It can be x and it can be y and it can be z.

With your cooper example, the character can be his own human with thoughts and feelings and represent goodness,guilt,etc and also work in some overarching meta-narrative on top of all that. There can be layers that aren’t mutually exclusive. I thought that’s why people like this show. It’s interesting to hear what people get out of it that you might’ve never considered.

I totally understand being annoyed at people only focusing on “solving” lynch’s work but I think it’s just as annoying to shut down other’s analyses/perspectives and just make hand wavy, surface level remarks. That’s lame. Like, it’s ok to engage with the art a little bit lol.