When I visited my friend Joe in Butte, Montana, in the summer of 2010, he explained the strangeness of some of the locals by offering the following: “Just remember, David Lynch is from Montana.”  All these years later, I’m not sure if that says more about Lynch, Montana or my friend Joe.  However, during all of my trips to that beautiful state, I have never not thought about that mercurial filmmaker, and how he may have been shaped by his early days there.

Lynch died this week at 78, following a rather difficult battle with lung cancer—no doubt brought on, as he freely admitted, due to his decades-long cigarette habit.  He faced down his disease with the same free-spiritedness with which he gazed at the Hollywood machine, with a lit smoke and that quizzical grin as if to say: “What are you gonna do?”

In an industry known for its oddballs, Lynch was perhaps the most famous of outsiders.  No other filmmaker in modern times was as singularly bizarre and difficult to pin down in his output.  “Eraserhead,” his first feature, was made on a small budget and became a darling of the midnight circuit.  Filmed entirely in black-and-white, it starred his early muse, Jack Nance, as a man inhabiting a strange environment with a not-quite-human child.  To label “Eraserhead” strange isn’t suitable; it exists on its own special plane of WTF.  There certainly was no getting it; you either took the ride or waited patiently back at the station to catch the bemused expression on your friends’ faces upon their return in the roller-coaster.

It was the first truly Lynchian film in a career that would put at the forefront the bizarre, the misshapen, the illogical and the mysterious,  the freaks, sometimes in body, nearly always in mind.  Perhaps this was why Mel Brooks tapped him to direct “The Elephant Man” in 1980.  Lynch made few films inside the Hollywood system, but “The Elephant Man” marked one of the few times when his artistic sensibilities were married to a conventional—if certainly unusual—narrative about an outsider.  Based loosely on historical events, Anthony Hopkins played a Victorian-era surgeon seeking to help a severely deformed man (John Hurt) lead a more normal life.  The film was nominated for five Oscars, including for Hurt in a bravura performance and two for Lynch for writing and directing (Brooks famously left his name off all marketing materials lest the public think the film a comedy.)

With those accolades to his name, it was natural Lynch would turn to a project that had tried and ultimately slipped up several earlier filmmakers: adapting Frank Herbert’s “Dune” for the big screen, featuring an all-star cast, snazzy special effects and a musical score by the band Toto.  As with nearly all of Lynch’s work, “Dune” was divisive, not least thanks to the many changes his team made to the source material.  The end result was incredibly ambitious, bloated, yet fascinating—an admirable failure that, forty-one years later, remains incredibly entertaining and endlessly watchable despite its many drawbacks.  Denis Villeneuve’s grandiose, two-part adaptation made this decade, as accomplished as it is, maybe more faithful to the letter and spirit of Herbert’s writing, but Lynch fashioned a curio of early-eighties B-movie filmmaking at A-level budgets  (it was produced by Dino de Laurentiis.)  “Dune” also was the first of Lynch’s works to star Kyle MacLachlan, who would later appear in “Blue Velvet” and, of course, “Twin Peaks” and its various spinoffs.

“Blue Velvet” may be Lynch’s most accessible film, an upside-down quasi-detective story that played in the suburban sandbox—and its seamy underbelly—that so fascinated Lynch.  MacLachlan starred alongside another of Lynch’s favorite thespians, Laura Dern, a truly out-there Dennis Hopper as a gangster with some rather unusual fetishes, and Lynch’s onetime romantic partner, Isabella Rosellini.  The result is enrapturing and enveloping, sexy and unsettling, violent yet ultimately hopeful—much of which could perhaps also be said of “Wild at Heart” (1990).  “Blue Velvet” earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination for directing.

As straightforward narratively as Lynch’s “Dune,” “Blue Velvet” and the magnificently minimalist “The Straight Story” (rated G and produced by Disney, no less) are, it was his penchant for the ultra-weird, the uncanny and the logic of dreams that ultimately became his signature.  Perhaps no director since Luis Buñuel was able to accomplish the impossible task of capturing the aesthetic of a dream narrative on screen.  Lynch’s obsession with crafting stories inside the funhouse mirror of the unconscious led to some of his greatest triumphs and most interesting failures.  The TV show “Twin Peaks” and its various expansion efforts—including one on Showtime as recently as 2017—drew a cult following.

The filmmaker went full Lynch in a trio of films where dream logic and narration were melded in a way only he could conjure.  “Lost Highway,” from 1997 was about a married couple played by Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette; halfway through Pullman’s character transforms into someone else played by Balthazar Getty, then changes back later.  Arquette plays two parts as well.  Narrative strands are explored and then dropped.  Surrealism and supernaturalism are ever-present.  The result was a headscratcher.  I still remember heading to a screening in West L.A. that spring of 1997 with a film school friend named Joe (not Montana Joe), where in the lobby the giant poster for “Lost Highway” proudly bore “Two Thumbs Down” from Siskel & Ebert.  Lynch knew his audience and was proud of being out.  I revisited “Lost Highway” a few years back, and it didn’t quite work as I remembered.  However, the experiment proved to be the launchpad for what was, arguably, Lynch’s masterpiece.

That was “Mulholland Drive,” from 2001.  What started as an abandoned TV project morphed into yet another Lynchian pretzel fantasy that on its surface was a Hollywood cautionary tale (sort of) that blended Lynch’s mania for the dark side of American life, the notion of the Freudian doppelganger and the glamour of the movies themselves.  “Mulholland Drive” fascinated audiences and critics alike, earned Lynch another Oscar nod, and it made a star of Australian Naomi Watts here in America.  “At last, his experiment doesn’t shatter the test tubes,” Roger Ebert enthused after previously tearing apart “Lost Highway.”  “The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.”

Lynch’s three-hour “Inland Empire” (2006) with Laura Dern tried the same surrealist approach but never quite landed.  Ever marching to his own beat, Lynch refused to allow “chapter stops” on the DVD edition: You watched it from start to finish or not at all.  His movie, his rules.

“Inland Empire” would turn out to be his final feature-length film, though he directed many music videos before and thereafter, as well as several episodes of the “Twin Peaks” revival—even appearing onscreen once again as his long-running character FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole.  His dialect was hard to define, no doubt a result of his peripatetic childhood spent in the Upper West, then near Washington, D.C., Washington state, North Carolina, and even Boston before he headed to Los Angeles full-time to pursue his career.

Lynch occasionally acted in other filmmakers’ projects, too, including the underrated “Lucky” from 2017, directed by the familiar character actor John Carroll Lynch (no relation) from “Fargo” and many other films.  During a promotional stop in D.C. to promote “Lucky,” I asked John Carroll Lynch about directing David Lynch, particularly as “Lucky” starred Henry Dean Stanton, who often appeared in David’s films.

“David was great. He came for Harry Dean because he loved Harry,” John told me.

When I asked him if David was ever perhaps tempted to offer John directing tips on the set of “Lucky,” John smiled and shared a rather telling anecdote from the set that demonstrated David knew when it wasn’t his turn at the megaphone.

“There was a moment where Harry was struggling with something, and Harry went, ‘Do you understand this, David? … And David turned to Harry and said, ‘It’s not my place to say, Harry.’” When he was writing and directing, however, it was David Lynch’s place to say.