career.

Lost Highway is in many ways a sister film to the next entry on this list, Mulholland Drive. It’s also a film with one of the more horrifying images in Lynch’s career, that of Robert Blake as The Mystery Man. His stark white face and black lips, played to haunting effect in the early scenes, is reminiscent of the titular character of the Lynch short, The Grandmother. The content is not really the same, but if you can endure the onslaught of visual chaos and freakish character design in this short, about a boy who plants a seed that grows into a horrifying grandmother, then you can probably rock with Lost Highway.

Film: Mulholland Dr.
Short to watch: Giò by Armani: Who is Gió, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, Trésor Lancome Paris, Gucci by Gucci — watch here on YouTube

Mulholland Drive, a bizarre narrative puzzle about the dreams and nightmares of Hollywood, is considered by many to be Lynch’s masterpiece. When you watch it, you’ll understand—there’s really nothing quite like it. Though it has the discomforting feel of Lynch’s other work, it also has a candy-colored gloss. There’s something more effervescent to this one, an aspiring actress who arrives in Los Angeles and crosses paths with a mysterious woman with amnesia. The story plays out in dreamlike vignettes, all of which eventually intersect—though it’s not exactly decipherable. The vagueness of the film’s last act is what casts a beguiling spell over the audience and leaves the long-lasting impression that’s landed it near the top of multiple “greatest films of all time” lists.

For this one, we’re going to have a little fun. Because a really great gateway into the peculiar look and feel of Mulholland Drive is a series of perfume commercials Lynch directed in the ‘90s and 2000s for various luxury brands. They all depict women in various states of performance, and all have that dreamy, not-quite-real Hollywood essence—the facade masquing the nefarious underbelly of show business. In a Gucci ad, we see city streets and beautiful women dancing hypnotically in what appears to be different rooms of a luxe hotel. In a promo for Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, a ghostly woman ascends the stairs of a windowed building and finds a bottle of perfume that she strokes lovingly. She then sits on a chaise and puts the perfume on while extravagant music plays, her face lit like an Old Hollywood star. In a Lancome commercial, a beautiful woman walks through the street and up a set of stairs smiling and touching her head in ecstacy. For Armani, we follow a modelesque woman as she enters a black tie party and everyone turns to stare at her. She’s photographed, kisses a man, then leaves in a car watching after him. We then see her at a more lively party, possibly a club, where she gets up and dances freely with a big smile on her face. Photographers find her again and she poses for their shots.

All of these ads have a soap opera feel—beautiful women with strong feelings often over-emoting at nothing while exaggerated music plays in the background. There’s a phoniness to it all, in that quintessentially Hollywood sort of way. They’re definitely in conversation with Mulholland Drive, in that they are lovely to look at but just a little… off. If you’re drawn in by that contradiction, you’re already in the headspace for Mulholland Drive.

Film: Inland Empire
Short to watch: Rabbits (2002) and Lady Blue Shanghai (2010) — watch here and here on YouTube

Lynch’s last and most inaccessible feature film is Inland Empire, which can feel at times like an extended joke. Watching it is in many ways an act of endurance. It’s a maze of a movie, and filmed in low-resolution digital video so it’s also ugly to look at. There isn’t really a plot, just the loose impression of one. Essentially, it’s the story of a Hollywood actress played by Laura Dern going mad as she gets uncomfortably close to the character she’s playing in a film. It’s something of a trilogy with Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, in that they all deal with Los Angeles, doppelgangers, and beautiful women in cursed situations. But while the other two films have the occasional bit of lightness, Inland Empire is a straight-up nightmare.

The film has the most obvious precursors in terms of link between short and feature. First, Lynch made a series of short horror films called Rabbits that depicts three human-like rabbits in a singular living room. Events start playing out like a sitcom, complete with a laugh track, before descending into something far more terrifying—the room washes in red light, the voices go blurry, shadows elongate and linger. Lynch released these shorts online, but segments of them appear within Inland Empire. Lynch also directed a commercial for Dior called Lady Blue Shanghai that plays like a condensed version of the film. Marion Cotillard stars as a mysterious woman in Shanghai who finds a Dior handbag in her hotel room. A lot of confusing story elements come quickly into play and there’s an evident link of distress between Cotillard and Dern’s Empire character. The ad was filmed in the same digital style as the movie, so they share that DNA, too.

It’d be the act of a fool to encourage anyone to start with Inland Empire in their Lynch journey—even some diehards struggle with this one—but hey, if Rabbits and Lady Blue Shanghai speak to you in any way whatsoever, maybe it’s worth a shot.

Film: Twin Peaks: The Return — “Episode 8”
Short to watch: Fire (Pozar) (2015) or The Mystery of the Seeing Hand (2020) — watch here on the Criterion Channel and here on YouTube

This is a bit of a cheat because Twin Peaks: The Return isn’t technically a movie (despite what some publications might say), and so an episode of the series isn’t a feature either. But The Return, the last of Lynch’s major works, deserves a shoutout here, especially given how ardently it fused together so much of what Lynch came to represent. It’s the culmination of five decades worth of work, with “Episode 8” as its apex. Even if you haven’t seen The Return, you’ve probably heard about the triumphs of this episode, which features elements of fantasy, the Trinity test, soot demons, and other touchstones of Peaks-specific lore that is a little too layered to get into in this space. All you really need to know is that it’s one of Lynch’s most notable works, a true marvel of the small screen and probably the main reason folks still argue about The Return being a film.

The real entry point to this episode is the series, Twin Peaks, which you can’t really relate to any one particular Lynch short or commercial or concert. But if you want to test the waters of just how much you could come to appreciate this era of Lynch’s work, these short films will give you a taste. First is Fire (Pozar), a 10-minute animated short that shows some odd being floating from the sky and into a quaint, pastoral setting. It hovers for a bit and is joined by floating eyes before “rocks” of some sort start falling from the sky, creating fire. We pull back to realize we’re watching this play out through the eyes of a crying face, which dissipates and is replaced by dancing shadow figures with antlers. It’s hard to explain exactly how this relates to “Episode 8” without seeing that episode, but just know there is a definite aesthetic and emotional link, with the figures at the end feeling akin to the soot demons.

The second short is The Mystery of the Seeing Hand, which came out after The Return. It opens with a hand with an eye floating before a curtain before an egg manifests in the center screen and a strange bug-like creature starts hatching out of it. The egg then morphs into a face, then a mouth, before a golden bubble emerges from the cracks and flies out of it. This one is even more directly reminiscent of the sequence from “Episode 8” where we see a similar scene play out involving Laura Palmer, the cosmos, and the origins of evil—or something—and in a similar stage-like setting.

As you’ll learn as you delve deeper into Lynch, many of these links between short projects and feature films are ephemeral, almost spiritual. It’s hard to draw a hard line between any two things Lynch made, but it’s easy to see how everything is in conversation. Not just between films and shorts, but between the man himself. The most impressive, lasting thing about David Lynch is his singularity—there was no one else quite like him. No matter how you enter into his artistic orbit, whether through this guide or a random act of fate, you’re in for a delightful, delirious, irreplicable experience.

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