The Two Best David Lynch Movies, According To Roger Ebert

Although the late David Lynch is now widely beloved by movie fans, there was a time when his reputation wasn’t so positive. After “Twin Peaks” crashed and burned, people were quick to dismiss the man as someone who had lost his edge. And according to famous film critic Roger Ebert, Lynch had no merit in the first place.

Ebert criticized Lynch’s second film, the critically acclaimed historical drama The Elephant Man, for its “superficial” philosophy, “unforgivable opening scene” and “equally stupid closing scene”. But even though Ebert had some nice things to say about this movie, giving it 2 out of 4 stars, it definitely… Hated Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece “Blue Velvet.” The new thriller horrified Ebert with its treatment of the character Dorothy, played by Isabella Rossellini. “She is humiliated, slapped, humiliated and stripped naked in front of the camera,” he wrote. “And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you have to keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.”

Ebert was not much of a fan of Lynch’s next film, “Wild at Heart,” and called his prequel, “Twin Peaks,” “shockingly bad.” He also disliked Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, writing in his review, “We keep thinking maybe Lynch will pull it off somehow, right up until the formless final scenes, when we realize it’s all just an empty stylistic window.”

By 1997, it seemed like there was nothing David Lynch could do to win over Ebert, but two years later, Lynch received his first ever four-star review, and another soon after. The first was about “The Straight Story,” and the second was about “Mulholland Drive.” So what motivated Ebert to win over them?

A G-rated story about a man who rides a lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his brother, this 1999 film is bafflingly straightforward and accessible.

“Since the film is directed by David Lynch, who usually deals with the weird, we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop — for Alvin’s saga to intersect with The Twilight Zone. But it never does,” Ebert wrote in his review.

The film was largely beautiful, embracing a small town without a hint of cynicism. As Ebert wrote:

“The first time I watched The Straight Story, I focused on the premise, and I liked it. The second time I focused on the background, too, and I loved it. The movie is not just about Alvin Straight’s journey through the sleepy towns and rural areas of the Midwest, but about the people he finds who listen to him and care about him. You would think it was fiction, this kindness from strangers, if the movie wasn’t based on a true story.”

Here I think Ebert appreciated an aspect of Lynch’s work that is often overlooked: this guy really loves small-town America. When he showed the sunny innocence of the city in “Blue Velvet” or the strange charm of “Twin Peaks,” it wasn’t Lynch being sarcastic, as many might assume.

In his review of “Blue Velvet,” Ebert wrote, “What are we being told? That beneath the surface of small-town USA, feelings are dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.” But the dark side of town in “Blue Velvet” wasn’t meant to portray the light side of town as hollow or hypocritical. Lynch truly finds small-town America fascinating, and his work becomes even more interesting when one understands that he is being honest.

“David Lynch has been working on Mulholland Drive his entire career, and now that he’s gotten there, I forgive him for Wild at Heart and even Lost Highway,” Ebert wrote in his review of the 2001 masterpiece. “Finally, his experiment didn’t break the test tubes. The film is a surreal, film-noir-style dreamscape in Hollywood, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.”

It’s not exactly clear why the surreal nature of this film works for Ebert while Lost Highway doesn’t. The two films are soul twins, and each deals with similar themes of guilt and escapism. Ebert says “Mulholland Drive” is great because “[Lynch] “He takes what was frustrating in some of his earlier films, and instead of backing away from it, he keeps moving forward.” But again, I’m not sure how this movie “communicates” anything in a way that “Lost Highway” doesn’t.

For many fans of both Ebert and Lynch, the reason they think this film wins over Ebert is because it doesn’t feature a violent scene where a man sexually assaults a woman. Female characters are constantly brutalized in Lynch’s works, and it is easy to interpret this as Lynch being cruel or exploitative. Most Lynch fans today believe that this recurring story has something to do with a certain traumatic experience Lynch had as a child, but this is a story that Ebert likely doesn’t know about yet. After some truly uncomfortable scenes in his previous films, this film is not only absent of explicit violence against women, but is told from a female perspective. Perhaps becoming the novel’s heroine was the key Ebert needed to understand Lynch’s madness.