It Must Be Good

I just finished watching Eraserhead, the 1977 film directed by surrealist David Lynch. Here's a little taste of it if you're unfamiliar.

Now, I'm not inherently opposed to Lynch's work, but I don't automatically label any of it as genius either. That's the thing I find so irritating about Lynch's films. I can keep up with him and what I think he's trying to say for a while, but then his images get so obtuse that any meaning that he may be trying to show is obscured. In other words, I can only take so much weirdness before I give up trying to decipher the secret code of the director's visual language. After that line is crossed, if the director still hasn't let me in on the joke, he's finished. I press the stop button.

The most frustrating part for me is reading what critics say about this film. It seems that nobody really knows what the film is about although some have pretty good guesses. But with as many good reviews as a film like this gets, it appears as though the reviewers are merely giving it a rubber stamp of quality out of fear that they'll come off as intellectually inferior to their peers. ("I don't get it, but I'm going to say I love it so I don't look stupid.")

In case it's not obvious, I didn't really like this film very much. But that's just my opinion. If you've seen this movie, can you enlighten me?