The Roxie Honors the Late, Great David Lynch with a Retrospective

Few filmmakers’ names turn into adjectives. But so distinctive is David Lynch’s feature-length work — with his noir visuals, unsettling narratives, stutter-step pacing and ethereal soundtracks — that we now use “Lynchian” to describe all manner of strange stuff, both real and fictionalized.

Since his death on Jan. 16, David Lynch tribute programs have popped up across the Bay Area, but the Roxie’s concentrated “In Dreams” retrospective, playing March 6–13, packs eight films into eight days, with multiple screenings of many. Which leads me to wonder, what would happen to someone who watches all the films back to back?

“Well, I think they’ll be more connected to reality, to be honest,” says Isabel Fondevila, the Roxie’s director of programming and curator of the retrospective.

Audiences must see Eraserhead, she insists, Lynch’s self-described “dream of dark and troubling things,” his debut black-and-white feature about a distinctively coiffed man experiencing the horrors of work, parenthood and in-laws. After it premiered in 1977, Eraserhead achieved fame as a midnight film in New York and Los Angeles theaters; the Roxie hosted it from 1978 to 1979.

“It was huge,” Fondevila says. “It’s a really really important film for the Roxie.”

The March 6 and 11 retrospective screenings of Eraserhead will be extra special, she notes, because they reunite the feature with Suzan Pitt’s avant-garde animated short Asparagus, which played before it at many of the midnight shows. “It feels like you’re stepping into someone else’s subconscious,” she says of Pitt’s 1979 short. “Just going from that super colorful Asparagus and then Eraserhead? It’s got to be a trip, really. I can’t wait.”

There’s no one way to approach the program, Fondevila says: “You can do anything you want with Lynch.”

I do have some highlights to note, for your planning purposes. Barry Gifford, co-screenwriter of 1997’s Lost Highway, will appear for a post-film conversation at the March 8 screening. The March 7 screening of Wild at Heart (adapted from a Gifford book), featuring young Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as couple-on-the-run Sailor and Lula, opens with a “wild” drag show featuring Lil King Milk and Vivica Bea Roadkill. And Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr. and Dune are all showing on 35mm.

(With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films in our recent memory, Fondevila points out, it will be interesting to revisit Lynch’s take on Frank Herbert’s sci-fi.)

Die-hard completists will have to seek out The Elephant Man, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and The Straight Story elsewhere. The Alamo has organized their own retrospective (coincidentally, also called “In Dreams”) March 7–April 4, showing every Lynch feature except for The Straight Story, which seemingly can’t catch a break.

Over a month after his death, we are no closer to pinpointing what makes a Lynch film so Lynchian. The word is its own definition. What’s left is for us to bask in the weirdness, celebrate a singular artist and surround ourselves with like-minded devotees.

‘In Dreams’ plays at the Roxie Theater March 6–13, 2025.