What is to be said of this man who has already, in his lifetime, been lauded as one of the best directors in cinema history? Something personal, perhaps. My first encounter with Lynch happened when I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old. The Elephant Man aired on broadcast TV a few years after its theatrical run; I think the year was 1983. I watched it with my late grandma, whom I fondly remember. The movie moved me deeply. It’s been more than 40 years since, but I have never seen it again during all this time, because the sad feeling I felt for the title character was seated so profoundly in my mind—the then mind of a child—that to revisit it as an adult would be a form of betrayal of this initial genuine impression.

Later, I would find out it would be a rare “normal” film of his: a slick biographical feature. Then, when I was perhaps 8, Dune came out in the cinema. I had not read the novel yet, but the world it opened up for me made me seek and devour the source material soon after the movie’s release. The concepts of “Zensunni” and the “Orange Catholic Bible” intrigued me more for their familiarity than the otherworldly context in which these were placed. Pretty much like Lynch’s movies. Yes, they are weird, but the most disturbing part about them is the familiarity in which this weirdness seemed to have been so deeply rooted.

Take Blue Velvet, his “return to form” after the studio films of The Elephant Man and Dune. David Foster Wallace would much later succinctly define the “Lynch Formula”: the unbelievably grotesque meets the unbelievably banal. One moment you find yourself in a serene Rockwellian setting; the next, you’re peering into a particularly bizarre hellish abyss.

Well, I’d talk more, but I need to go back to drawing.