Mel Brooks saw ERASERHEAD and thought Lynch a kindred madman who would be the perfect director to film a script Brooks wanted to produce about John Merrick -- a man whose exterior was as hideous as his soul was beautiful. Lynch's film about this real person, who was hideously deformed by disease, THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), was an elegy to the freakishness of the human condition disguised as a piece of Victorian morality theater. Exploring territory similar to ERASERHEAD, Lynch exposed undercurrents of metaphysical anguish and absurdist fear, but the accessible humanity within Merrick's tale made the film a box-office success and earned it eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Director.
Lynch was offered the third Star Wars film, RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), but opted to advance his script Ronnie Rocket at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. This project did not materialize, and Lynch waded into deep water with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who owned the rights to Frank Herbert's byzantine, epic science fiction novel Dune. Lynch once described DUNE (1984), which was released in drastically shortened form, as "a garbage compactor. Things are supposed to be mysterious, not confusing." This striking, underrated, but nevertheless muddled production only partly revealed Lynch's concerns and was a box-office failure.
He was back in true form with BLUE VELVET (1986), a quasiautobiographical transit through zones of Kafka, Bosch, Buñuel, Capra and Hitchcock that Lynch has described as "The Hardy Boys Go to Hell." In this scatological film noir, composed as if inspired by the ambience of a nightmarish asylum, collegiately handsome Kyle MacLachlan stumbles upon, and is subsumed in, a crucible of child abduction, drug wars, voyeurism, sexual abuse, small town corruption and compulsive souls desperate to find truth in a dimension that seems to be devoid of meaningful questions. Sensuous details mix with a painterly neo-Gothic eye for the bizarre. All is the opposite of what it seems: Neat, placid surfaces cloak macabre reality and the outwardly horrible is ultimately the most benign. Malignant impulses fester deep within people and things. Dennis Hopper's maniacal performance as Frank catapults that character into the stratosphere of cinema psychos. The surreal conclusion gives us pause -- where does the dream end and the temporal world begin?
Lynch's characters inhabit the outer fringes of society and mind. He is obssessed with texture and tension, sexual and biological functions (and dysfunctions), moods and sensation. Industrial images and sounds reinforce the machine metaphor of artificial reality. "Finding love in hell may be a theme in all my movies," he has said.
In 1990, Lynch ventured into television with "Twin Peaks," a more discreet cut of BLUE VELVET fabric, and directed WILD AT HEART, a road movie and unlikely paean to THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Although "Twin Peaks" attracted a fanatical cult audience that continued to grow after the entire run of the series was released on videocassette, the series dwelled in the ratings cellar and was eventually cancelled. In order to give a sense of closure to the show's central mystery, Lynch concluded the series with the theatrical release of TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992), a muddled but frequently chilling film that answered the TV show's elusive question: "Who killed Laura Palmer?"
Other notable (non-nominated) credits include CRUMB (1994, producer), NADJA (1994, exec. producer), LUMIÈRE AND COMPANY (1995), LOST HIGHWAY (1997), THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), DUMBLAND and DARKENED ROOM (both 2002, also producer/exec. producer) and LIGHTHOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2003, exec. producer), INLAND EMPIRE (2006, also producer), and executive producing SURVEILLANCE and THE SQUARE ROOT OF ONE PERCENT (both announced for 2008).
Nominated for Directing 1980: THE ELEPHANT MAN
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another medium) 1980: THE ELEPHANT MAN (w. Christopher DeVore & Eric Bergren)
Nominated for Directing 1986: BLUE VELVET
Nominated for Achievement in Directing 2001: MULHOLLAND DRIVE
4 nominations