You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least s

You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least saw the most popular films one day and vaguely felt like I didn't get them, but there was nothing there I'd identify as bad filmmaking or anything. It just seemed like it was trying to say something and I wasn't getting it. I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is. There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.