Cremaster... what the hell just happened?

Lynch is no where near as impenetrable as Barney. The former sees how much he can warp and distort a narrative thread while still maintaining comprehensibility; the latter dismisses narrative altogether and merely regurgitates inchoate symbolic/mythic/referent jumbles onto a projected screen. I'd say, given their goals, Lynch is far more successful: with the exception of "Lost Highway," his movies actually have simplistic plot-lines that come through after one or two viewings, but are subsumed in spectacularly cinematic evocations of mood. Some of them, like "The Elephant Man," "Wild at Heart" and "The Straight Story," are even downright mainstream ("Wild at Heart" is, admittedly, rather extreme, but it's still basically just pulp). And even with "Lost Highway," Lynch has readily admitted that he also has no idea what exactly is going on, so how is he being 'dishonest?' Barney so far has produced little beyond megalithic testaments to his own art-cult personality (accompanied, as all high art must, with volumes upon volumes of pseudo-explanatory obfuscation intended, rather dishonestly, to elucidate its 'meaning'), and in terms of basic structural quality (not in terms of concept or art design, but raw filmic effect), the cycle progresses from gassy student-film indulgence to the workmanlike sheen of overproduced infomercials. The closest Lynch ever comes to Barney-esque navel gazing is in "Eraserhead," and that was 20 years prior and executed with a h*lluva lot less ego (at least Lynch doesn't *star* in the thing) and a h*lluva lot more self-awareness and wit. "Eraserhead" is actually pretty droll in parts; people try to claim the same of "Cremaster 3", but I think they're confusing 'droll' with 'insistently abstruse.'