The late director sided with the outsider and saw things in America no one else could see. His startling oeuvre changed film and television for ever

David Lynch, the director of Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, who has died at the age of 78, leaves behind the cinematic descriptor “Lynchian”, described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with the mundane” and “using compelling visual images to emphasise a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace”.

Even this may not be enough for Lynch obsessives, for whom he was the ultimate countercultural outlier, the weirdo’s weirdo, who changed film and television for ever.