Wasn't able to get onboard with the central premise here. I think the Bardo lens makes sense, but it's a little difficult to square that with the nonlinear structure of Lost Highway in particular. The characters transition to a new state, but that state is often predetermined in the film's sequencing. Nochimson pulls from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and claims the transition of these characters to a "lower" state is based on their failures to see the liberating potential of visions and existence beyond the "marketplace" (a lower, surface level reality, as opposed to the "palace" of existence beyond cultural/material constraints). Given what these "transitions" entail in Lynch's films, I'm not sure I blame them! There's a line about the typical Lynchian paradox where "actions already have consequences" but I have some pretty serious misgivings about that worldview and how Lynch applies it.

I think the framework works best with Inland Empire, where the optimism of a more fulfilled reckoning with an existence beyond the marketplace is realized after the ordeal, even if there's some moralism to get there. I have trouble seeing these "negative" examples of failures to move beyond in some of Lynch's other films as positive. The "here to here" journey is a throughline in his filmography, and I've never read Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart as insincere in the triumph of the final "here" where a domestic stasis is revived, albeit with the sinister undercurrents still lurking underneath or outside it.

I'm not sure the quantum mechanics aspect of this book is necessary. I wasn't convinced by it anyway. The general infighting among Lynch scholars (particularly in the endnotes) is always fun! Some of the vaguely sex-negative writing (although this is present in the films too) is not so fun. The interview with the professor that warns against misappropriating quantum theory is very funny after reading what I'd describe as exactly that.