David Lynch

The work of David Lynch, one of American cinema's most unabashedly eccentric directors, is almost always immediately identifiable by his dark and surreal aesthetic. The filmmaker first fell into the spotlight with his 1976 feature debut, Eraserhead, a bleak and supremely strange tale involving a mutant baby and a woman who lives inside a radiator. The unhinged oddness of Eraserhead won Lynch many fans, leading to his recruitment as the director of The Elephant Man, which proved to be a mannered and restrained departure. Lynch's follow-up, a massive adaptation of the Dune sci-fi saga was visually intriguing, but ultimately confounding, resulting in one of the biggest box-office bombs of the '80s. Steering clear of large-scale productions, Lynch rebounded remarkably with Blue Velvet, a pulpy tale of small-town crime marked by Dennis Hopper's ferocious performance as a psychopathic villain. Since then, most of Lynch's productions, including the groundbreaking Twin Peaks TV series and the willfully weird Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, have presented intriguing variations on his fascinating Velvet template, with the notable exception of The Straight Story, an uncharacteristically linear rural meditation. Also an accomplished musician, writer, and visual artist, as well as an amateur weatherman and part-time coffee seller, Lynch is entirely at home in his own bizarre world, and viewers can be thankful that he occasionally welcomes them over for a visit.