Ben:  "We've laid in a gala reception for your fair-haired boys tonight.  All of Twin Peaks' best and brightest."

Jerry: "We're holding it in a phone booth?"

 Less surreal, more of a fixed narrative perspective.

I don't really get your question Megs?: It's more like a statement, or a half finished thought?

I'm reluctant to disagree with someone who has the good taste to put Scott Walker in their avatar, but Blue Velvet is certainly inferior to all of them.

Blue Velvet has some great moments but also some deeply embarrassing ones, and overall it was a slightly clunky attempt to marry Lynch's trademark weird mood with mainstream cinema. I think it took until Lost Highway before Lynch managed to fully recapture the awesome brilliance of Eraserhead.
 

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I haven't found anything deeply embarrassing in Blue Velvet. There are some clunkers in the dialogue, both in the writing and the delivery, and Frank Booth is more ridiculous than frightening.
Lost Highway has some problems, most obviously with the soundtrack which only brings to mind the Kids in the hall skit "He's hip, he's cool, he's 45".

Blue Velvet is simply his most consistently good movie.

And it's a little interesting that you bring up the marriage attempt with mainstream cinema since I've always considered Blue Velvet as the "meanwhile, in another part of town" version of John Waters' Polyester.

I've always taken both the examples you cite as intended to be deliberately ironic and never intended to be anything other than hokey.  Come on, this is Lynch 101 here, isn't the fact it's not a real robin a clear indication that writer/director is fully aware that the "American Dream" is just that, a dream not a reality for most people?

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 I don't think the angel scene in FWWM is meant to be ironic, but I agree that the robin and good witch are likely meant to be ironic. The Blue Velvet ending scene works because it is a parallel with the beginning of the film's classic Lynch darkness dwelling under the surface of the American homes. But what about the ending of Wild at Heart? What does he mean there?

Sometimes it seems too easy to hedge one's bets with the suggestion that one's actually being 'ironic', and thereby denying criticism that way.

Wow, these quotes are like Russian Dolls!

I wasn't hedging my bets when I said 'ironic' (are the inverted commas here tautological?) Sandy's dream is ironic in the way it is written and performed and shot in front of the illuminated stained glass windows of the church and the organ swell in Badalamenti’s score; this is an overegged pudding and something clearly not to be taken literally but recognised as a massive exaggeration.

The robin is clearly mechanical, albeit probably a stuffed real live robin at one point, it is obviously not a living robin in the shot (and it so easily could have been) - Lynch speaks coyly about this, as is his trademark approach, but it's pretty apparent that he intended for us the audience to realise that the bird is not the genuine article and draw our conclusions as to why from it.

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 No, when I said about hedging your bets through irony, I was accusing Lynch or any kind of artist of that, not you. What I meant was you can overegg something slightly even if it's meant to be sincere and then if anyone criticises it's 'hokiness' then you can say you were actually being ironic. I'm not saying that's what Lynch does but it's easier than being honest and sincere. Also, I'm not so sure all of those examples are not in fact sincere. Was the 'Just You and I' scene in TP ironic? I don't think so. Lynch can just be very treacly when he's dealing with love scenes and such. And that's a good thing in my book. If Lynch was too knowing with his portrayals of Americana and cherry pie and a sheriff named Harry S Truman, then it just wouldn't work. He has to be on their side.

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For a contrast, I completely disagree 

It's actually his trademark for me, though the underrated one - Lynch in most of his films goes a step further than just showing the dark side and the horror. He really believes in goodness and while more or less undisputably he has achieved some mastery in showing hell, he doesn't stop there, for which thanks goodness.

The bright side of life may be treated with irony here and there - although I'd argue that Blue Velvet's clean lawns and merry firemen are not meant to be the real goodness, it's rather a fake make-up of the ritten inside - but nevertheless it is there. The only films where I can't really find it, are Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but is it just by accident that it was between these two films that he made Straight Story?

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Bobi 1 Kenobi

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