I was too young to watch Twin Peaks. My older sister was probably too young too, but I was 13 and had to go to bed before it started and she was allowed sometimes to stay up and watch it. If I really pushed it, I could see the first few minutes. I was pretty sure that Agent Cooper killed Laura Palmer. Apparently, despite the advertising (because of course Lynch wasn’t doing Who Shot JR) it was very obvious who killed Laura Palmer. That wasn’t the point. It was so much more than that. I saved up all my pocket money and bought my sister the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased (fifteen dollars!) as her next birthday present: the tie-in book about Dale Cooper’s childhood, ostensibly his personal diaries. Parts of it were hilarious.

I still haven’t seen Twin Peaks, and the truth is, I have seen very few Lynch films. I ended up like Hal Hartley instead, the OTHER auteur film director who was huge in the 1990s (the Canadian one). But I understood pretty quickly that Twin Peaks was something different. I’ve talked a lot about how absolutely different nerd culture was 30 years ago, but it’s very hard to convey. In 1990, we still lived in a world where science fiction, fantasy, horror and superheroes were not ready for prime time. They didn’t make those kinds of things for adults, except in Japan. Or if they did, it was six episodes and then it would vanish and you would only see it if a friend of a friend of a friend had a copy, or you rented the VHS that was barely visible because of course the city only had one copy of it and every nerd had run it through the machine. In 1990, Star Trek The Next Generation was back on TV, and it was barely hanging on. If you stayed up very very late you could watch Moonlighting which was the most revolutionary show on television… because it was a screwball comedy with dream sequences and musical numbers. The Simpsons was considered transgressive because it was animated and not wholesome – the big shows were ALL sitcoms, and all wholesome. Cheers, Cosby, Fresh Prince, Roseanne…you had to stay up very late to see L.A. Law, which was the prototype for big issue shows like ER that were coming soon.

But then somebody put Twin Peaks on television.

The term “cult” TV was coined to describe Star Trek, because at the time, rating measurements weren’t broken down by demographics. Almost every single ratings box was on TVs owned by all-American families who watched soap operas and sitcoms and westerns. Then they tried to cancel Star Trek and got tens of thousands of letters. The only explanation was it must be like a cult: a small number of people who were fanatics, zealots. The term “fan” was coined from fanatic. (Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater had brought the word fanatic into popular use when he’d aimed it at American conservatives, the people with the same values as the current administration.) The 60s had given rise to fanatics for Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes and Trek, and then the 70s had brought dozens more, and then the 80s had turned them all into toy commercials and that part had kind of killed genre fiction and nerd media. Everyone sort of thought it might be dead; just a weird boomer thing because those kids liked 1930s pulps. But Twin Peaks was not like that. It sort of looked like an adult show. It was a murder mystery drama with a quirky small town and it was also full of the hottest new stars but it was also…art. It was fucking art, and it had to be talked about as art. The word cult had to be hauled out again because adults didn’t want to be fans, but they wanted to be INTO this show. Because it wasn’t just compelling like the CBS Sunday movie, or witty like Murder She Wrote or grown up like Murphy Brown or expensive,like Dallas…it was DEEP. It had levels. It had to be decoded.

Nowadays we not only live in a world where pretty much every fiction exists in a fantasy world and is designed to be full of secrets and codes so the Youtube money machines can do their work, but back then, this didn’t really exist. Let me be clear: when Lynch put in layers of meaning, that’s not “Oh this guy standing behind Iron Man is a reference to a comic from 1994”; I mean artistic meanings, but to some extent there is some overlap in the two things, and in the way people watched. Lynch likened Sherilyn Fenn to Elizabeth Taylor (they looked quite similar) so you needed to know that he was using references to her when he shot some scenes. Lynch actually came out and made statements to help people understand the show. He literally published a ten point guide to help peole. The owls were the spirits of dead people, that’s one I remember. The sheriff is called Harry Truman because he’s a good man and he kind of represents America’s best self. The log lady was just weird, though. She just liked logs. In one memorable scene, Lynch realized that one of his sound guys was being reflected in a prop, and he decided to leave it in the film and build the whole second series around that image being textual. That was Bob, a malevolent force. You might see him in the Black Lodge. You could watch Fire Walk With Me if you wanted more clues.

Unlike things now, of course, Lynch wasn’t sending out codes to be cracked, but art to be understood, but around all of this came a new kind of popular media, building on Twin Peaks like fungus in a culture. You can draw a straight line from Twin Peaks to Picket Fences being full of bizarre set pieces and bathos, and The X Files of course, with it’s deepening mysteries and nameless bad guys, and Forever Night, which was about a vampire cop of all things. The 1990s was a heyday of late night genre TV shows, as all of a sudden, mainstream American TV discovered that genre fiction was allowed. There was a goddamned Highlander TV show! John Glover played the devil! Roswell made a generation of teens LOSE THEIR GODDAMN MINDS because it was romantic in a way nothing on TV was before that. (because teen programming barely existed either – Beverly Hills 90210 began mostly not far from Degrassi Junior High. It was all message TV.)

Then, riding over the horizon, came Buffy the Vampire Slayer and nothing was ever the same again. We were still sharing the tapes in the early days of Buffy and Charmed…but soon enough…all of that was gone, and nerds went mainstream.

None of that has much to do with David Lynch. When he made Twin Peaks: The Return, he wasn’t interested in secrets and lies that forced you to watch to the end (although he did keep you guessing, like any good storyteller would). He hadn’t set out to create that kind of TV. He’d only set out to make great television with his beautiful ideas and his artistic courage. He’d shone out as a young film student: so much so that the head of his film school had the school pay Lynch to get Eraserhead made. Mel Brooks helped him make The Elephant Man, and stayed in the shadows. People believed in him, and those who worked with him never stopped talking about how much they loved him, and how kind he was. But as he found success, he never compromised. He was somehow the ultimate fuck you to people who insisted arthouse cinema wasn’t a good thing, that nobody liked it, or that it coudn’t make money. America and the world went to Wild At Heart and Lost Highway and The Naked Lunch and were often utterly confused and even distraught, but it was the 1990s and early 2000s and that was welcomed. Mel Brooks once described Lynch as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”, referring to how he mixed his weird drawl and down-home country manners with his oddness and otherworldly nature, but it could just as easily be a description of his career. He could make a movie about terrifying slug monsters and shooting your wife in the head and he’d be welcomed into America’s homes and Oscar ceremonies like he’d just made Mr Smith Goes To Washington. Nowadays we don’t have video stores so they can’t have arthouse sections, and movies may have lost their soul, right when we need good art most of all. And nerds have become geeks and stopped like genre fiction because it was art, because it was just as smart and rich and clever as the mainstream.

But I can tell you one thing: David would not want you to worry about that. He wants you to make your film, to work on your project. Lynch rarely gave interviews and didn’t always like talking about himself, but not because he was shy. It was because there were only two things he wanted to talk about: the work he was doing right then, and the work YOU were doing right then. He loved to make movies and television, to write scripts, to direct, to make art, and that’s what he always wanted to do. He wasn’t on a lot of press tours or red carpets because he wanted to be back at work. Again, I’m not sure he would get away with that now, but then again, he was still making movies last year. Finding budgets. Getting shots. Getting it done. The only time he would stop working or talking about the day’s work was to give advice to others on making movies, and that, more than anything, is what I remember about David Lynch.

He was authentic, and kind and like Jimmy Steward he managed to put both of those things into the camera and speak directly to you, the way only movies can. There’s something more intimate about the screen, but not so invisible as the book. It feels like it really is all about you. Add to that Lynch’s kindness, and he always seemed to be talking straight to me, straight to all of us, telling us kind things and good things, even when he was making us scared and uneasy. And when he spoke about you making movies, all of that was also on show. When he said how to make movies, he said it as if he was looking right at me and saying “here’s how you, Steve, can make a movie.”

The other day I told someone my rule that “if your only heroes are famous people, you’ll only be happy when you’re famous.” The second part to that rule is you should never be a fan of a person just as a person. You should be a fan of their virtues and values and the parts of them that inspire you. (Same goes for things too – don’t like Star Trek because it’s Star Trek, or you end up with movies about Section 13.) Yes, I’ve gone to Charles’ Dickens house and sat in his chair and I cried when I touched the wood of his desk but I try to remember also to value his diligence, his courage, his passion for detail, his care and exactitude in capturing the truth, to the last detail, and his care (with those famous exceptions) for the people and the world around him.

David Lynch was kind and he was brilliant and he was courageous and he was true and he was all the things an artist should be. He taught us all to look deeper and think harder and care more about the art we make and the things we love. He said that liking art and deep things and intellectual things could be cool and sexy and popular. That the owls were not owls and that’s allowed. But most, most, most of all? He wanted me to make movies. And I will, for him. And I hope when I point my finger at my screen or my audience and tell them I want them to make games, they hear some small sense of David’s spirit, talking straight to them, and saying they can do it.