David Lynch died yesterday at the age of 78, after a career that made him perhaps the most consequential American art filmmaker in the history of the medium. But his singular voice extended far beyond cinema, into television, music, internet fame, coffee making, furniture design, transcendental meditation, and practically any other creative endeavor you can imagine. He was a brand, though a fiercely independent one: Beginning with his debut movie, Eraserhead, in 1977, Lynch became the rare kind of artist whose last name seemed to describe an entire genre. He established a style that offered an otherworldly reckoning with our way of life, incorporating classic Hollywood storytelling, pulpy romanticism, and abstract surrealism all at once.
Lynch’s canon was so tremendous that each of his many fans and acolytes likely had different entry points into it. There was the aggressive midnight-screening oddness of Eraserhead in the 1970s; the frightening mix of throwback folksiness and depraved sexuality in Blue Velvet in the 1980s; and the bizarre-but-incredible TV phenomenon that was Twin Peaks in the early 1990s. Others found him through 2001’s Mulholland Drive, a staggering collision of Hollywood dreamscapes, or 2017’s inimitable Twin Peaks: The Return, which exploded the form of “prestige television” that its predecessor had helped plant the seeds for. These are just a few of Lynch’s achievements in a body of work that spanned big-budget and micro-budget, highbrow and low. His output was also defined by his personal celebrity—a folksy, chain-smoking former Eagle Scout who produced art of high complexity while also rhapsodizing about the simple pleasures of eating a donut with a cup of coffee.
The first Lynch film I saw in a theater was Mulholland Drive, at the age of 15. A budding cinephile, I was only somewhat aware of the director’s titanic reputation and of the movie’s circuitous journey to the screen. (It was initially intended as a television pilot, a Twin Peaks successor that ABC ultimately rejected.) Mulholland Drive was an artistic thunderbolt like no other for me, and watching it for the first time is still probably the most transformative experience I’ve ever had in a cinema. I can palpably recall my terror during the early sequence at Winkie’s Diner, in which two men discuss a dream one had involving some ineffable monster out back, and the transfixing mystery of Club Silencio, one of Lynch’s many on-screen environments that seemed to have a foot in multiple realities. The film was at certain times a chilling representation of fear, trauma, and death, but at others hauntingly lovely and funny. It opened my eyes to what movies could be, beyond just the entertaining product they usually were.
[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]
Mulholland Drive resisted easy explanation, as did all of the director’s stories. But, boiled down, many had a sweet purity to them, involving battles of good and evil and harsh realities endured by pure spirits. The director had a charmed and normal childhood, by all accounts; he was born in Montana but moved all over the country as a kid, living in Washington, North Carolina, Idaho, and Virginia at various points. Still, he would later recall moments that punctured that idyll. “When I was little, my brother and I were outdoors late one night, and we saw a naked woman come walking down the street toward us in a dazed state, crying. I have never forgotten that moment,” he once told Roger Ebert, evoking an image that would serve as Blue Velvet’s centerpiece many years after the fact.
More adult life events inspired his first feature, however. A quiet, eccentric, ink-black comedy about a peculiar young man who works at a factory in an industrial dystopia, Eraserhead is plainly Lynch’s way of processing his life as an early parent in Philadelphia. Its protagonist struggles to raise a mutant creature while also dealing with nattering in-laws and a mundane job. Most theatergoers were likely to find the film off-putting—what with its clanking, abrasive soundtrack, beautifully cloying interludes of simple songs, and unabashedly nonnarrative strangeness. Eraserhead could have died in obscurity, but it became a cult-movie sensation instead, the kind that circulates among artsy gatherings, comic-book shops, and other underground scenes, as much of Lynch’s filmography now does.
The veteran comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks saw the movie and, somehow, it resonated with him. He then hired Lynch—over far more objectively qualified, well-known names—to direct a project that Brooks had been nurturing, The Elephant Man. It was a critical smash that landed several Oscar nominations, and Lynch’s industry ascension seemed set. His follow-up was the sci-fi epic Dune, an adaptation of the blockbuster Frank Herbert novel, for which Lynch claimed he had passed on Return of the Jedi. But it was an artistically compromised box-office failure; the director never made a big-budget film again. He instead found greater success once he’d swerved back to his more personal fascinations: His next film was the alternately astonishing and repellant Blue Velvet, a nasty noir fairytale of gangsters and abuse in a picture-perfect suburban town.
[Read: David Lynch's unfathomable masterpiece]
Lynch took many, many creative risks over the years, but Blue Velvet is the movie that perhaps best melded grim violence and white-picket-fence cheerfulness—a vision that came to characterize him in the public eye. The director continued to dig beneath idealism’s rot for the remainder of his career, and the 1990 premiere of Twin Peaks brought his worldview to a broader swath of viewers. Co-created by the writer Mark Frost, the ABC show was an uncanny soap opera, powered by a murder mystery that briefly captured the country’s imagination. Twin Peaks ran out of ratings steam quickly over the course of its initial, two-season run, but it’s since emerged as Lynch’s quintessential work. The series’ legacy was powered by both its empathy—the stark and sincere emotion the director could deploy so beautifully—and the way it transformed between various media over time. Twin Peaks evolved into a larger, decades-spanning project, encompassing the aggressively tragic and beautiful prequel film, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and the confounding, hilarious, and formally defiant sequel show, The Return, which premiered 25 years later.
In his later life, Lynch charged into the digital frontier in his typically singular fashion. He used grainy digital video cameras to shoot the bizarre California epic Inland Empire mostly on his own dime; he uploaded original, offbeat episodic projects and crudely animated cartoons exclusively for subscribers to his website. The director was an excellent marketer of himself, despite his preference for alienating themes and aesthetic choices: His trademark non-sequitur-filled humor and rambling sincerity connected both him and his oeuvre to generation after generation. Lynch, more than many of his peers, could expose audiences to the harshest, most discomforting imagery while also balefully commanding them to “fix their hearts or die.” If the American experience had a cinematic poet, it was him. The news that Lynch had left us was shocking only because it seemed that he’d be here with us forever.