One of the first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979. The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, “Eraserhead” (1977). This was the moment of Lynch’s first brush with cult fame: “Eraserhead” was a year into its three-year run as a midnight movie at the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard. Against a backdrop of hulking tanks and rusted pipes, an eager student reporter named Tom Christie directs questions to Lynch and his cinematographer, Frederick Elmes. The thirty-three-year-old Lynch, in a voice so flat and nasal it verges on cartoonish, enthuses about all the “neat areas…down in the tanks,” explaining that he found the location while driving by one day: “I think this place is beautiful, if you look at it right.” He directs the camera’s attention to a blotch on the ground: the remains of a cat, procured from a veterinarian for use in the film, that “got covered in tar and preserved itself.”

Citing the vague tag line that describes “Eraserhead” as “a dream of dark and troubling things,” Christie asks Lynch: “Would you like to expound on that a little?” “No,” the filmmaker replies immediately, shaking his head and smiling. Christie reads from a review that likens the movie both to a dream and a nightmare. Lynch reacts with puzzlement. “I’m not sure I know what that means,” he says, before conceding, “That’s a fine statement, you know?”

Affable despite his elusiveness, Lynch seems less to be stonewalling than striving to verbalize daunting concepts with a vocabulary that might politely be termed basic. “Eraserhead” was “a real, definite thing in my head,” he says. “It’s not like thrown-together abstract; it’s meant-to-be-that-way abstract.” Christie points out an apparent incongruity: Lynch the family man (he was then newly remarried, with a young daughter, Jennifer, from his first marriage) and Lynch the creator of the dark, weird “Eraserhead.” “I’m not all that strange, really,” Lynch responds. “Beneath a calm exterior is the subconscious, right? Everybody has their little—the denizens of the deep and all that.” He proposes a working theory of filmmaking as world-making: “No matter how weird something is, no matter how strange the world is that you’re making a film about, it’s got to be a certain way. Once you see how that is, it can’t be another way or it’s not that place anymore. It breaks the mood or the feeling.” Finally he gets in a good closing one-liner, explaining his decision to cast the unknown Jack Nance and not a name actor in the film’s lead role: “If you’re going into the netherworld, you don’t want to go in with Chuck Heston.”

The David Lynch of today is, in many ways, not so far removed from this pale, polite young man, doing his best not to squirm under interrogation. The floppy hair would later swoop up into a signature quiff. The unfussy attire — a light shirt and zip-up jacket in the video — would be formalized as a uniform: khaki slacks, a slightly rumpled black suit, and, most distinctive of all, a white shirt primly buttoned to the top. (This getup has not escaped the attention of men’s magazines. GQ has called the no-tie, buttoned-up style “the David Lynch look.” Esquire went so far as to dub the filmmaker an accidental fashion icon: “David Lynch dresses badly, but he gets away with it and you can’t.”)

In person, Lynch projects niceness. He has kindly eyes, a soft-featured handsomeness, an air of corn-fed good cheer. He has often sought out these very qualities in his actors, most notably Kyle MacLachlan, who bears a physical resemblance to him. But there is also something a bit strange about Lynch’s niceness — a heightened, golly-gee, stuck-in-the-fifties folksiness that some people think must be a put-on. The biography he typically uses for press releases consists of four words: “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.” Whether innate or cultivated or both, the picture of David Lynch the straight-arrow square is striking for the obvious contrast with the darkness and extremity of the work, its obsession with grotesquerie and depravity. In view of the work, in fact, Lynch’s mild-mannered calm can seem somewhat creepy. This is the contradiction — David Lynch the all-American weirdo — that defines how we think about him. Not for nothing did Mel Brooks call him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” and David Foster Wallace describe his voice as “Jimmy Stewart on acid.”

That voice has become more caricatured over the years, even the subject of self-parody. Most of us know it from Lynch’s recurring cameo as the hard-of-hearing F.B.I. bureau chief Gordon Cole in “Twin Peaks,” whose foghorn delivery only slightly exaggerates Lynch’s speaking voice. So much about Lynch’s fraught relationship with language is summed up in that voice, in its unnervingly high volume and halting cadences. It’s clear from the 1979 footage — and from almost every interview he has done since — that words do not come easily to him. Both Lynch and his first wife, Peggy Reavey (née Lentz), have referred to his “pre-verbal” years, a phase that lasted into his early twenties, when he had a hard time stringing even more than a few words together. In his early short film, “The Alphabet,” verbal learning is a source of dread: a young girl is terrorized by the letters of the alphabet as she sleeps. The serial killer in “Twin Peaks” leaves lettered scraps of paper under the nails of his victims.

Lynch’s films abound with gnomic pronouncements and incantations. “Now it’s dark,” the maniacal Frank Booth hisses in “Blue Velvet.” “This is the girl,” the mobster financiers keep insisting in “Mulholland Drive.” (The key to Transcendental Meditation, which Lynch has practiced for more than four decades, is the repetition of a personal mantra.) Lynch’s mistrust of words means that his films often resist the expository function and realist tenor of dialogue, relying instead on intricate sound design to evoke what lies beyond language. Conversely, his studio art is notable for a perverse preponderance of text. Many of Lynch’s large, tactile art-brut canvases feature variously cryptic, comic, and ominous inscriptions (“Suddenly My House Became a Tree of Sores,” “There Is Nothing Here, Please Go Away”). Especially in his recent series of smudgy black-and-white lithographs, the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power.

In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature. Lynch has said, more than once, that he had to “learn to talk,” and his very particular, somewhat limited vocabulary seems in many ways an outgrowth of his aesthetic. In keeping with his interest in the intangible, he has a curious, syntactically awkward fondness for abstract nouns: “When you do something that works, you have a happiness.” “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone.” If his films swing between extreme moods, so, too, does the tenor of his conversation, especially when he’s discussing his work. Great ideas are “beautiful” and “thrilling” and make you “fall in love”; when the creative process is impeded, it’s a “terrible thing” that can feel “like death.” (What Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, lacks in eloquence, he generally makes up for in caffeinated enthusiasm.)