“Now it’s dark.” The line famously uttered by Frank Booth, one of the most memorable villains in movie history, now somehow feels appropriate for the auteur behind “Blue Velvet.” The great American film director David Lynch has died at age 78. Last summer, Lynch revealed that he was diagnosed with emphysema, a chronic lung disease. He wasn’t surprised — he smoked all his life, and quite enjoyed it. But the news of his death struck a visceral nerve for many. The reactions were akin to those when David Bowie died in 2016, and it’s not surprising. Like Bowie, Lynch was sui generis. That kind of vision, talent, and creative gift cannot be imitated or replaced. He belongs in the Pantheon of the American cinema.

Lynch opened up the unsettling world of love, good, and evil; of dreams and nightmares, and human inability to see the difference between the two. His name is synonymous with “surrealism,” “macabre,” “strange.” In “Blue Velvet” (1986), we witnessed goodness, beauty, and perversion in a small fictional American town, Lumberton. Although he introduced Kyle MacLachlan in 1984 in his famously unsuccessful adaptation of “Dune,” it was in “Blue Velvet” that collaboration between the two men cemented. The same film also marked his collaboration with Laura Dern, who would go on to appear in Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Inland Empire” (2006), and later in “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017).

Other notable films included “Lost Highway” (1997) — an erotic, hallucinogenic jazz symphony. “Mulholland Drive” (2001) was a Hollywood dream that never stood a chance and turned quickly into a nightmare. Every film he made, even his more straightforward movies such as “The Elephant Man” (1980) or “The Straight Story” (1999), contained elements of singular vision. So much so that “Lynchian” is an adjective frequently deployed by movie critics.  

Born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, Lynch grew up surrounded by Americana. His father worked for the federal government, and the family moved a lot. Lynch ended up living in Washington State, Idaho, North Carolina, and Virginia. Before film, he studied painting, and he would continue to paint and experiment with different media concurrently with filmmaking.

He made his first short film, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)” in 1967, and his first feature-length film would come in 1977. “Eraserhead” introduced what would become Lynch’s hallmark — seemingly normal people, trying to live a good life, in abnormal circumstances, in a dream-like state.

It is almost impossible, and perhaps not fair or useful, to single out a work that represents the pinnacle of Lynch’s success. But as far as the importance and impact on the audience, it is “Twin Peaks” that has and will undoubtedly continue to seep into our lives as a representative of American consciousness. It transcended its cultural specificity, and somehow, its drama became relatable to people far away from America.

I first encountered “Twin Peaks” in my native Bosnia (then Yugoslavia). Despite being a communist country, we got plenty of American cinema and TV series that I could feast on, as I was deeply obsessed with everything relating to America. I never missed an episode, and like many, I was drawn to Agent Dale Cooper and the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. I found Lynch’s world strange but not uninviting. In fact, everything seemed to make sense, even half a world away — from “damn good coffee” to cherry pie to the Red Room and the Black Lodge. Everything moved languorously in a way I never saw before on film. It was a metaphysical mystery and a soap opera all at once, but its sentimentality was grounded in the unusual and odd. It was madness that often seemed familiar and made sense.

One of the biggest elements in “Twin Peaks” was the distinction between good and evil. This is what runs through all of Lynch’s work, and when he and Mark Frost made “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the evil and darkness were even more palpable than in the first season. Through Lynch’s eyes, our world was filled with hearts of darkness, and we desperately needed light.

Cynicism never had a place in Lynch’s work because he was genuinely concerned about the well-being of humanity. In his later years, he spoke publicly about his practice of transcendental meditation and founded the David Lynch Foundation, which provided help to veterans battling PTSD.

Despite the dark visions that seamlessly moved from Lynch’s mind to the screen, he had hope. It was always self-evident that he loved America, even if he showed places where the American Dream was often a nightmare. Dennis Hopper, who famously played Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet,” called Lynch “an American surrealist.”

The signifier “American” is inextricable from David Lynch’s surrealism. His films were of a time that never operated metaphysically rather than chronologically. Lynch’s constant allusions to 1950s America were both ironic and authentic. He never mocked these signifiers of an idealized America; he knew the comfort and peace these things brought us — and him.

American diners were a big part of this consciousness. In his book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006), Lynch reflects on one of his favorite L.A. diners, Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside Drive in Burbank: “I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

Diners cure alienation and hopelessness, and such an experience can only be found in America. Lynch expressed his creativity in such a unique way, offering a vision of America’s beauty and brutality.

Our world has lost a great artist in every sense of the word, a dark void not unlike those found in his films. But while it may seem dark now that Lynch is gone, we should always remember that in real life David Lynch was a good-humored man who always said, “Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole.”

Emina Melonic writes about culture, film, and books. Her work has been published in Claremont Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Age, and The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, among others. She’s currently writing a biography of Edward G. Robinson and a book on Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood years.