David Lynch was a visionary director of the strange and the surreal – but what we hear in his films is as important as what we see.

For the iconic writer-director, who was diagnosed with emphysema before his death last week at 78, cigarettes were more than a habit—they were a form of meditation, a symbol of the art life, and an endless source of visual poetry.

It would be convenient to say that I was so cool that I watched it on purpose, an artsy queer suburban kid desperate for culture. I happened upon it by some mysterious channel surfing synchronicity and kept watching,