baffling, just barely skirts unwatchability most of the time but nonetheless Rollin intermittently wrings something incredibly moving and almost human from what would otherwise be little more than porn with numbingly elaborate justifications attached. identities and bodies crumble inside of sterile but fashionable interiors, which are supposedly insulating them from the barren, scarred urban wasteland which awaits outside. the eternal present-tensism is what really works here, though, with the constantly refashioned (and yet always disintegrating) selves clumsily stumbling towards warmth…

What makes Lynch so fascinating is that he’s a conservative whose aesthetic tendencies (unerring empathy for/centering of his female characters, a proclivity for exploring dysphoric relationships between persons and their bodies/bodies and the world, and an affinity for the cynical epistemology of the noir) constantly undermine his nostalgic and otherwise regressive gestures. Nowhere is that more apparent than in The Return, a colossal moral reckoning with the willful failure of each and every available institution (cultural/political/social) to reckon with trauma.…

divine revelation is inscribed in unicode; angels speak through the language of differential equations. prophetic nightmares are recorded in shaky videotape and disseminated through disbelieved dreams. Carpenter unearths the sublime gothic excess beneath the stultifying beige of urban sprawl, and, in doing so, reveals the secret evil kept in the flesh of men. insects work away at the edges of the world, tiny extant forms of decay amassing into something terrifying and cataclysmic. a man is nothing more than a…