The Cinematheque

“In a sense all film is entering into someone else’s dreams. Maybe we can even share the same dreams.”

David Lynch

Few artists can legitimately claim ownership of an aesthetic that shaped not just the contours of an art form but culture at large. David Lynch (1946–2025), who died in January, was one such rarity. His extraordinary body of work, which captured the collective imagination through film and television but also includes painting, sculpture, music, books, and much else besides, treaded an improbable line between accessibility and pure experimental impulse, between the appetite of an audience and the obstinate belief in one’s own vision. That ​“Lynchian” could enter everyday parlance is proof not only of his ubiquitous influence but the discovery that life was taking on uncanny dimensions à la Lynch. (The term itself conjures more of a feeling than a description, something the famously explanation-averse director would no doubt appreciate.)

An architect of dream worlds on the verge of waking (or vice versa), Lynch is best known for a cycle of features—1977’s Eraserhead to 2006’s Inland Empire—and a groundbreaking 1990 television show, created with Mark Frost, that would thread into his film career and, in 2017, produce what is perhaps his magnum opus. His work—surreal, sometimes nightmarish—deals often with the hidden horrors of American life, the rot under the root, but also with the goodness in people and the power of love. It is, to a large degree, a binaristic universe, governed by virtue and wickedness on a cosmic, metaphysical scale. ​“Why are there people like Frank?” Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey asks of his sadistic foil in Blue Velvet. The answer, unspoken, is because there is evil, an abstraction that undergirds the ethics of Lynchland—and particularly the planet of Twin Peaks. Doppelgängers are a common motif, as is electricity as a signifier of slippage between worlds, a rupturing of planes. ​“It’s sometimes dangerous, but it’s magical,” Lynch said of his fascination with the phenomenon. ​“It’s a force.”

In his film and TV work, ideas—or the ​“fish” he catches, as he’d prefer to frame it—found expression through a company of collaborators whose names became synonymous with his own. MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Jack Nance, and Harry Dean Stanton are probably the most prominent of his players (though the troupe is vast); behind the curtain, editor Mary Sweeney, casting director Johanna Ray, production designer Jack Fisk, and a trio of cinematographers—Frederick Elmes, Freddie Francis, and Peter Deming—virtually coauthored his career. But it is composer Angelo Badalamenti who emerged as the elemental Lynch ingredient, scoring Blue Velvet through Mulholland Dr. before returning to the swelling synthscape of Twin Peaks, his most beloved work, for its miraculous 2017 revival. Lynch would direct no major film or television projects after The Return (had the pandemic not evaporated a Netflix series, who knows what could have been), preserving a partnership with Badalamenti that endured until their respective deaths—Badalamenti in 2022, Lynch just over two years later.

This December, The Cinematheque invites you to experience the sui generis genius of David Lynch with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition mounted on a scale unseen in these (or other) parts before. ​“In Dreams” will present all ten of the director’s feature films—most restored in recent years—as well as a program of formative shorts tracing his early evolution. The added slice of cherry pie: the retrospective will also include the broadcast pilot of Twin Peaks and, in its 18-hour entirety, the director’s labyrinthine last testament Twin Peaks: The Return.

As far as holiday presents go, we have a definite feeling none will be as wonderful and strange as this.

“Lynch was never less than fully himself … [He] made an era-defining work for every era in which he was active.”

Dennis Lim, Film Comment

“David Lynch didn’t just expand the idea of cinema: he created a new version of reality, an alternative world that changed our sense of the one we thought we were living in.”

Michael Atkinson, Sight and Sound

“A singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade.”

Steven Spielberg