As you'd expect (I mean, look at that cover) this is a mixed bag.

A few of the essays are great!  Highlights: Alanna Thain's Rabbit Ears piece describes the "vibration-image" in Lynch, the use of light and (loco-)motion in Inland Empire, and the broader "problem of recognition" explored in his films. Gary Bettinson's piece locates Lynch in the midnight movie tradition, and finds in Eraserhead an initial structural unity that slides into disorientation. The midnight movie audience is interested in the communal experience of the dysphoric, whereas the "typical" audience may tolerate dysphoric imagery only in service of its eventual resolution. Greg Hainge pushes against Lacanian readings (and specifically McGowan's essay sequenced right before, pretty funny!) and narrativization in favor of a general cinema of attraction approach to (non-)reading these films. I'm summarizing, but you get the idea.

The apparent contradictions from essay to essay make for a fun read in any case. My level of interest in the psychoanalytical readings is probably lower than most, and there is some irresponsible, gross writing here. And I wholly disagree with a LOT of the ideas presented. A few of the essays read like a bunch of notes and "heady" concepts smashed together without development or evidence of how those concepts are present in the films. A handful could use a good edit, although the introduction and final piece by the "editor" were possibly the most in need of one.

I still have my misgivings about the guy, and a couple of the essays only played into those issues. But his films inspire a unique kind of passion and fervor in audiences that can't be discounted, and at the end of the day there is something there that we're all trying to grasp. More than anything this collection highlights the both the depth and abstraction of that something that viewers can feel but can't fully articulate or rationalize.