My first exposure to David Lynch was around 1998. My dad was a huge movie buff, renting a stack of VHS tapes and DVDs at least once a week. His strategy for selecting films was an enigma to me. As soon as we entered the video store, I'd set off on my own to explore the aisles, mainly interested in finding out which new SNES, Genesis, and PlayStation games were available. On one of those many trips to rent videos, a Lynch film happened to make the cut.

My father mostly watched movies at night, and I often joined him, watching intently. Sometimes, I’d lie on the carpeted living room floor, wrapped in a blanket, keeping him company until I eventually fell asleep. When the films were rated R, I'd pretend to be sleeping, making sure he could see my closed eyes and partly open mouth. With me convincingly off in dreamland, it was showtime.

I probably saw no more than five minutes of Lost Highway's two-plus hour runtime before I fell asleep in earnest that night. However, the snippets I did catch stayed with me for over two decades. Vague memories of a first-person view drive down a dark, ominous highway that seemed to stretch on forever, accompanied by the haunting image of one of the creepiest looking Mofos I had ever seen: Robert Blake's "Mystery Man." These were not the comforting last images one wants to see before drifting off to sleep.

Fast-forward to the stay-at-home era of the pandemic. After passing up Jack Nance's intriguingly obscure portrait on movie nights for months, I clicked and finally streamed Eraserhead out of curiosity.

After experiencing the explosion of Lynch's mesmerizingly disorienting debut film, I was left grappling with the blurred vision, tinnitus, and confusion that followed. I'd been blown away by cinema before, but never had a film unsettled me like this. It felt like the stuff of unreal and seemingly nonsensical nightmares, yet somehow, it still made sense.

My attraction to Lynch's work wasn't immediate. But after fully processing Eraserhead and deciding to push the needle in again with Blue Velvet, the romance flourished.

Rewatching Lynch films with unsuspecting friends or recommending Eraserhead to them—"It was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films!" or "Hey, you like Broadway musicals, don't you? Well, Mel Brooks adored Eraserhead!"—has brought me a great deal of sadistic pleasure. I understand that Lynch's style is an acquired taste, but the process of acquiring it is half the fun. His oeuvre redefined what feature films can do both to and for audiences willing to embark on the journey.

Lynch was an avid painter and visual artist who turned to cinema because he wanted to make moving paintings. While this motive might seem clichéd if articulated by someone else, Lynch's sincerity made it resonate authentically. He embodied a sincere approach to expression and gave life to the platitude of creating art for art's sake. Today, such genuineness and sincerity are rare, either because studios, producers, and distributors are unwilling to back projects that don’t promise Marvel-type revenues or because this type of artist doesn't exist anymore. Consequently, watching a Lynch film, even before his passing, often evoked a sense of melancholy since it brought to the fore the realization that the era in which such unique and experimental films could be made and thrive had long since ended.

David Lynch had a profound love for Los Angeles. Through his art, music, films, and even weather reports, he chronicled and captured the essence of the city and its surrounding areas. As parts of L.A. tragically turn to ash, lives are uprooted, and the prospect of a city forever changed looms, his passing invites us to draw a metaphorical connection. Then again, that's likely too predictable an ending.