It's a Strange World. David Lynch and the Philosophy of What Lies Beneath.

Before the first frame of Blue Velvet, there is a curtain. Blue velvet, moving slightly, as if something is breathing behind it. The credits come up over it, and one of them tells you exactly whose world you are about to enter: A David Lynch Film.

Then the curtain dissolves into a blue sky. Red roses against a white picket fence. A fire truck rolls down a quiet street in slow motion, and the fireman on the side waves at you as if he has all the time in the world. A man is watering his lawn. He collapses, the hose still running, and the camera keeps moving, down into the grass, where insects crawl over each other in the dark.

That is the whole film, in its first few minutes.

Blue Velvet came out in 1986. Jeffrey Beaumont comes home to the small town of Lumberton and finds a human ear lying in a field. He could hand it to the police and go back to his life. He doesn't. He wants to know, and the wanting takes him somewhere he can't come back from.

"It's a strange world," Jeffrey says, more than once. He says it like someone who has only just noticed.

David Lynch noticed early. He trained as a painter, and he came to film because he wanted to see a painting move. His first short, made in 1966 as an art student in Philadelphia, was exactly that: a painting that moved. He never stopped thinking like a painter. His films work on you the way a picture does. You feel them long before you understand them.

He also spent his whole career refusing to explain them. Ask him what something meant and he would politely decline. The work had to speak for itself.

"Absurdity is what I like most in life," he told the writer Kristine McKenna in 1989. It is the key to almost everything he made. Look at the ordinary world long enough and it becomes the strangest place there is. The roses are real, and so are the insects underneath them. Lynch never called one the truth and the other a lie. He showed you both at once and let you sit with it.

His name became an adjective for that feeling, the moment an ordinary room turns and you can't say when it happened.

A David Lynch Film. Four words on a velvet curtain, and you already know that nothing behind it will be quite what it seems.

It's a strange world. He spent his life making sure we noticed.