Laura Palmer goes through hell in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me." Sheryl Lee, who plays Laura Palmer, goes through hell in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me." Even the audience goes through hell watching "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."

David Lynch's unrelenting 1992 horror film, a prequel to his "Twin Peaks" series, aimed to kill "Twin Peaks," which had been a television sensation just two years earlier. "Fire Walk With Me" famously starts off with a shot of static on a television set, and pulls back to reveal either an axe or a pipe — it's not clear which — being slammed into the top of the TV. As metaphors go, it wasn't subtle.

What follows is a brutal and difficult-to-watch descent into madness, chronicling the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, the homecoming queen whose dead body washes ashore at the beginning of the pilot episode of "Twin Peaks." It's as violent and nightmarish as anything Lynch ever committed to film, and bizarre even by the standards of an artist who was known for being bizarre. Without the context of the TV series, it's almost inscrutable; even with the context of the TV series, it's almost inscrutable.

But after more than two hours of sheer, utter darkness, there is light. Laura Palmer, who indeed meets her untimely end in the movie's final moments, is in a room surrounded by red curtains, and before her there's an angel. The angel is floating, and Laura is crying, a cry that turns into laughter as she's bathed in its light. She's safe from the abuse she endured in life, relieved of her pain, and she's unable to contain herself in the beauty of the angel's presence.

It takes a long time to get there, but Laura Palmer, and Sheryl Lee, and the audience are all finally free.

It's the first scene I thought about when news broke Thursday of the death of David Lynch, the captivating, visionary, impressionistic filmmaker who was known for his boundary pushing surrealism and dream logic explorations. Lynch is so singular that the word "Lynchian" was coined to describe anything that combines dark, cool moodiness along with a hint of the abstract. He brought weirdness to the masses, and he changed film forever.

Lynch died at age 78, just a few days shy of his 79th birthday, which would have been Monday. He announced last year that his lifelong love of cigarettes — he started smoking at the tender age of 8 — had caught up with him, and he was suffering from emphysema. He said he was homebound and would no longer be able to direct, which he later walked back and said he'd direct if he was able to do so remotely. He said he had no plans to retire.

For film fans, Lynch was a gateway, and he created a shorthand for fellow fans to identify each other by. A Lynch fan is a fellow outsider, who views life through a slightly cracked lens. Find a fellow "Twin Peaks" nut and it's a skeleton key to a different world, a world of Bookhouse Boys and Log Ladys and owls that are not what they seem, which is to say nothing of cherry pie and damn good coffee. Two "Twin Peaks" fans can go on and on about Windom Earle or the eternal question of "How's Annie?" and that's because of Lynch's worldview and how he made his fans see the world around them.

Lynch, who was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, made 10 feature films during the course of his 40-plus year career, starting with 1977's "Eraserhead" and ending with 2006's "Inland Empire." With Lynch you knew you were going to get some disturbing performances (see Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet," Willem Dafoe in "Wild at Heart" or Robert Blake in "Lost Highway"), some unexplained imagery (the white horse in "Fire Walk With Me," most of "Inland Empire"), a brooding Angelo Badalamenti score (he worked with the composer on "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks" and "Mulholland Dr.," in which Badalamenti makes a cameo) or maybe a demented take on a pop song (Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" was never the same after Dean Stockwell lip synced to it in "Blue Velvet").

His only foray into big budget filmmaking was "Dune," the 1984 flop which proved Lynch could do a lot of things, but sci-fi epics weren't necessarily one of them. Otherwise, he existed in his own world, in his own boundless imagination, where things didn't have to make sense. They were open to interpretation, and they let the viewers fill in the gaps with their own meanings and associations. Lynch made you think, he encouraged free thought, and he ran from explanations.

He earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Director with 1980's "The Elephant Man," and he also earned nods for "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr." He never won, but he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his body of work in 2019. The curveball in his filmography is "The Straight Story," in which an old man rides his lawnmower on a 250 mile journey from Iowa to Wisconsin. It was rated G and distributed by Disney which, come to think of it, is perhaps the most Lynchian move of all.

Across his filmography, flashes stand out: Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch's on-screen stand in for himself in many cases) hiding inside the closet in "Blue Velvet," the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) calling himself on the phone in "Lost Highway," the "Silencio" scene in "Mulholland Dr." They're fantastical, upsetting, indelible moments in cinema, burned into the brains of the Lynch faithful. He nodded to "The Wizard of Oz" so much on screen that a 2022 documentary, "Lynch/ Oz," explored the connection between his works and the 1939 classic.

"Mulholland Dr.," Lynch's 2001 look at the dashed dreams of Hollywood, is perhaps his weirdest success; he revived it from a passed-on pilot of a TV series, turned it into a symphony of strange and received universal acclaim for it, after spending years getting dogged by critics ("Fire Walk With Me" and "Lost Highway" were not well received in their time). It still holds many mysteries, and it broke open the career of Naomi Watts, whose soap opera audition in the movie is among this century's standout scenes to date.

Your favorites are all Lynch fans, from David Bowie and Trent Reznor to Steven Soderbergh and Charli xcx. "We love David Lynch," Pamela Anderson said during her recent visit to the Criterion Closet.

There's not a filmmaker alive that didn't admire him; Steven Spielberg cast him as legendary director John Ford in his semi-autobiographical "The Fabelmans," and Lynch steals the final scene of the movie as he teaches a young Sammy Fabelman, Spielberg's stand-in for himself, how to compose a shot. MacLachlan, in his touching tribute to Lynch, called the filmmaker "the most authentically alive person I'd ever met."

He lived a full life; he was a painter, a practitioner and proponent of transcendental meditation, an occasional musician and a big fan of the weather, and was known for giving out his sunny weather reports on social media. He was a father of four. Lynch loved coffee and adored cigarettes, and he took in as much of both as he could while he was here. He knew the price he was paying, and he paid it without complaining.

After killing off "Twin Peaks" with "Fire Walk With Me" he returned to its world in 2017, turning in 18 lovely, crazy, intoxicating episodes that revisited and reinvented the world of the TV series. He looked at it as a movie, not a TV series, and it's a fascinating work that ends on one of the most bone chilling notes of his career, again courtesy of the great Sheryl Lee, the angel by his side.

A world without Lynch is a world that's a little less mysterious, a little less secretive, and a lot less interesting. He was a true artist, and he remade reality in his worldview. He was a maestro of creativity, a titan in the world of art, a consistent light in the darkness. If there's any justice in the world, he's now sitting in a red curtained room, enjoying his coffee and cigarettes, laughing with the angels.

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