what stands out most to me is the whirling phantasmagoria of the middle section, bridging the warm-hued patriarchal fantasy of the first hour and the cynical hyperviolent self-castigation of the last twenty minutes in a gesture that deflates both the (almost noirish?) libidinal probing of Aoyama's ego and the various mythologies he attempts to hang on Asami's image. she is victim and victimizer, sex object and domestic servant, empty vessel and overburdened signifier, each and every configuration colliding like tectonic…

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…