David Lynch
Inland Empire

Nothing is allowed to say that is not an equivocal intention of this vanished identity of mine; movement is its negation, subject to the necessity of the name as resignation to destiny, just as all the interdisciplinary undisciplines me in the de-genre aesthetic I have also degraded myself to a re-censurer.
What you are about to read is not the "point of view of the fuck" of the critic in jacket and tie in the pay of some publication.
With Inland Empire, Lynch in fact removes the subject as a unique and indivisible entity, to make room for the plurality of sensations, for the incoherent peeks under the petticoats, of the many petticoats worn by the many personalities dreamed in a dream of death (see please the huge sequence of the lighter in front of the dying Dern) of Laura Dern. 
Inland Empire, Lynch's de-profundis, already in Lost Highways the self split into 2 distinct personalities (in the man who dreamed his double and imagined a woman split into 2, the brunette Arquette as the unfaithful wife and the blonde vamp as the lover), here in Inland Empire the subjective frame breaks entirely, but if we think about it, it is the rest of the real world that disavows itself.
While the Spielbergs of the industry strive to stitch together, synthesize, exorcize into recognizable and organized spectacle, the Lynches tell us that truth and fiction in today's mass society have become the same thing, with no more dividing boundaries, Lynch is one of the few who has understood that in this society buried in levels of manic and sub-genital inebriation of social and worldly, it's impossible now to separate reality from fiction, it's hard to state precisely what is true and what is false, whether a fact is true or false, since it doesn't matter the truth of an occurred fact but the conviction that the messenger of this fact (which often gladly collides with the figure of the journalist) manages to convey to the zombie-audience.
Lynch seems indeed to bypass these questions, the film states clearly that true and false do not exist and have never existed, but Kurosawa was saying the same thing in the 50s with other means and another poetics, only death exists, the rest matters much less, or rather, should not matter at all, the rest matters only as a constructive requisition of a universe, after all, as the man of color says next to the dying Dern: "don't worry, nothing is happening to you, you are only dying."
But Lynch had already hinted at having surpassed the plot with his striking debut in Eraserhead; he had already surpassed himself, and by surpassing himself, one also surpasses thought arriving at de-thinking, where critics still think, trapped in their Manichean structures and still make mistakes in judging works outside the Aristotelian units of time, space, and action. Artaud described the critic as "one who stubbornly seeks a bed in another's home," there is this disorder, I feel their discomfort when they talk about certain less commercial works, what does this criticism do? It brings everything back to meaning, to a very personal vision of meaning, disguised as objectivity, while any criticism should be tendentious, first qualifying the critic before David Lynch the director, "there is no critic outside the artist" said Oscar Wilde, Feuerbach had already said it before Wilde, the artist is the critic, so the critic must only be the artist, any critical intervention is grafted, is an appendix to the artwork, but a true artwork cannot tolerate mediations in the form of a review, this snootiness of the literary critic who has to know better than the great artist cannot be tolerated, it seems to me dangerous to smuggle this tame, conciliatory and good idea of this shepherd dog of the critic who after all is a spectator like others, he just has the little flaw of writing, it's not true, he is a person who has a very strong institutional role, who has remarkable capacity of influence and above all has social possibilities that should be remembered, therefore he is part of a culturally strong system in its own right, and when they want to present themselves as something harmless this is not true, it is not harmless, it's not true that those who write always write too much, we also write less and anyway words always hurt. Either critical essays and in-depth studies on certain GREATS are done or one must remain silent. 

Lynch's cinema consists of a very wide range of semantic and formal nuances, often irreconcilable and very difficult to inventory. De-thinking, therefore, let's briefly analyze what it is and how it differs from the cinema of the parvenus of the Spielbergs, that is, from that cinema of inverted, grocers, of prop men, of packagers, it is a cinema of meaning and not of counter-sense, a cinema of the said, of the already said and not of saying that disavows the said.
The cinema of the non-text, therefore, of the non-script, of the non-plot, in this type of art the plot has the same importance as the park lights, the music, a piece of wood from a tub, a chair arranged in a certain way, a can, clearly all entrusted to the artist's arrogance,  but we hear the critics' thoughts on experimental geniuses: "we want a linear film from Lynch, damn, these crazy artists, who never put on the brakes! Always looking for alternative, experimental, and daring ways to tell a story! Why doesn't Lynch make a good genre movie, a swashbuckler, adventure, action? a la Rambo?"
Let's leave them for a moment to hibernate in their obtuse idiocy and concentrate on a key scene of the film:  the surreal and hallucinogenic sitcom of the family with rabbit heads with pre-recorded laughter of the audience as if it were the Robinsons or Mel's Dinner: it is nothing more than yet another stick from Lynch against the media system and its vulgar slave audience, Mulholland Drive was already a tight concentration of scathing media criticism versus Hollywood made with modern objects, and done with the awareness of how ridiculous human beings are when grappling with their petty categories, so from the theme of the double in Lost Highway and Mul. Drive Lynch arrives at the theme of the multiple until the final recognition. The plot, that is, "miserable opium for barely seeing spectators" gives way to the ineffable, the emotional upheaval becomes the ultimate end of creation. A fatal, complete abandonment, (de)constructed (de) thought, and irreparable, Inland Empire is a sacrilegious puzzle, yet ironic, bursting and sensual. The darkness this time swallows no one, life itself unfolds in the shadow. The digital, deliberately and permanently ruined, grainy, and low-resolution, serves to immortalize the dream and life. Nothing is more perceptible or tangible, faces transform into horrible Baconian expressions, lives are re-knitted. What remains is the terrifying penumbra of violence, the symbolism of the rabbit-men, the folding of the story onto itself.

The Western television public/private/mixed is so entirely hedonistic that it even turns this good Pope into a mannequin for a Giorgio Armani show, once upon a time in prime time on Rai you could see a film by Claude Chabrol or Dino Risi, now it's all an extension of Rocchetta advertising, plastic faces, souls that identify with the texts of Pingitore and Zelig pissing inside the screen the oxymoron of possible ontology since it is represented.
And what misery the laughable ostentation of this new mass opinionism in overflowing press and in the society of spectacle and art, of TV brawls, of political forums, in academic conventions, and in entertaining audiovisuals, where each in turn is convinced that they are really saying their piece, perhaps with the illusion that what they say will have some weight in dialectics, all then prostrated before the morality of common sense, to the creeping servile reverence of roles, the verbal truth conjugated to the most insipid mawkish frenzy of the motion-to-place, to the representation in short of state codes, as if to such indecency the virtuality of life tout court did not provide, and there's no way out;  Italian (or American) public/private/mixed television suffers from the profound overdose of reality from the Vermicino live broadcast; this disgusting flow that only Mario Schifano has managed in his beautiful painted photographs to totally displace from the inevitability of the passage of time (television as Gerard Grisey) continues to feed on bodies doubly virtual: they enter as bodies (we are bodies, we do not have a body) virtual: total adherence not so much to the changing of fashions but to the immutability of the most extreme fetishism to cancel themselves through television technology: it is not a ruthless reflection of the inorganic you do not go so far, only there is this naked nullification that makes the illuminated box an immense film document for future anthropologists.

The remaining David Lynches in art now find themselves segmenting not only time and space but  the gestures, in a different short-circuit for each different program that had the honor of hosting him: ridiculing critics and the servile plot public not for their belonging to the category "cultural objects" but as virtual bodies that tried to impose themselves as real thinking bodies.
Fabrizio Corona or the Franzoni or the Pope "appearing" on these screens nullifying, therefore making possible in the most Musilian sense of the word the existence of God are the same thing: sexless bodies that through rituals which are many "perfect cadences" sacrifice themselves in the name of the most animalistic capitalism.
The cinema/television dualism therefore, is according to my analysis the last step Lynch offers us with this last effort of his (with hindsight it is possible to understand what the little man in white with a camera on his back in Lost Highways could represent), personally my favorite Lynch remains in Lost Highways and Eraserhead but I recognize that with Inland Empire he has pushed himself even further, into rarely trodden territories, perhaps only by Derek Jarman, Jodorowsky, Fellini, Glauber Rocha, Dreyer, Bunuel (in some things), Godard, Tsukamoto, Fassbinder (in some things) and Carmelo Bene, especially with his Nostra Signora dei Turchi, where turbid is the hypnotic element that becomes encephalic vibromasseur.

One last note: if we think about it, television directing in shots does not admit ambiguity, the "polished" card of gossip magazines is emulated. In this cinema of de-thinking no art is made, it is not even attempted to imitate it, the live television is the only possibility for the detractor: relying on the alea, examples: the speaker leaving the role by messing up the part; the presenter descending the stairs of Sanremo stumbles and falls live rolling down the stairs; sudden cuts due to the cardiac arrest of the director etc. short circuits in short, languages that do not timely meet the trusted speech therapist. Here, what might happen on TV if someone made a mistake or let themselves go in the throes of a very healthy folly and maybe live (but it almost never happens alas) is finally dealt with in this cinema of the Signifier.
The only thing that hasn't convinced me about this 3-hour monument?? The last ending (yes, because it has more than one), the embrace, too sickly sweet although unreal and certain music not quite guessed (Beck?!), but otherwise to be watched and rewatched with the emotion of the first time.