David Lynch is my favorite filmmaker, ever since I first encountered Twin Peaks on VHS as a high school student in 1999, which led to me seeking out the rest of his extraordinary body of work. Lynch’s paintings and his filmography contain worlds of opposites colliding together – beauty and ugliness, menace and comedy – often at the same time. Even though there are things in his work that are deeply strange and difficult to watch, there is also an attitude of almost childlike wonder towards the world and a meticulously observed appreciation of human behavior. Mel Brooks, who produced David Lynch’s second film The Elephant Man, sums it up best. Upon seeing Eraserhead for the first time, Brooks, interviewed for Lynch’s authorized biography/memoir Room to Dream, said that he loved the movie “because it’s all symbols, but it’s real.” Everything in Lynch’s work is there for a purpose, never “weird for weirds sake.”

Read more: 45 Years of David Lynch – Philadelphia Weekly