Fuuuck no, Inland Empire is where Lynch truly lost it. Lynch is unfortunately mostly illiterate to critical theory and absolutely unaware of why some critics adored his early films (I've read a lot and listened to a lot of his interviews). The big selling point for Lynch was a return to Bunuelian surrealism with an American + psychoanalytic twist. But Lynch, as we all know by now, has no idea what any of that means.

I see most of Lynch's art as being a direct response to positive crit of his work , without any of the knowledge to what informs the positive crit. Lynch is one of those unfortunate filmmakers that makes everything to appease positive critics. In this way he's practically the Trump of filmmaking. I swear , if we had enough money and influence to buy a lot of film critics to all write similar reviews, we could literally manufacture what Lynch does next.

Lynch initially was unsure of himself and dug deep to create the best work he could. While his earliest shorts were very stupid responses to much better experimental filmmakers, unlike guys like Kenneth Anger, he sought to somehow bring it to the silver screen. But with anyone that lacks intrinsic self-worth, as his pathetic 'meditation university' makes clear, when people responded positively to some aspects of his work, he aimed to please them by only underscoring what the critics liked by magnifying what he thought they wanted. And so, his work went from thoughtful to thoughtless. He may have read one review that likened his flicks to the improvisatory nature of dreams as described by Jung, so he took it to the extreme and made everything improv. He may have read another review on early surrealism, and again, aiming to appease the critics, he took it to another meaningless extreme with what I'd describe as 'wacky', 'silly', but mostly stupid non-sequitor surrealism. Read about his process: on set, he'll shout one day, 'I want an elephant, three "midgets" [sic], and a one armed woman.' He's doing it to be 'improvisatory' or 'spontaneous' because that's his deepest understanding of psychoanalytic crit or surrealism. It has nothing to do with it and is a true farce toward the masters.

Lynch's last more decent work was that movie with the Wizard of Oz references. His last good work was Twin Peaks. His only great work was Blue Velvet. He has his dumb cadre of similarly illiterate contemporary fans, who last I checked paid money to listen to him ramble on his website through an exclusive subscription fee, but all serious critics have by now discarded him as a mountebank. He was only made popular because the 80s were a horrendously low point in US cinema and everyone was grasping for any kind of hope that it wasn't dead.