What made David Lynch cool

When one of your favourite filmmakers dies, it is hard not to feel a deeply personal sense of loss; the punch in the viscera with the knowledge that someone who has created some of the most iconic pieces of cinema from the past half-century will no longer be bringing his inimitable and unforgettable personal voice into film. And so it has been with the dreadful news that the director David Lynch died on Thursday at the age of 78: not a young age, but when the likes of Ridley Scott and Clint Eastwood are still making major work in their eighties and nineties, it is an enormous shame that he will no longer be a presence in Hollywood.

If, of course, he ever was. It is typical of Lynch’s bloody-minded and weird sensibility that the only bona fide blockbuster he ever directed, 1984’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, was such an incoherent mess that it scared Hollywood away