Denby really gets into it here. I liked his discussion of "Pulp Fiction". Some of the directors may be just playing with us or, perhaps, acting out their boredom with that Hollywood script-conference menace the conventional “story arc.” But others may be trying to jolt us into a new understanding of art, or even a new understanding of life. In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted. Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?
I've been thinking about these questions frequently since I saw INLAND EMPIRE, which really has me waiting in anticipation of Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop -- which should be out in another 11 days, I'm told by multiple sources. As it was written over a year ago now: For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?
One day I will eventually sit down and write my thesis about INLAND EMPIRE. This may have to wait until the film is released on DVD, but for now I will just identify some of its themes. "Traditional" film is like software that follows the code/data separation paradigm, whereas INLAND EMPIRE is more like self-modifying code. The thesis will also explore the computer science concept of reflection as applied to film, and Lynch's style/process will be related to programming "languages that do not make a distinction between runtime and compile-time." I might also draw comparisons between mainstream Hollywood and the comments of futurist programmers, who say that "We believe the result of the common academic approach is computer science graduates who make programs that are fat, slow, and incorrect. The present state of the art in programming discourages experimentation and formal analysis." The New Disorder: Adventures in film narrative | 
