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I note that every single American newspaper now has a headline calling David Lynch a "surrealist".
Surely his work was influenced by surrealist cinema, to some degree. Yeah, he was into dreams and the subconscious and symbolism and the like. So that's enough to make him a surrealist? Even if he never expressed himself any form of interest in the surrealist movement?
Indeed, Surrealism was a movement. It was not just a style or an aesthetics, but a movement which also had philosophical and political aims.
The movement maybe was not formal organization, but it had an inside and an outside. Bataille, Artaud, Ernst and Dalí were all expelled from the movement, if I don't remember wrong. Or rather expelled by André Breton, but such a verdict effectively meant that you were not a surrealist anymore: being a surrealist was being part of the surrealist movement. Which of course does not exist anymore. If it had existed, it would possibly expel David Lynch which had been a great thing for headlines now when he's dead. But there are no surrealists in the 21st century, just as there are no situationists.

What's even the point of necessarily bringing up an -ism when summing up Lynch's ouvre?