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 deformed by disease, "The Elephant Man" (1980), employing a visual style reminiscent of "Eraserhead", was an elegy to the freakishness of the human condition disguised as a piece of Victorian morality theater. Exploring familiar territory, 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 Best Director and Best Screenplay nominations for Lynch.

Offered the third "Star Wars" film, "Return of the Jedi", Lynch opted instead to advance his script "Ronnie Rocket" at Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. When this project did not materialize, he 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" (1985), released in a drastically shortened form, as "a garbage compactor. Things are supposed to be mysterious, not confusing." This striking, underrated, but nevertheless muddled production, incomprehensible without having read the book, was a box-office failure. Feeling like "I had sort of sold myself out," Lynch later forced the removal of his name from the film's credits.

He was back in true form with "Blue Velvet" (1986), a quasi-autobiographical transit through zones of Kafka, Bosch, Bunuel, 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 ambiance of a nightmarish asylum, collegially 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 manic performance as Frank catapults that character into the stratosphere of cinema psychos. The surreal conclusion gives the audience pause--where does the dream end and the temporal world begin?

Though "Wild at Heart" (1990), adapted from a novel by future collaborator Barry Gifford, won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes, it met with critical disfavor at home. Reviewers found this "road" movie's impassioned scenes of brain bashing and decapitation all but unbearable, despite strong performances by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern on their trek through Hell (or is it Oz?). He faired far better with his first entry to network programming, ABC's groundbreaking "Twin Peaks" (1990-91). This creation of Lynch and screenwriter-author Mark Frost depicted a community's intricate web of secret sex, violence and horror, unearthed by murder and revealed through the investigation of FBI agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) how evil can get passed from troubled heart to troubled heart. Though it had run its course before finally leaving the air, the sensation of its first several weeks demonstrated that network TV could produce an audacious and cutting-edge work of culture, paving the way for quirky shows like "Northern Exposure", "Picket Fences" and "The X-Files".

Lynch miscalculated when he returned to "Twin Peaks" terrain for the feature "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" (1992). Critics savaged it, audiences hissed at Cannes and U.S. moviegoers stayed away, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "Twin Peaks" time had come and gone. Lynch had changed film and changed TV, but success had made him more uncompromising. His characters had always inhabited the outer fringes of society and mind, but in his best-received work, though he delivered something magnificent and terrible, he would pull back from the horror and restore some semblance of order. His unabated vision is just too much to bear for all but the most devout Lynchophile.

Take for example his unrestrained "Lost Highway" (1997), co-written with Gifford, the final moments of which are nothing but chaos and fear. Whatever the movie is about, Lynch refused to make it a neat package for spoon-feeding, preferring to leave room for each individual viewer to dream and have a different take. Characters change (or do they?), and the plot goes off in a different direction (or does it?). Who or what is that Mystery Man played by Robert Blake (who agreed to the role without having a clue as to what it was about)? Perhaps the point is that there is no point. At the end of the 20th Century, we live in a world that is not always comprehensible or correctable. In Gifford's words: "We went out on a limb with this thing and just let everything out. When you do that, people don't generally like this sort of stuff, so you know you're going to get slapped around to some extent."

Lynch demonstrated his brilliance with "Premonitions Following an Evil Deed", his contribution to the "Lumiere and Company" (1995) project, providing perhaps the most inventive use of the restored Lumiere camera and homemade film stock from among the 39 participating directors. There is no denying his originality, but the courage shown in allowing his art to grow increasingly darker and more difficult could impact negatively on his future as a filmmaker.

Never one to play it safe, Lynch confounded expectations when he directed "The Straight Story" (1999), a based on fact drama about an elderly man who rode a tractor several hundred miles in order to reconcile with his estranged brother. In lead Richard Farnsworth, the director found the perfect embodiment of sincerity. That same year, Lynch attempted another foray in TV series with the pilot "Mulholland Dr.", but the suits at ABC found the material too dark and odd for mainstream consumption. Even maverick cable channels like HBO passed on the show, but producer Alain Sarde was sufficiently impressed to offer to bankroll additional footage allowing Lynch to make a feature film that premiered at Cannes in 2001. A dystopian look at the price of the pursuit of fame in Hollywood, "Mulholland Dr." was meant to echo Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece "Sunset Boulevard". Many of the typical Lynchian touches could be found, with creepy villains, oddball secondary characters and a mid-film switch that echoed "Lost Highway" but which was here more effective. Lynch shared the Cannes Best Director Award and the film opened to universal critical acclaim, although audiences tended to be somewhat confused and confounded by the piece. Despite earning numerous prizes from critics' groups, "Mulholland Dr." did not fare well with the more conservative members of the Motion Picture Academy. Lynch received the film's sole nomination for Best Director, almost insuring he would not win.

As a filmmaker, Lynch revels in his power to stimulate, understanding full well that his visceral, often oblique images may frustrate and even antagonize audiences. Though his work is full of abstractions, it is still, in large part, about the old-fashioned conflict between "good and evil", something on which moviegoers can certainly hang their hat. Lynch has said that "finding love in hell" is a theme in all his movies, and as he casts about for future projects, one wonders if he can be true to his terrible vision without alienating the people who go see his movies.