David Lynch is gone; he died Wednesday at the age of  seventy-eight, bringing one of the strangest careers in American film to an end and leaving the rest of us to try to reach a conclusion as to what it all meant.

He never made a western. He never made a romcom or a workplace comedy. He never made a “prestige” period picture. He never made a buddy movie or an action movie or a heist movie or a (straightforward) crime movie. Not for him was getting hold of a franchise and riding it until it died of thirst in the desert; he wasn’t interested in making Mission Impossible 6 and 7/8. The only things he made were David Lynch movies (as the producers of Dune found to their dismay), and those were about as far out of the mainstream of American cinematic entertainment as it is possible to get and still be permitted within the city limits of Hollywood.

I resist calling him an “experimental filmmaker” — though there is a grain of truth in the description (in the effect of his work more than in its intent) — because I don’t think he was experimenting at all; I think he had a cement-solid vision of what film was and what it could do, and he knew precisely what he was up to every single minute.

For much of the past fifty years, people have spent countless hours burning up mental calories trying to “figure out” Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway, which seems to me to be a waste of time (though there are worse things to do with your idle hours). David Lynch’s films aren’t Sudokus, nor are they housing tract prospectuses or blueprints for can openers or toaster ovens; they’re dreams, and if his career illustrates anything, it’s how literal and flatfooted the vast majority of films are, and how very few filmmakers utilize to any degree the extraordinary power of the medium to dissolve and reconfigure the walls of reality. (In this a goof like Ed Wood beats most of today’s A-List directors, though Wood’s surrealism was the result of ineptness rather than art.)

Lynch’s most puzzling visions stubbornly resist dissection or definitive explanation, but most of the difficulty results from seeing them as puzzles in the first place. Instead, they’re spiritual weather reports; David Lynch was a meteorologist of the soul, and though he was American to the core, his movies have more in common with European films like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad or Ingemar Bergman’s Persona or Hour of the Wolf than they do with the more commercial work of his American contemporaries.

The first Lynch film I saw was The Elephant Man (1980), which was (along with 1999’s The Straight Story) as “normal” a movie as he ever made. Even then, though, I knew that this was about as far from being a conventional, heartwarming, “disease-of-the-week” weepie as you could get. The difference becomes clear when you compare the film to the box-office winners of 1980 and imagine how the directors of The Empire Strikes Back, Private Benjamin, 9 to 5, or Coal Miner’s Daughter would have handled the story of John Merrick.

Not everyone responded positively to Lynch’s oblique, uncompromisingly interior approach, especially at first. It royally ticked off Roger Ebert, for instance, who was presumably upset that The Elephant Man wasn’t the sort of thing Sydney Pollack would have given us. Ebert also hated Wild at Heart (1990), Lynch’s off-kilter, violent, Wizard of Oz-inflected love story, though how the man who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls could disdain “sophomoric humor” or criticize anyone for indulging in the “cop-out” of “pop satire” is beyond me.

As time went by, though, Lynch gathered more and more approval, but many critics praised him because of the attack they believed he was mounting on the values of what used to be called “Middle America.” What else could a movie like Blue Velvet be but a savage repudiation, an unqualified exposure of the wormy rot underneath the shiny linoleum?

However, in seeing Lynch as an unqualified celebrator of subversion, these critics were missing half the boat. Lynch didn’t believe that the “real truth” of the world was a hidden corruption that was bound to come out sooner or later and overwhelm everything, or that the scrubbed, brightly-polished surface of “normality” was nothing but a lie or a hypocritical sham.

He believed in the reality and power of both the decency and the corruption. You cannot accuse David Lynch of cynicism (Ebert’s mistake), but he was certainly as Manichean as they come, seeing as he did a world poised on the razor’s-edge between darkness and light, with each constantly trying to encroach on the other’s domain. It’s his acknowledgement of both aspects of life and his rapt love of their battle, and his belief that the balance between them is subject to the merest breath, that make him such a complex — and divisive — artist.

Certainly, a man who could make both Blue Velvet, in which the placid surfaces of ordinary life conceal a subterranean hell of twisted desire and violence, and The Straight Story, where the only perversion is the decision to ride a lawn mower across the state to visit an estranged brother, is a one-of-a-kind visionary. Those two films may be Lynch’s most emblematic ones, and they are not opposites, as may appear at first glance; they are fraternal twins, one light, one dark, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder and hand-in-hand. That they both issued from the same mind and are the products of the same sensibility may be the most disturbing thing of all — they are, in fact, both the work of an Eagle Scout.

He is irreplaceable. We have other great directors — Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, to name just a few. But even the most adventuresome of them rarely do more than occasionally edge a toe into the territory that David Lynch spent his whole career traversing from corner to corner. He was fearlessly committed to going ever farther, digging ever deeper. He was like a legendary explorer, again and again plunging into trackless, unknown territory where anything might happen. Every film was a Lewis and Clark expedition into the wild unconscious, and the reports he brought back from those brave forays into the void revealed unbelievable terrors and awe-inspiring beauties.

Probably like many others, when I heard of Lynch’s death the first film I though of was Eraserhead. Back in the Pleistocene (the early 1980’s, that is), if you heard about an interesting movie and wanted to see it, you pretty much had only one recourse — your local video store, and so I rented a VHS cassette of Eraserhead from the Blockbuster down the street. Then, late one night, while my wife slept peacefully in our bedroom, I turned off the lights in my living room, put the movie in the player, and was instantly plunged into an eerie, repulsive, frightening, baffling, disorienting world that was also undeniably comic and even, at times, darkly beautiful. I was clearly watching something that was not made for me — or against me, for that matter. It wasn’t made with reference to me at all, or to anyone or anything else in the world. It was wholly itself, and came to me like an artifact from another universe.

No movie has ever given me the creeps like Eraserhead did — or made me think like it did. When it was over, I sat alone in the darkness and wondered what the hell had just happened.

Old movie posters often used to be emblazoned with a cheesy boast — “Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before!!” The silly slogan came true in Eraserhead; it came true again and again in everything that the enormously gifted, magnificently weird, profoundly divided David Lynch gave us. I’m sorry that he is gone, but I’m so grateful that he was here. There was only one of him, and considering the disquieting nature of his unique vision, I’m glad for that, too. I can only take so many nights like the one when I watched Eraserhead.

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Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was A Singular Success: Fat City