Woeful Misinterpretation: Mulholland Drive

What ho! A demonic homeless man.

Alas, there is a David Lynch film that is more confusing than Eraserhead! I was feeling smug up to about halfway through the film for managing to grasp the relatively simply plot, but I was soon consumed by woe as it turned out that everything I had witnessed was probably a dream. By the end of the film, the confusion was almost unbearable. Who was the strange creature that haunted the dreams of a minor character who only appeared in one seemingly unrelated scene? Who were the old couple who resulted in the death of Naomi Watts? Was the end of the film a prologue to the start? Did Naomi Watts actually see her own decaying corpse? Was I meant to be this confused?

Betty and Laura attempt to follow the plot of Mulholland Drive

Perhaps there was an antidote to my despair: it transpired that Lynch had released some notes to help gormless viewers like myself wade through his convoluted masterpiece. But this only made it worse! "Notice appearances of the red lampshade". "Where is Aunt Ruth?". Apparently Aunt Ruth is dead. Poor Aunt Ruth. And there is no less than six interpretations of how the dead Aunt Ruth interacts with the film.
In fact the beginning and the end of the film are particularly opaque. Apparently the beginning shows the Jitterbug Contest in which Diane Selwyn rose to fame. But this is only according to the internet, and therefore not true. The internet also posits that the blue haired woman shown at the end is in fact the ghost of Aunt Ruth. Why?
By this point, I had discovered that attempts to unravel the mysteries of Lynch were bordering on hysteria. Perhaps he was just being weird for the sake of it. Why not end the film with a blue haired woman and the protagonist exploding after being pursued by tiny yet demonic old people? Perhaps the laws of reason do not apply to high cinematic art. Maybe the seemingly unconnected array of bizarre images are meant to produce a profound emotional reaction deep in my core. Is it possible that I'm not really communing with my inner being? Or perhaps I'm just a bit thick.
Needless to say, David Lynch has outwitted me.