"...and inescapable!"

I agree. Lynch is particularly good at scenes that are both menacing and funny but without diminishing either mood. The classic example is Adam Kesher's confrontation with the cowboy in Mulholland Drive.

I'd say that depends on your definition of "many", really - I never thought (or wrote) that ONLY newer Lynch fans had a problem with it - but you will find that they make up the majority of IE's detractors. 

 I think I covered most of this in the post you quoted - it really depends how you look at the characters. I don't see ANY linearity in IE, so I don't feel the need to try and make sense of the movie's chronology; if I did that, I'd be imposing a narrative on the movie - which would kind of defeat the purpose of it, at least within the framework of my interpretation. As for the rabbits - to me it's all part of the same thing. Put a bunch of animals on a generic sitcom set and add a generic sitcom laugh track - is the result automatically a sitcom? Well yes, if you can imagine a framework in which that makes sense (in other words, if you are "good with animals") - but there's the crucial part of that sentence: if you can imagine..... If you can't, you're boned. In your post you actually wrote something which is essential to this:

This rich stew of information seems to invite the viewer to try and piece it together in some way

That's just it: it seems to invite, but maybe that invitation is just an illusion? Do the three old men really "turn into" the rabbits, or do they simply occupy similar positions on the screen? Is that similarity enough for us to assume that they have actually become the rabbits? Same with the repetitions - does something acquire significance through repetition?

I'm not offering answers because I find the questions themselves more interesting. And to me, IE is a movie which asks many questions - but viewers can choose to answer them or not!  

This is an interesting discussion. What intrigues me is, there's talk of a backlash from long-term Lynch fans but the only real criticism I've seen on messageboards was posted before the film was released. People saw the clip on Room To Dream and/or read it was filmed on DV and began freaking out. The posts around that time were quite vicious. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single post that's been openly hostile towards the film. I'm not saying people don't dislike it, but they're keeping quiet about it - hence the conspicuous lack of IE discussion in the title of this thread.

I watch DL's films for the mood, mystery and beauty of the images. The film isn't ruined for me if it doesn't appear to make any narrative sense so DL can pile up the scenes, images, moods etc. and it doesn't bump me out of the film. I can understand why people feel INLAND EMPIRE is self-indulgent (it is, very) and want a more conventional narrative, but almost everything he's ever released has been panned for being self-indulgent, messy and/or incoherent at some point. Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway were reviled when they were first released and it took years for them to achieve any kind of mass appeal.

And lest we forget, David Lynch has made three films with conventional beginning/middle/end narratives (The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story) and they're never discussed on the boards - ever.   

But the cultural attitude towards INLAND EMPIRE will change over time. The response to FWWM was vitriolic and it wasn't just the critics who hated it but fans too. All these years later people watch FWMM and it doesn't carry with it the same sense of expectation. People were disappointed that it didn't resolve the cliffhangers from the series. Now people seem more willing to accept it for what it is - a film in its own right. It seems that where filmmaking's concerned good and bad are relative terms.

I've loved (and I mean loved) FWWM since it was released and I'm not sure individuals have gone from thinking it was terrible to thinking it's genius but that's what happened culturally. The same thing happened to Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Anyone watching FWWM for the first time now can go out and buy books and magazines, read messageboards and FAQ's and watch interviews on the DVD's. None of that existed when the film was released and people had to invest time and energy in dialogue, symbolism etc.  

Over the next ten years articles will be written about INLAND EMPIRE. Fans will watch the DVD fifty times and post their observations on messageboards. When Lost Highway was released the narrative structure was incredibly radical and people didn't know what to make of that either. I must have seen FWWM a hundred times and I'm still discovering new things after fifteen years. I've only seen INLAND EMPIRE twice and I have no idea what's left for me to discover but it's kind of exciting. I would write about how aesthetic sensibilities change over time but I don't want people to die of boredom reading this post.   

I can see why you might not like INLAND EMPIRE and I respect your point of view.

I'd say that depends on your definition of "many", really - I never thought (or wrote) that ONLY newer Lynch fans had a problem with it - but you will find that they make up the majority of IE's detractors. 

I'm not sure that's true. A quick trawl through the comments on Amazon turns up several thumbs-down verdicts for IE from people who liked Lynch's early work such as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet.

Now here's a question:

If for some reason you didn't know IE was a Lynch film (hard to imagine, I know, what with Rabbits,  the familiar casting, and Bucky's voice,) would you be more or less critical?

Let's say this was a lesser name director and Lynch only put his name on as producer, like Nadja (which left me cold, personally.)