In a way, Lynch always felt like an artist out of time—a holdover from a long-gone era, or an avatar from some future one that hadn’t arrived yet. In his films, nothing was as strange as normalcy.

David Lynch played Gus, the bartender of the Broken Stool, The Cleveland Show ’s Drunken Clam equivalent. He is 117 years old, his father did a murder-suicide to his mother, and he thinks llamas ...