TP is a painting that one befriends and revisits. The characters are alive because the action is not cut into cartoonish snippets, which would make anyone appear either an action-hero and a wit or an insufferable bore.
The characters look more real because aged. They do not look like obvious choices for a TV show. They are known to have lived and, so, are alive.
The reason some object to the atomic bomb is because they cannot deny the number of deaths a nuclear conflict would inflict. By contrast, when non-nuclear warfare is entertained, it is easier to engage in wishful thinking and believe that the conflict will somehow resolve quickly and with few victims (at least for the favoured side). One may also believe that the more skilled will live, and the lesser skilled will die—that is, that the outcome will be fair. The bomb, by contrast, kills indiscriminately.
One may enjoy mountains without understanding how they have been formed. One may be lulled by the sound of the ocean even if one does not understand wave formation. One can enjoy without understanding. (It very well may be that our perception is just coarse enough not to generate more intricate observations than we can explain, at least collectively, as humanity. But then again, it may not be.)
There is no operationally useful definition of god, but an epistemically useful one can be gleaned from a metaphor: red blood cells as individuals, the organism they serve as god. The organism looks nothing like a red blood cell and is beyond each cell’s comprehension. The best each cell can do is to serve the organism by fulfilling the function that the cell has the urge to fulfil. TP displays an organism. It may be just beyond the capacity of the viewer to comprehend this organism and its intentions.
TP is suffused with love for life, for people, for differences. TP takes as axiomatic the acceptance of differences, as well as the tolerance towards the diversity of individual passions. Everyone has been manufactured for a purpose.
TP’s goal is to scare one out of “reality,” to make one think, for oneself. The movie is a canvas on which the viewer can project his own anxieties, visions, hopes, and aesthetics.
TP is a reunion of friends and family. These friends and family are not TP’s characters but one’s former selves.
As one moves from place to place, and as one chooses to be a slightly different self, one inhabits different realities. Later, one can travel and revisit a past reality. But one may not recognise it. Or the reality may refuse to recognise one. All one can do is to inhabit well the roles that one has been granted or has chosen and focus on the best strategy from now on.
Not to feel diminished by others’ accomplishments, everyone ultimately creates his own reality, populates it by his own values, and inhabits it. David Lynch creates a world that the viewer is free to co-opt. In Lynch’s world, you do not have to be rich. You do not have to be smart. You do not have to be particularly beautiful or young. You do not have to be sane. But you have to be, to connect, and to dream up a possibility result, a hero, or an idea that would unite and encourage some to become heroes.
Lynch grew up in provinces. He knows how to listen to silence and how to notice. He knows what electricity sounds like, what the night sounds like, and what the evening fog sounds like. Living in the middle of nowhere makes one sense-deprived (as does meditation) and compels one to create in order not to be stifled by silence.
TP explodes in episode 18 (E18), which comprises half of the series. The states are high: E18 manufactures reality: our reality. It is there for a purpose, which, by the end of the episode, will have been accomplished.
Interpreting TP (should one feel compelled to do so) is a metaphor for artistic and scientific endeavours. The ambiguity, the incompleteness, and the improbability of the narrative is what makes interpreting it so compelling and addictive.
Yet TP is not magical realism. Magical realism flouts rules. TP creates a new world, with a vocabulary and a consistent set of rules.
For Lynch, film is as a primarily visual and audio medium. Music is the portal between realities.
To fight evil, one must accept all parts of oneself, good and less good.
