David Lynch's ten weirdest scenes, by film

Welp, it got weird.

It's a scientific fact that if you watch the canon of David Lynch's full-length films back-to-back, your eyeballs will not only melt, but David Lynch himself will somehow randomly appear to film your eyeballs melting. Fortunately, for safety's sake, there is a week of recovery time between each of the four films featured this month in the Mayan Theatre's David Lynch Series.

Nevertheless, because even limited exposure to a small dose of David Lynch can lead to horrible boils, we've compiled a primer for the uninitiated: the weirdest scenes of David Lynch's oeuvre, one from each film. You will not enjoy this.

Eraserhead
"The Pencil Factory"
The entirety of Eraserhead, Lynch's first film, is pretty much fucked up as hell, as well as largely incoherent. The pencil-factory scene is a case in point: Dude's head pops off and is replaced by a plaintively yelling worm-creature, head is then spit out of one factory and taken by a small child to another factory, where it is processed into pencil erasers. Or something. Hence the title, presumably.

The Elephant Man
"I Am Not an Elephant"
Although the sort-of-real-life story of the Elephant Man is seemingly a perfect one for David Lynch, if only by virtue of being inherently grotesque and unsettling, Lynch actually reined in considerably on the grotesque here -- perhaps because of first-studio-movie jitters. This scene, in which the Elephant Man tells off a crowd of hostile onlookers, is almost empowering. Still weird, though.

Dune
"Cocktail"
The 1984 Dune kind of blew -- even Lynch admits it, explaining that he was under persistent studio pressure to make an action movie in the typical action-movie vein. And this one is sort of that, in a weird, unsettling, awkward way, because the filmmaker is still David Lynch -- but not a good weird, unsettling, awkward way. Still, Lynch manages to get some pretty fucked-up shit in there, like this scene in which the villain drinks some sort of bug creature. And, yes, that is Sting.