David Lynch carved his special directorial niche in avant-garde filmmaking with the use of surreal visuals and characters treading the edge of sanity. Excluding his couple of humanistic features based on real-life stories,  The Elephant Man (1980) and Straight Story (1999), and Dune (1984) – which is entirely its own animal within the Lynchian paradigm – Lynch successfully created a new wave of absurdist aesthetics in movies.

Generally, movies directed by Lynch cross multiple genres within a Kafkaesque tradition – mystery/thriller, crime, dark comedy, horror, and neo-noir. His main characters are nearly always awkward at best, typically lost in more than the physical sense, and outright insane in extreme cases. And down the road in time, the extremism in characterization went up....

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