Watchcast Poll for June: Pick Your Lynch!

Greetings, Nextlanders! As you may have heard if you've been following along with the Watchcast, we've got a slight scheduling change coming up. Due to a variety of life events (most notably, I think I'm buying a house, lol), we've made the decision to push off our watch of Twin Peaks' first season to the second week of July. We want to jump into that without any potential for interruptions, therefore we will be putting a pause on the Watchcast for the last week of June and the first week of July. But between now and then that means you still get three more Watchcasts, and for that slate we've decided to pluck some movies from the David Lynch category that almost won the poll last month. We'll be opening with Blue Velvet, and closing with Wild at Heart, but that leaves one more movie, and we'd like you, the voting body of our patronage, to select it. These are your three choices.

Eraserhead (1977)

Lynch's first feature is a dystopic, industrial nightmare born largely out of his time living in a particularly dangerous part of Philadelphia with his first wife and child. As surreal and off-putting as Lynch's later works got, I'm not sure anything he's made is a more pure distillation of the visuals and themes that became his signatures than this. I've only seen this once, and it was ages ago, but there are a handful of shots in this movie that are permanently seared into my brain chemistry.

The Elephant Man (1980)

While most people understand Lynch to be a filmmaker most interested in making surreal, off-kilter pictures, he occasionally makes fairly straightforward movies, too! The Elephant Man, which is a true-ish biopic about Joseph Merrick, and features two stellar performances from both Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt. Another one I haven't seen in a long time, but I remember loving it.

Dune (1984)

Generally considered Lynch's only major flop and the only film in his catalog he's more or less disowned, Dune is, in its own extremely peculiar way, deeply fascinating. From a visual perspective, it's a level of weird spectacle that's far beyond whatever "we want our own Star Wars" aspirations its producers had. It's got an incredible cast that, by and large, is absolutely going for whatever the hell it is this movie is striving for. And from a storytelling perspective? Well, let's just say there's a good reason the more recent Dune adaptations split that first book into two movies. Still, despite this movie's myriad problems, it's a captivating watch, and was a regular staple of my household growing up. My mom was a big fan of the Dune books, and as much as she complained about all the things wrong with this movie, she still had sincere appreciation for what it was trying to do, as do I.

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And those are your choices! You've got until Thursday to vote, and we'll post the full schedule for the month this Friday. Happy voting!