Long before I ever saw any of his movies, David Lynch was in my dreams.

I had insomnia as a kid. Whether it was caused by the creeping depression that had begun to manifest in my mind, crouched Bob-like at the edge of the bed, or the paralyzing fear of our house being broken into (thanks Chris Columbus and John Hughes), weeks went by in the third and fourth grade where it felt like I didn’t sleep a wink.

My mom had an idea. Maybe listening to music would help. This is how I was introduced to Angelo Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks.

I get what she was thinking. The opening track (“Twin Peaks Theme”) is a gentle nocturnal lullaby, with its soothing organs and swooning synths swirling around a reverb-drenched guitar sample. If the whole album was like that, I would have drifted into a blissful sleep with ease.

But track two is “Laura Palmer’s Theme.”

To this day, the opening synth note may be the most ominous thing I’ve ever heard.

I remember the eerie glow of the CD player display illuminating the room. I had crossed into a surreal, nightmare world. The floor assumed a black and white chevron pattern. A claustrophobic panic seized my throat; I tried to speak: eht sdrow emac tuo sdrawkcab.

But then…

“All of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did.”

If that opening synth note was hell, then the endless piano ascent that occurs a minute and a half into the track was heaven. It was as beautiful as the opening had been ominous.

As I fell into a dream, the darkness returned. But I felt safe.

It wasn’t until years later that I watched Twin Peaks for the first time (via the original 2001 season one box set; I ordered the pilot episode on a region 2 disc off of eBay). If you’re from the Pacific Northwest, it’s impossible not to fall under the show’s spell. It’s the only piece of art that I’ve ever come across that captures the specific spookiness of the region. Growing up, we lived less than an hour away from the real town where the show was filmed, near Snoqualmie Falls in Washington state, and visited many times. Despite what they said on Blank Check, the pie was fucking delicious.

I subjected my high school girlfriend to a New Year’s Eve screening of Eraserhead (I owned a copy of the 2000 Absurda box set sold from Lynch’s personal website). My brother brought a pizza.

In my first apartment, my partner at the time and I hosted Twin Peaks nights, complete with homemade cherry pie (and damn fine coffee, naturally). The parties petered out midway through season two (when David Lynch’s name stopped appearing in the “Directed by” credits and the show, infamously, fell off a cliff).

In my early twenties, I took a film class in Seattle where one of the assignments was to storyboard a sequence from a movie. I chose the opening of Blue Velvet. I still think it is neck and neck (or maybe ear and ear) with the “putting on the glasses” sequence from They Live as the ultimate visual metaphor for the dark rot at the heart of the American dream.

For years, YEARS, while attending community college, I ate McDonalds Filet-O-Fish with a chocolate shake for lunch. Why? Because on a hidden special feature on the original Blue Velvet DVD David Lynch said that’s what he ate for lunch.1

In 2007, David Lynch did a signing at Scarecrow Video in Seattle. He sat upstairs, smoking like a chimney. A friend and I braved the miasma of smoke and bought a bag of coffee from him, as well as a DVD collection of his short films. Later that evening, we went to see a screening of Inland Empire he introduced that began with a violinist playing what, to my young and impressionable ears, seemed like nothing but caterwauling noise. The movie was similarly bizarre and inscrutable. I loved it anyway.

During the pandemic, my partner and I watched Twin Peaks: The Return. I didn’t watch it when it originally aired, due entirely to not having Showtime. It was gloriously insane, maddeningly perverse, bewildering, and, ultimately, transcendent. Dale Cooper split into two doppelgängers, one pure evil and the other sublimely goofy? This is why we love David Lynch. A legacy sequel without a shred of shameless nostalgia? This is why we love David Lynch. The return of David Bowie’s FBI Agent Phillip Jeffries as a German expressionist tea kettle? This is why we love David Lynch.

It’s been nearly thirty years since I tried to fall asleep to the Twin Peaks soundtrack as a child insomniac. Instead of living an hour away from the real Twin Peaks, I now live two hours away from the real life Lumberton (where Blue Velvet takes place, Wilmington, NC). I guess my subconscious knows I need the dream worlds of David Lynch nearby.

This is all to say: David Lynch is, was, and always will be, one of the most formative filmmakers of my lifetime. He was beyond idiosyncratic: he was unapologetically weird as fuck. But it was never weirdness for weirdness’s sake. He was a master not only of visions—he painted with light, cameras, and actors—but of sounds, too. He created in Laura Palmer one of the most fascinating (and tragic) characters of all time. Twin Peaks changed an entire medium, forever. His movies were unforgettable. They could be hard to watch sometimes, but only because they were so viscerally emotional. He meditated with the Beatles. He was a true artist. He taught me there was beauty in the darkness, you just had to wait for it.