Films like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” aren’t always easy to explain, but they live on in your mind and burrow under your skin.

If you met him in person, David Lynch came across as a Midwestern pastor, all gee-whiz and aw-shucks. He was one of the few people who seemed wholly incapable of irony and, hearing him talk, you’d think the man must have enjoyed a pretty darn nice Montana childhood.

The director developed such a distinct style that “Lynchian” became a go-to term for any sort of surrealism onscreen. These scenes from his work get to the heart of what that term embodied.

Searching the Tribune’s photo archive for a picture from “Eraserhead,” the 1977 David Lynch film that concluded one phase of my moviegoing life in the late ’70s and cracked open a second, bigger one,

His work could be weird, disturbing, nonlinear, even perverse. In life, he was almost comically old-fashioned. But there’s a method to the madness, and deep meaning to be discovered in the confusion he so expertly sowed.

Lynch’s films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture – one increasingly out of the shadows today. As someone who teaches film noir, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.

David Lynch died yesterday at the age of 78, after a career that made him perhaps the most consequential American art filmmaker in the history of the medium. But his singular voice extended far beyond cinema,