Some artists are so visionary, so boldly original, and their work has such raw and lasting magic that it's hard to imagine a world without them. David Lynch, who died this week at the age of 78, was one of those artists. The name David Lynch (simple yet ironic) conjures up images not just of a series of immortal films but of a higher imaginary universe: a dark, surreal theme park , where dreams can become reality and reality feels like a dream.

Lynch reinvented cinema in his fearless way, allowing the native avant-garde ecstasy of his mind to bloom into an aesthetic that turned Hollywood tropes on their head. My first exposure to Lynch films was in 1977, when I was in college and one of our campus film societies was inspired to place a giant image of the protagonist of Eraserhead on the backdrop of its timeline. That picture hung on my wall throughout the semester; that's all we knew about the film. Finally, the night of Eraserhead’s release arrived. The auditorium was packed and to say the film lived up to the poster would be an understatement. The soundtrack alone, with its mix of hisses, clangs and roars, is mesmerizing. These images—Henry and his rubber hair, the monster baby, the lady in the radiator—were all born out of some outrageous pretzel logic nightmare that somehow became your nightmare.

And yet...it's still gripping. It tells a story that pulls you in at every hallucinatory turn in a way that walls of sanity close in on you. Eraserhead was a midnight sensation in New York, but if you compare it to all the other legendary midnight movies, they all feel like they're straight out of that era. And Lynch staged Eraserhead with a timeless grit, so if you watch it now it doesn't look like some outdated horror extravaganza from the '70s. It’s as timeless as Psycho or a canvas by Dali or Bosch.

How would you reenact Eraserhead, the most realistic dream movie ever made? Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) is an elegantly restrained classic drama of body horror and tragic humanity; it was an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film that was entirely his own. He then surpassed himself, and all other filmmakers of the time, with the film-noir mad genius Blue Velvet (1986). Then there was the creepy soap opera Twin Peaks (released in 1990). "The Story of Integrity" (1999) presents a topsy-turvy, honest look at American health. "Vertigo" - Hollywood's nightmare "Mulholland Drive" (2001). Plus drawing, video, cartoons, meditation…

David Lynch is a radical whose films fill the screen and are as moving as gorgeous, disturbing paintings. Yet he's also a natural storyteller who wants to immerse you in the moment and make you forget yourself, with the same kind of immersion that cinema imposed in the days of the studio system. When Lynch was hired by Mel Brooks' production company to direct The Elephant Man, it wasn't surprising to see him imagine John Merrick as an awe-inspiring clinical horror, turning disfigurement into poetry. Surprisingly, he turned out to be a master storyteller. He knew that telling stories and casting spells were actually the same thing.

Even though 1984's Dune was a commercial and artistic failure, I'd say Lynch made the right choice to direct it. Science fiction spectacle has become the order of the day. It makes sense for him to give it a try. You could say he exploited the film's failures in an inspired way. After signing on to produce a blockbuster film and adapting someone else's material, he's hitting his stride with a newfound "never again" purity.

I still consider "Blue Velvet" to be Lynch's greatest masterpiece, coming right after "Dune" and emerging directly from the depths of his disturbing imagination. It's almost impossible to describe how disturbing audiences felt in 1986 with the image of Frank Booth, a maniac obsessed with drugs, rage and fetishes. Yet the film is a thriller, a romantic noir with a postmodern Hitchcockian power that turns the hero's voyeurism into the audience's.

I think Blue Velvet, besides being the greatest movie of the 1980s, is also the most important movie of that decade because it started the independent film revolution. Yes, this was all supposed to happen three years later, along with "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" and Harvey Weinstein and all. But it was "Blue Velvet" (with a little help from "Blood Simple") that really reinvented indie cinema as a fractured version of old Hollywood left to be torn apart. You could make a similar claim for "Twin Peaks," a film in which Lynch dared to bring the vision of "Blue Velvet" to the small screen, effectively ushering in a new golden age of television. It shows you what can be done.

By then, Lynch was already a celebrity, his image brightened in the second half of the '80s by his romantic partnership with his fearless co-star Isabella Rossellini in "Blue Velvet." One of Lynch's main inspirations since then has been his instinct, or perhaps playful perversion, to see his life as a work of art.

He was never one to over-explain his films, but he created a myth about himself that explained a lot: the all-American boy born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, who grew up in the 1950s , discovering the legendary legalism. A time that was both comforting (on the surface) and terrifying (internally); he went to art school in Philadelphia, experienced the city as a bombed-out hell, and transformed it into the underbelly of his imagination He spent five years working on Eraserhead, shooting the black-and-white magical hell scenes at AFI Studios in Los Angeles, but never revealed how he created the sickly image of the monster baby (which foreshadowed the creature in Alien) ); he talked about going to Bob's Big in Los Angeles every day Boy, drinks coffee and milkshakes there because he feels safe enough to let his mind wander; he dresses like a downtown dude, with a shirt buttoned to his Adam's apple and wavy hair hair, interspersing his speeches with awe-inspiring aphorisms that made him sound like a broken Jimmy Stewart; he became a believer in Transcendental Meditation because it was his other safe space in the new '50s; Not that anyone has ever shot a foot of film.

Film critics regarded "Mulholland Drive", released in 2001, as Lynch's greatest work. While I do think this movie is a miracle, I've never shared its full perspective. I think critics were too fond of the way "Mulholland Drive" deconstructed itself. To me, the film's themes have a more shocking audacity in "Blue Velvet." This reflects something that has become more evident in Lynch's work over time - his tendency to reuse themes, moods and motifs. This first came up in "Wild at Heart," a movie I didn't particularly like (I found it weakened by Nicolas Cage's overly stylized overacting). You can also feel it in the clipped video wreckage of Lost Highway and Inland Empire. At the same time, Lynch continued to push himself. His 2017 revival of Twin Peaks was some of the craziest, most audacious stuff on TV.

In what's arguably the quintessential scene of Lynch's career, Dean Stockwell looks like some kind of crazy gangster clown holding up an industrial work light like a microphone in "Blue Velvet." on his rouged face and lip synced to Roy Orbison's "In." dream. "The lyrics are like this: "In the dream, I walk with you/In the dream, I talk to you/In the dream you are mine, always/We are together in the dream. As the film will reveal, these words embody the perspective of Frank Booth, a drug-addled sadomasochistic psychopath played with terrifying talent by Dennis Hopper, who in the film of Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) The seeds of his own darkness. Yet these lyrics might also be speaking for David Lynch. His films are dreams that speak to us and travel with us in a trembling and unforgettable way. Us. Now that he is gone, I want to say to him: Rest in peace and dream.