All 10 David Lynch Movies Ranked By Weirdness

Blue Velvet serves as the blueprint to the typical Lynchian movie.

Its iconic opening depicts suburbia in all its idyllic glory: blue skies, white picket fences, and cheery firemen. But a freak heart attack shatters this facade, and we are left with the lingering image of the writhing insects that inhabit Lumberton’s chaotic underworld.

This coming-of-age neo-noir mystery sees boy next door Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and girl next door Sandy (Laura Dern) stray from suburbia and venture down the rabbit hole into a world of criminals, femme fatales, seedy nightclubs, seedier apartments, voyeurism, and violence.

If Jeffrey and Sandy are the prototypical Lynchian heroes, then Frank Booth (Dennish Hopper) is the ultimate Lynchian villain. Far from a typical crime boss, Booth is an unhinged tornado of profanity, violence, and Oedipal perversions. He is the evil incarnate that our hero must vanquish, but also a figure of patriarchal terror, a force that will recur throughout Lynch’s works.

Weirdest Bit: The infamous scene where Jeffrey spies on Booth raping Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) is the movie’s most harrowing moment, but the “Candy Coloured Clown” sequence, where a lipstick-wearing Booth beats Jeffrey whilst hissing along to Roy Orbison (as a drunken floozy dances atop the car), is all sorts of weird.