Every David Lynch Film Ranked From Worst To Best
1. Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive (2001) is considered the pinnacle of Lynch's career, and to your writer's mind, it distils perfectly Lynch's genius as both a filmmaker and a visionary capable of adapting to pressure and dreaming something more beautiful from it.
The dangled subplots from the would-be TV show - Mulholland Drive was envisioned and in part filmed as TV pilot - are repurposed as echoed, hallucinatory extensions of the film's creeping, dreadful undercurrent. In particular, Lynch evokes this "God-awful feeling" in the infamous dumpster monster scene, in which an awful manifestation acts as both hideous portent of doom and a visual metaphor of the main plot's nightmarish subversion of Betty Elms' Hollywood dream.
As Betty, Naomi Watts enters a career-best and career-launching performance, as her gee whizz, wide-eyed innocence unravels into a dark, interconnected mystery in a concentrated celebration and assault of Hollywood, the beauty and malignance of which is explored through the gorgeous, pathos-laden Silencio sequence and the unsettling quality of the Cowboy's 'smart Alec" speech, in which Lafayette Montgomery joins the ranks of Lynch's disturbing other creations. It is a sequence that can be read as a representation of unyielding Hollywood oppression - the additional features of The Return's BluRay all but confirm that the machine remains Lynch's own antagonist - but really, this is the ultimate interpretive Lynch magnum opus, a work that invites endless insights over the course of its spellbinding 146 minute running time.
The overarching dream interpretation indirectly ruined by the notorious Dallas retcon of season 9, it's an indication of the film's brilliance that Lynch absolved and perfected the rotten trope without even definitively using it.