From the late David Foster Wallace’s essay on the late David Lynch, “David Lynch Keeps His Head”:
David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third kind of territory. Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained." Lynch's movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies point at the too-facile summation that "film interpretation is necessarily multivalent" or something-they're just not that kind of movie.
Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial sense of being comfortable or linear or High Concept or "feel-good." You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to "entertain" you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)
There’s a Lynch quotes that goes: “We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.”
I think cognitive development really does look something like this. As we get older, our brains pick up more and more patterns that we use to interpret and classify the world around us. We want to minimize prediction error and relegate unimportant details to the background. We get worse at learning new things and changing our minds. More and more of life feels like autopilot.
Babies don’t have this problem — they can stare at a face for minutes, wide-eyed and confused. They haven’t yet learned the visual processing techniques and the informational patterns to quickly interpret what they are seeing and set it aside. Everything is still new for them. Every face looks like a Lynchian character.
For us to see the world that way again, sometimes it takes art that catches us off guard. Something that we can’t fit into learned patterns or neat interpretations. Art to be experienced, not explained.