Needless to say, there have been umpteen films spawned since, many tipping into parodic excess. None has come close to yanking off the sex, grotesquery and violence in small-town America in such a scabrous mishmash of tones and registers as Blue Velvet. His work explodes with experiential chaos. Beneath the images he conjures that stun and shock pulses vivid emotional undercurrents. No single emotional plane exists, upon which can be ascribed a monolithic identity. Instead there’s a multiplicity of selves, varied surfaces freely leaping between the past, present and future like in the three-hour epic Inland Empire (2006). The screen itself splits. Sudden dislocations take shape within seemingly overt connections like one between a scene of a prostitute entering a hotel room and a later one with her bleeding. However, the actors are different. So is the space and time. Kael says, “Lynch’s use of irrational material works the way it’s supposed to: we read his images at some not fully conscious level.”