Theres a scene in the Twin Peaks pilot that starts with the normal, humdrum, boring rhythms of everyday life. Were in a high school, where a schoolgirl sneaks a smoke, a boy is called to the principals office, attendance is being taken in a classroom. But then a police officer steps into the class and whispers to the teacher. Suddenly, a scream is heard, and outside the window a student can be seen running across the courtyard. The teacher is holding back tears. Theres going to be an announcement. And then David Lynch trains his camera on the empty seat in the middle of the class, as two students look at each other across the room and realize all at once that their friend Laura Palmer is dead.Lynch was always good about recording the surface-level details of life, but its because he couldnt help but pick apart those details in his work according to Lynch, always, just always, there was something lurking beneath the surface that was just not right. In many ways, that Twin Peaks moment is the definitive David Lynch scene because of how simply and subtly it establishes the thematic throughline of his career. But then again, its also very much not the definitive David Lynch scene because he had so many moments his fans could point to over the span of his 40-plus years of making movies, TV, and art. Ask any coffee-drinking, weather-report-watching, card-carrying Lynch fan and youll likely get a completely different response on the matter.When you cant quite put your finger on whats amiss, it may as well be 'Lynchian.' Its that unnerving, dream-like quality that made David Lynch a legend.And this is the heart of what is one of the most difficult things to accept about his passing for us fans. Here was an artist who had such a singular voice, but whose appeal lies in different places for everybody.There are few who can claim to be deserving of a brand-new adjective. Everybody has their style, their trademarks, and there is no shortage of films that have been described as Spielbergian or Scorsese-ish, but that misses the point. Those always describe something specific in the lighting, for instance, or subject matter. But then theres Kafkaesque, which can be applied to damn near anything thats just really unpleasant and disorienting. Its a bigger term than the specifics of the work that coined it, and it is to this exclusive club that Lynchian belongs.When you cant quite put your finger on whats amiss, it may as well be Lynchian. Its that unnerving, dream-like quality that made David Lynch a legend, and his status as such isnt likely to change.Watching Lynchs midnight movie classic Eraserhead was something of a rite of passage back when we were a budding film nerds, though little did one of us know that decades later his teenage son would be undertaking that same rite (with Dad right alongside him). But it wasnt just because I (Scott) was telling the kid that he had to watch Lynchs stuff. No, one day the kid and his girlfriend just started binging Twin Peaks by their own accord. (They were in the Windom Earle era of Season 2 at this point, God bless.)PlayTheres just always been something about the guys work that has made it timeless in an odd sort of way with odd perhaps being the applicable term. How else can one explain how when Twin Peaks: The Return finally happened in 2017, Lynch chose to give the little kid in the show a bedroom that looked like it belonged to a 10-year-old from 1956 with its cowboy trimmings and all? (Lynch, perhaps not coincidentally, wouldve been 10 in 1956.) Of course, that kid in The Return also happens to live in a really fucked-up world that only David Lynch could dream up, one where his father is some kind of clone from another dimension and where theres another, evil clone as well who practically punches his fist through a guys face at one point.The Return came at the height of the lets greenlight every nostalgia play we can think of boom in Hollywood, but Lynch of course took that greenlight and then did whatever he wanted with it. That included leaving the audience as high and dry as any in TV history by refusing to bring back the original Twin Peaks most important characters in any meaningful way. And why should he have? That wouldve been the most un-Lynchian thing he couldve done.Look at what happened when Lynch did play by the rules of the more conventional Hollywood game. His Dune is one of the most infamous misfires of the past half-century, but its also very specifically a David Lynch movie even when it was an Alan Smithee movie. The filmmaker was famously troubled by his experience making Dune a topic you can explore fully in our friend Max Evrys book, A Masterpiece in Disarray. And while the legend of Paul Atreides and the Fremen and the Harkonnens and all the rest of it is there in Lynchs version, its all peppered with imagery that couldve only come from the guy who a few years earlier gave us the most nauseating chicken dinner ever put on celluloid. I mean, who comes up with a cat/rat milking machine other than David Lynch? You can almost hear him now: Its the future, folks!PlayBut theres a beauty in Lynchs imagery as well, however weird or funny or disturbing or anachronistic it is. His second feature, The Elephant Man, is as close to Oscar bait as the guy ever came, but its also an extremely touching and lovely film that happens to be set in an extremely disquieting time and place in history, a world where sideshow freaks actually existed, where their mistreatment was very real and where a gentle soul like John Merrick didnt have a chance in the world. Until he did.Thats fucking Lynchian too, guys.Defining his work, pinning it down to genre or trope or any of those other boxes we try to use is a fruitless effort, but dammit if it isnt easy to pick a David Lynch movie out of a lineup. That was his magic. His film and TV work was dark and funny and dreamlike and surreal and very genuinely strange but in an organic way and a million other things that his admirers will be sure to highlight in the coming weeks, like were doing right now. One of our favorite things about his films is that he was obsessed with a world beneath the one we live in and pulling back the (sometimes quite literal) curtain to reveal whats lurking behind it.Take Blue Velvet, for instance. On one level its a pretty standard noir following an everyman becoming something of an amateur detective to follow clues and put away the bad guy. The setting is a Norman Rockwell painting, full of white picket fences and girls-next-door, but Kyle MacLachlans Jeffrey descends past that facade into the world of gas-huffing drug dealers and loungey lip-syncers that is anything but standard. Rooted in the veneer of a mid-century Americana thats plainly depicted as being not the whole truth at minimum, all of Lynchs work was tinged with a healthy dose of surrealism and wholly unconcerned with being grounded. Theres a great documentary digging into Lynchs relationship with The Wizard of Oz which follows that particular yellow brick road even further, but the point is the influences at work in his films, Blue Velvet included, are a set that simply doesnt exist anymore, and were not likely to see again.At this point in movie history, were effectively on our second or third generation of filmmakers inspired by the previous generations. In the beginning of cinema as an art form there were artists from other disciplines using film as their chosen medium. As more of the road stretched out behind us, so to speak, filmmakers wanted to make movies like the ones they grew up watching. Lynch of course is among those.But for as unique an artist as he was, at some point he stopped being a distinct collection of influences, and became the influence himself, and that is where we come back to the term Lynchian and why were likely to just never see the like of him again. Theres a moment in the middle of one of 2024s more unexpected hits, I Saw The TV Glow, where the protagonists find themselves at a bar listening to live music. The way the camera floats, the theatrical wardrobe of the singer, the red, strobing lights out of time with the cadence of the song its there to create an atmosphere and its as Lynchian a scene as weve gotten in some time. Jane Schoenbruns film trades in the type of surrealism familiar to Lynch fans and was in fact inspired by Twin Peaks. One of the great things about a rangey term like Lynchian is that you can see his influence across a wide array of films and filmmakers. Yorgos Lanthimos has a darkly comedic sensibility that peels back layers of polite society. Think about The Lobster, and how it pulls people out of the real world, sequestering them in a hotel where they have to find love or risk being turned into an animal. Its the absurd scrutiny of the everyday things we take for granted that reveals that Lynchian thing lurking under the surface. Robert Eggers The Lighthouse is an avant garde bit of nightmare, ditto Ari Asters Midsommar. Weve gotten David Robert Mitchells It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and Emerald Fennells Saltburn. Theres Richard Kellys Donnie Darko and another standout 2024 hit, Love Lies Bleeding from Rose Glass. Lynch is clearly on Tarantinos list of filmmakers to homage, and theres even fellow Dune director Denis Villeneuves pre-blockbuster stuff like Enemy or Maelstrom which have an otherworldly quality to them that owes a debt to David Lynch.David Lynch and Jack Nance on the set of Eraserhead.David Lynch might not be your favorite filmmaker, and maybe you havent seen all of his films or theyre just not your thing, but its important to recognize him as something of an end of an era. Like his films that invoke a bygone time only to explore the world just beyond our usual frame of view, his influence on today's and tomorrow's filmmakers is what he leaves behind. We, for one, will always be looking just under the surface hoping to find those Lynchian things lurking.Header photo by Stefania D'Alessandro/Getty Images