David Lynch was America’s film poet

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, to television, music, Internet fame, coffee making, furniture design, transcendental meditation, and virtually any other creative endeavor you can imagine. He was a trademark, but a fiercely independent one: Beginning with his debut film, Eraser headin 1977, Lynch became that 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, thick romance and abstract surrealism all at once.

Lynch’s canon was so vast that each of his many fans and acolytes likely had different entry points into it. There was the aggressive midnight viewing weirdness Eraser head in the 1970s; the frightening mixture of recurrent folkliness and depraved sexuality in the Blue velvet in the 1980s; and the bizarre but incredible television phenomenon that was Twin Peaks in the early 1990s. Others found him through the 2001s Mulholland Drive, a dizzying collision of Hollywood dreamscapes, or 2017’s incomparables Twin Peaks: The Returnwhich exploded the kind of “prestige television” that its predecessor had helped plant. These are just a few of Lynch’s achievements in a body of work that spanned big budget and micro budget, high 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 movie I saw in a theater was Mulholland Driveat the age of 15. A budding cinephile, I was little aware of the director’s gargantuan reputation and the film’s rewritten journey to the screen. (It was originally intended as a TV pilot, a Twin Peaks successor which ABC ultimately rejected.) Mulholland Drive was an artistic lightning bolt like no other for me, and seeing it for the first time is still probably the most transformative experience I’ve ever had in a movie theater. I vividly remember my horror during the early sequence at Winkie’s Diner, where two men discuss a dream one had that involved some unspeakable monster in the back, and the transfiguring 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 times a harrowing depiction of fear, trauma and death, but at other times hauntingly delightful and funny. It opened my eyes to what films could be, beyond just the entertaining product they usually were.

Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television

Mulholland Drive resisted easy explanation, like all of the director’s stories. But, boiled down, many had a sweet purity about them that involved battles between good and evil and harsh realities endured by pure spirits. The director apparently had a charmed and normal childhood; he was born in Montana but moved across the country as a child, living in Washington, North Carolina, Idaho and Virginia at various times. Yet he would later recall moments that punctured that idyll. “When I was little, my brother and I were out late one night and we saw a naked woman walking down the street towards us in a daze and crying. I have never forgotten that moment,” he Roger Ebert once saidthat evokes an image that would serve as Blue velvet‘s centerpiece many years after.

However, several events in his adult life inspired his first feature. A quiet, eccentric, ink-black comedy about a peculiar young man working in a factory in an industrial dystopia, Eraser head is clearly 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 nagging in-laws and a mundane job. Most theatergoers would probably find the film off-putting—what with its tinny, abrasive soundtrack, beautifully labored interludes of simple songs, and unashamedly non-narrative weirdness. Eraser head could have died in obscurity, but it instead became a cult movie sensation, the kind that circulates among arty gatherings, comic book shops, and other underground scenes as much of Lynch’s filmography now does.

Veteran comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks saw the film and somehow it resonated with him. He then hired Lynch—over far more objectively qualified, well-known names—to lead a project that Brooks had nurtured, The Elephant Man. It was a critical smash, landing several Oscar nominations, and Lynch’s industry ascent seemed set. His follow-up was a sci-fi epic Dunean adaptation of the blockbuster Frank Herbert novel to which Lynch claimed he had moved on Return of the Jedi. But it was an artistically compromised box office; the director never made a big-budget film again. He was instead more successful when he had returned to his more personal fascinations: his next film was the alternately astonishing and repulsive Blue velveta nasty noir adventure of gangsters and abuse in a picturesque suburban town.

Read: David Lynch’s unfathomable masterpiece

Lynch took many, many creative risks over the years, but Blue velvet is the film that perhaps best united grim violence and hilarity with white picket fences – a vision that came to characterize him in public. The director continued to dig under the advice of idealism for the rest of his career, and the premiere in 1990 of Twin Peaks brought his worldview to a wider range of viewers. Co-written by writer Mark Frost, the ABC show was a creepy soap opera, driven by a murder mystery that briefly captured the nation’s imagination. Twin Peaks quickly ran out of ratings steam during its initial two-season run, but it has since emerged as Lynch’s seminal work. The show’s legacy was driven by both its empathy – the stark and sincere emotion that the director could so beautifully display – and the way it transformed between different mediums over time. Twin Peaks evolved into a larger, decades-spanning project that includes the aggressively tragic and beautiful prequel film, Fire Walk With Mein 1992, and the confusing, hilarious and formally defiant follow-up show, The returnwhich premiered 25 years later.

In his later life, Lynch stormed into the digital frontier in his typically singular fashion. He used grainy digital video cameras to film the bizarre Californian epic Inland Kingdom 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 in his own right, despite his preference for alienating themes and aesthetic choices: His trademark non-sequitur humor and wandering sincerity connected both him and his oeuvre to generation after generation. Lynch, more than many of his peers, could subject audiences to the harshest, most uncomfortable images while 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 only shocking because it seemed he would be with us forever.