Our Top Five Scenes from David Lynch

The Straight Story is an outlier in Lynch's filmography for many reasons, not least of which is its status as a G (general audience)-rated Disney movie. While this fact explains why it was the first of his films that I was able to see at the cinema, in many other ways, The Straight Story is the most mature and wise expression of Lynch's moral concerns. When Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) and his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) finally reunite at the conclusion of this twilight road movie, Lynch shows us that there is no substitute for the face-to-face encounter, especially in matters of forgiveness, and that one of the surest ways to set aside grievances is to consider humanity's place under the stars.

'I'll show you light now' from Inland Empire serves the same function as the Club Silencio scene, burning a hole in the membrane of the cinema screen. This pivotal awakening illustrates screen theory, illuminating the cinematic apparatus in a way unmatched within Lynch's filmography until Twin Peaks: The Return's own diegetic camera/recording scenes more than a decade later. Burial's sampling of the dialogue/scene for the introduction of his masterpiece Untrue celebrated and enhanced the scene's aesthetics and atmospherics within popular culture.

While there are many scopophilic scenes in Lynch's movies, none unite excitement, risk, rock and roll, and a multiplicity of 'looks' quite like 'This Magic Moment' from Lost Highway. When Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) first sees Alice (Patricia Arquette), the magic of the moment is the draw of the forbidden. Having temporarily purged his mind of the guilt of a horrible crime, Pete embodies Fred Madison (Bill Pullman)'s new start, doomed in this instance by his inability to look away from the siren that he cannot ignore but will never possess.

'I'm not going to talk about Judy. In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at all.' With these words, Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) revealed the source of his torment and the malignant power that would entrap Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). Lynch waited a quarter of a century to pay off this scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, repositioning the moment in The Return to illustrate the time-and-space-shattering effects of evil. Everything about the sequence, from the visual fragmentation to the structure to the blocking of the actors, is disorienting by design. What year is this? indeed.