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.…

on the violent impositions of movie-making, the mere force of a video camera's gaze enough to draw out a hidden evil in the placidity of an essentially anonymous landscape. baffled that anyone could watch this and demand less talking, less arguing, because honestly there's nothing more purely dread-inducing here than the pointless circumambulations that people engage in when they're terrified and have no fucking clue what they're doing. the terror is built with negative space, visually and narratively, the absences…