As this giddy NY Times review by Manohla Dargis reminds us, “There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head.”

But ask yourself: When it comes to David Lynch, isn’t that exactly where you want to be?

Remember Mulholland Drive? I do. After my sixth viewing I realized I was watching the movie, repeatedly, not because I enjoyed it as cinema but because as a process the movie taught me to appreciate symbols with the same deference I apply to modern art.

“What does it mean?” was replaced with — well, rewatching the film.

Instead of meaning there were colors, shapes and sounds that existed in a sort of expanding holographic nowness. With lots of glamour and shadow to fringe the shape shifting: Beautiful men and women moving through their Fate like bits of snow in a shimmied snow globe. This appeared to be the very antithesis of story telling, movie making. And yet, damn, Lynch had an Oscar nomination for Best Director that year.

But still no meaning. Remember that old Zen bromide about a flower. “What does a flower mean?” The ridiculousness of the notion. Lynch trains us in how to be OK with not intellectualizing our symbolic life, our dreams — both the horrorific and the sublime. I suppose this has something to do with his ongoing practice of painting modern art and applying the aftereffects of his transcendental meditation to filmmaking. Or not.

And now, coming soon to a theater near you (maybe) we have Lynch’s latest mindfuck INLAND EMPIRE — for all intents and purposes the sequel to Mullholand Drive.

Avoiding big studio constraints, Lynch shot his new film on a dig cam and is distributing INLAND himself (which explains the above ‘maybe’). For Lynchophiles this bodes well. It’s usually a good sign when an artist unhinges from the traditional approach and goes their own way. Think Vincent Van Gogh. Or Justin Timberlake.

What can we expect from INLAND EMPIRE? Well I love the way Movie City News describes the first few scenes shot in a polish hotel room, a place where giant rabbits abound and the wild-eyed Grace Zabriskie lists for the film’s heroine, Laura Dern, what’s in store for each us in the three hours ahead:

Sexual depravity. Ferocious violence associated with erotic longing. Jealousy. Fairy tales. How evil came into the world. Self-consciousness about the film-medium (introduced specifically in Mulholland Drive). The indeterminacy of the filmic tense. The possibility that we are “in” more than one time zone. The past-present-past all at once somehow.

And what he then procedes to do rather than embody these topics in a linear hiarcharchal narrative is to surf around on this menu. The movie works quite insistently even deliberately through a sort of structured attention deficit disorder.

Or as one YouTuber put it: “…a K-Hole into the the Death of the Hollywood Star System by way of the white rabbit.”

The doctor will see you now!