Pinpoint Vagueness

Rating: Null/10 (3 December 2002)

While I love films that force one to think and become engaged, it is vital to remember that this 'film' was meant to be a television series that lynch would have a few years to develop and finalize.
The pilot did not do so well, and it had to be finished quickly and released as a film.
I think what Lynch has done is make a film so vague that it means different things to each and everyone of us.
I have heard people giving long discourses on such arcane and esoteric things as the lighting or the lampshades in certain scenes, or the implications and moral and ethical impacts of 'the cowboy'.
I think Lynch's true plan was scuttled due to the poor showing of the pilot and he was forced to throw together in five months what he hoped to finish in five years. What we got was an unfinished and unsatisfying tease that means different things to different people.
Director Lynch has certainly done little to decipher his own vision of this film for us. This is not a great film. We are projecting greatness on to it.
It's so vague that we are projecting on to it every hidden deeply personal and mythological icon we carry with us as individuals. And I'm not sure that that wasn't what the director meant to do.
He may have settled to intentionally make a film that means nothing to him, has no plot, has no point but is so vague that enough people can recognize one small image, character, or scene in it, and from that extrapolate the idea that the entire film MUST be something artistic and important.
It is the ultimate testament to what Hollywood does. Hollywood produces nothing and convinces us that it's 'product' is gospel, oxygen, import. We flock to theaters and pay too much to see crap films we know are bad yet praise. Instead of walking away from a theater feeling insulted and emotionally manipulated we buy into the status quo and universally praise crappy shallow unredeeming Hollywood films.
Until Mr. Lynch can explain it for himself, I consider this an unfinished, and intentionally vague film. No more.