David Lynch famously abhorred explaining himself. “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” the director once said of his esoteric debut feature, during a 2007 interview. When asked to elaborate, he replied, smiling: “No, I won’t.” The clip, which tends to make the rounds on the internet every few months, demonstrates—without actually stating—everything that anyone ought to know about the late auteur’s oblique body of work: The viewing experience itself matters much more than where the story is going, let alone what it’s “about.”

Twin Peaks was perhaps Lynch’s most robust example of this general philosophy—and revisiting the series after the director’s death last week reinforces just how effective his approach continues to be. The show, which premiered in 1990 and has since grown a cult audience, embraced many of linear television’s conventions while simultaneously defying them as often as possible. Part murder mystery, part soap opera with an urban-legend flair, Twin Peaks begins with a resident of the titular fictional Washington town discovering the dead body of a local high-school student, Laura Palmer. From there, it deliberately layers on the kitsch while gradually revealing the cosmic nightmare lurking at the small town’s center.

But Twin Peaks’ many aficionados know that this synopsis belies its true genius. Lynch and his co-creator, Mark Frost, drew on the director’s affection for both the eldritch and the ordinary to conceive this singular affair, making great use of Lynch’s ability to balance these two discordant modes. Over the course of his career, it could sometimes seem easy to take his knack for stylistic cacophony for granted—but even now, Twin Peaks’ unknowability feels appealingly distinct.

The show’s arc follows an otherworldly battle between good and evil, ostensibly a familiar setup. But every character involved has a charmingly eccentric quirk—an eye patch, an obsession with drapes, an ever-present log, an affinity for doughnuts and cherry pie. The town sheriff shares a name with a former U.S. president. The local psychiatrist displays his collection of cocktail umbrellas. The FBI agent assigned to the Laura Palmer case, Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is as eager to solve the puzzle of her death as he is to learn what kind of lovely trees mark the entrance to the town. (They’re Douglas firs.) These characters contribute to the overall peculiar tone, emphasizing that viewers shouldn’t expect anything to be straightforward or easy to predict.

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

Audiences flocked to the show in its first season, attracted to its central premise. They were captivated by what they assumed were promised answers to the question that became Twin Peaks’ unofficial catchphrase: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” But that reveal came less than halfway into the second season—much earlier than intended, because of network pressure, according to Frost. What should have been a climactic moment instead felt, to many fans, disappointingly abrupt, as if Lynch and Frost had tossed out the truth about the teenager’s murder as an afterthought. The ratings started to decline, and viewers considered whether to keep watching Twin Peaks: Now that the show had wrapped up its biggest subplot, what was the point in watching the rest of its strange, seemingly disjointed storylines unfold over the remainder of the season?

The answer to that—and what actually made Twin Peaks so compelling, beyond its core mystery—lay in Lynch’s rejection of cut-and-dried solutions. Like all of the director’s most memorable settings, the show’s world abided by something closer to dream logic than any earthly science, obfuscating even the most integral developments. Viewers learned that what happened to Laura was a brutal act of violence, one that lacked an easy explanation; the series instead offered both a mundane and a supernatural reason for her murder. Yet after Agent Cooper named Laura’s killer and illuminated the dark forces converging on the town, viewers unfamiliar with the director’s work may have found it hard to imagine where else the show could go. What followed the presumed conclusion of Laura’s thread were 15 more episodes that tracked the affairs and schemes of everyone else in the town—instead of investigating, more linearly, the remaining secrets surrounding the murder. Mainstream audiences may not have always been ready for the task of keeping up with him, but Lynch’s desire to make these swerves is essential to the continued potency of his art.

[Read: What David Lynch knew about the weather]

Twin Peaks expresses the key duality to Lynch’s work many times over. The director enjoyed having it both ways when it came to narrative comprehension: He would break down some secrets while keeping others, giving his viewers just enough to make sense of what was happening while still leaving room to ponder the deeper meanings. Lynch was a transcendentalist who saw the innate power in the goodness of people, and a surrealist who endeavored to depict both the horror of violence and the electrifying fear of the unfamiliar. In Twin Peaks, he’d play up the Pacific Northwest community’s folksy allure in one instant, then transfix viewers by showing a demonic serial killer inching toward the camera in the next. The director refused to commit to any one truth or mood, allowing for—and encouraging—myriad understandings. He knew that within ambiguity often lay excitement.

After ending on a startlingly inconclusive note in 1991, Twin Peaks returned in 2017 to extend the story for one more season. Yet audiences who’d hoped for a traditional ending were again denied one. Again, Lynch seemed to be imploring them to stop seeking clarity and embrace the moments whose overarching connections are far less obvious. What mattered to him, it appears, was the experience itself: the feelings they evoked, the uncanny images whose significance were difficult to parse yet impossible to forget. David Lynch didn’t want to leave his viewers with an interpretation, but with something more visceral—like the taste of cherry pie and a cup of hot coffee, black as midnight on a moonless night.

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.

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.

The visionary director's belief in American beauty and horror being two sides of the same coin was perfected in the iconic 1990 TV series.

Lynch won acclaim for his strange and dreamlike sequences and was honoured with a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2019.

The Oscar-nominated writer and filmmaker is famous for the film Mulholland Drive and the TV series Twin Peaks.