That's Just Insipid!

"The diegetic film is in general considerably more 'logical' and 'constructed' than the dream. Films of the fantastic or the supernatural, the most unrealistic films, are very often only films that obey another logic, a genre logic (like the realistic film itself), a set of ground rules which they have laid down at the outset (genres are institutions) and within which they are perfectly coherent. It rarely happens that we find in a film narrative that impression of true absurdity which we commonly experience when we remember our own dreams or read about others, that very specific very recognisable impression (from which intentionally absurd films, like the 'literature of the absurd' of not long ago, remain so remote) which includes both the internal obscurity of the elements and the confusion of their assemblage, the enigmatic brilliance of the zones that the wish dazzles and the dark, swarming shipwreck of the almost forgotten segments, the sensation of tension and relaxation, the suspected outcropping of a buried order and the evidence of an authentic incoherence, an incoherence which, unlike that of films that aspire to delirium, is not a laboured addition but the very core of the text.
--"The psychologist Rene Zazzo, touching on the basis of a repeated remark of Freud's, rightly affirms that the manifest content of a dream, if it were strictly transposed to the screen, would make an unintelligible film. A film, I may add, truly unintelligible (an object in fact very rare), and not one of those avant-garde or experimental films which, as the enlightened audience knows, it is appropriate at once to understand and not to understand (not understanding being the better way to understand and too much effort at understanding being the height of misunderstanding, etc.). These films, whose objective social function, at least in some cases, is to satisfy a certain kind of intellectual's naively desperate desire not to be naive, have intergrated within their institutional regime of intelligibility a certain dose of elegant and coded unintelligibility, in such a way that their very unintelligibility is, as a result, intelligible. What is in question here is again a genre, and one which illustrates the contrary of what it would like to show; it reveals how difficult it is for a film to achieve true absurdity, pure incomprehensibility, that very thing which our most ordinary dreams, at least in certain sequences, achieve directly and effortlessly." ---Chrisitan Metz, The Imaginary Signifier

Metz published this passage in 1977, the same year that David Lynch finally completed work on his first opus, Eraserhead. I would like to entertain some consideration of Lynch's cinema vis a vis Metz's emphatic doubt as to the ability of a film to recreate the sensation and affect of dreaming. Is Lynch the rare, and perhaps singular, example of a filmmaker whose best work most nearly accomplishes the "true absurdity" of the dream-state; or is he but the most conspicuously worshiped demagogue whom droves of "certain kinds of intellectual" over-enthusiastically adore?