The little boy comes screaming to his Neanderthal father that there is a man with a stick in his mouth. His jaws are pried open. As the father tries with incredible violence to shake the stick out of the man's mouth, he literally destroys his body, driving the stick through his eyes. Lynch has us because what has happened to this man is a nightmare. He can't do anything and his only hope is brutal and ineffective. I believe that what we see in these animations are the kinds of things that we fear. How the stick got there is of no importance. It throws our mortality and our helplessness in our faces and we know that ultimately we are doomed by our own fragility.