The first film I saw by David Lynch (1946-2025) was Blue Velvet (1986), and I remember the shock of seeing college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discover a decomposing human ear lying in the grass, covered in ants. The image is a classic Surrealist bombshell harking back to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1929 collage-like short film Un Chien Andalou and its images of a hand crawling with ants, dead donkeys lying on top of pianos and an eyeball being sliced open with a razor. Lynch’s severed ear is also remarkable for its all-American context, its appearance disrupting the idyllic small-town setting established in the opening scene, with its white picket fences, green lawns and lush flower beds, its lollipop lady helping children across the road and its slowly cruising vintage fire engine truck.

Therein lies the specificity of Lynch’s surrealism: it is American. In his dreamlike cinema Lynch explored ways of fracturing and subverting the American Dream. Yet he was no theoretician in the mould of André Breton, the French author of the first Surrealist Manifesto; nor did he style himself, like Dalí, as an eccentric magus of the strange. Interviewed about working with Lynch on the 1990-91 television series Twin Peaks, the actress Sherilyn Fenn said of him: ‘It’s not that he’s weird; he’s just so “apple-pie” in a way. You know, like: “Doggone it, I don’t understand what the heck just happened” – that’s the kind of things that he’ll say.’ Lynch’s radically straight persona, Fenn went on to say, was that of an artist whose head was filled with extremely strange ideas. Indeed, Lynch himself explicitly made the connection between his observance of repetitive ordinary everyday rituals – for decades he would eat the same lunch at Bob’s Big Boy diner unless he was travelling – and the freeing of his creative flow, however bizarre and morbid. This very duality permeates his cinematic universe.

Lynch’s vision is at its most folksy and sinister in Twin Peaks, whose otherworldly quality is signalled by its memorable title sequence. Images of a Pacific Northwestern small town isolated in the wilderness, its serried pine trees and industrial rustic machinery, its waterfall and river, the only living creature a wren on a branch, are underscored by Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting theme music, which acts as a sort of subliminal portal into Lynch’s alternative soap opera. The show, peopled with a teeming cast of eccentric characters occupying a superficially wholesome and stable reality of road-side diners, high schools and close-knit neighbourhoods, hinges on the mystery of the murder of local girl Laura Palmer. Like Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks universe plays on the tension between the daytime world of grinning apple-pie America and its dark nightmarish underbelly: an upside-down world of violence and terror.

Sent to Twin Peaks to investigate the murder is Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by regular Lynch collaborator Kyle MacLachlan, whose clean-cut and rather opaque good looks are put to good use in the unstable and menacing surroundings of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and in the sci-fi political fantasy Dune (1984), adapted from the novels of Frank Herbert, in which MacLachlan plays an ambiguous messianic figure who believes himself to be a god. As Agent Cooper, MacLachlan repeatedly expresses an uncanny enthusiasm for such markers of small-town Americanness as a slice of cherry pie or a hot cup of coffee, objects which the camera frames with an intensity reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s gaze on Coke bottles or cans of Campbell soup. Alongside film-making, Lynch also directed adverts for cars and perfume. In his fetishised cinematic world, Pop Art shades into Surrealism. From what the viewer may assume is the real world to the dream sequences and supernatural visitations, which, in the words of a Twin Peaks character recounting one of his own, appear ‘as clear as a mountain stream’ – all is bathed in a sort of limpid radiance which is anything but reassuring.

The de-realising power of Lynch’s visual style is also perceptible in The Elephant Man (1980), which is neither science-fiction nor fantasy but inspired by the real-life story of Joseph Merrick (called John in the film), a man born with severe deformities who was exploited as a fairground freak and later ‘adopted’ by surgeon Frederick Treves, who was interested in his case and on whose memoir the script is based. The film’s re-creation of Victorian London feels continuous with the dystopian industrial wasteland of Lynch’s hallucinatory first film Eraserhead (1977), which had been inspired by a dangerous neighbourhood of Philadelphia where Lynch had lived for a while. This is a reality tinged with nightmare, not only in the extraordinary dream sequences that open and close the film and in the evocation of the hellish fairground where the freaks are displayed, but suggestive throughout of a dark dream state. One might notice, in a street scene where a butcher’s stall is set up outside, a curious juxtaposition of wing-like carcasses of meat and a pipe gushing water out of the wall which fleetingly suggests the image of an elephant. And John Hurt’s extraordinary performance as Merrick is overlaid with that of Anthony Hopkins as Treves, whose alienated and glassy quality suggests, even in a seemingly realistic context, a man in a waking dream.

Lynch listed Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Roman Polanski, Jacques Tati and Werner Herzog as the directors who he most admired. Nevertheless, it is in his love of American cinema that the key to his version of Surrealism – his nightmarish blending of dream and reality – is to be found. Lynch often alluded to The Wizard of Oz, a 1939 tale of Technicolor fantasy and monochrome reality where the heroine, who has travelled a very long way in her dreams, concludes that ‘there is no place like home’. He also loved Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Borrowing elements from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and relocating them to an American small town, it is the story of archetypal good man George Bailey (James Stewart), who, driven to despair, wishes he had never been born and is then able to experience what the world would be like without him in it. The lovely community of Bedford Falls, where he lived, has become Pottersville, a dehumanised place of exploitation where Bailey gradually realises his own complete erasure and the catastrophic consequences of his absence. It is one of the great nightmare sequences of cinema, where reality has become re-configured and with no exit in sight.

Mel Brooks memorably described David Lynch as ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’: the archetypal American nice guy, but from another planet. In Lynch’s universe both Bedford Falls and Pottersville, Oz and Kansas exist alongside one another, always capable of bleeding into each other. From this originate Lynch’s films-as-waking-dreams and his Heaven-and-Hell vision of America.