(CAUTION: SPOILER BELOW)
We watched Mulholland Drive last Sunday (yesterday), and it has me pretty freaked. I mean, WTF is going on in that movie? I really liked Lost Highway, and there are plenty of similarities between the two (almost too many, one might opine), but at least with Lost Highway I was able to fit the ends of the mobius strip together and make it make sense. Mulholland Drive just has too much bizarre, unconnected stuff, it's too much of a puzzle for me. I think I might have to watch it a time or two more. One web site I found (google search: "mulholland drive what the fuck is going on") does a pretty good job of putting some of the bigger pieces into place, such as that the second part of the movie is "real", i.e. Diane is the real person, and the events shown really happen, while the first part is Diane's dream or fantasy, and Betty is her persona in that dream.
Actually, given that the first part is a paranoid hallucination, there's not a lot of point in making it all make sense. But still... why would Diane include, as part of her fantasy, finding herself dead and decomposing in her bed?
And also, Diane's neighbor comes to the door and says that Diane has been missed for three weeks. Where did those three weeks go? Was she magically asleep, only to be awakened by the Cowboy? And what's all that about, anyway?
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Actually, it doesn't make sense to say that the second part is more "real" than the first part. I mean, the homeless guy has the blue cube? And when he drops it, the tiny loony old folks come out, and get into Diane's apartment, and terrorize her?
Re:There's no "solution"
rafael on 2002-07-16T08:38:12
You can only acknowledge Lynch's virtuosity here, even if you don't like the movie. (Even though I don't think there's a complete lack of logic here. Depends on the viewpoint. Joyce's final chapter of the second part of Ulysses seems completely illogical -- until you understand that this chapter doesn't depict the dream of one character or another, but rather the dream of the book itself, playing with its own symbols. I think Mullholland Drive is a machine that operates in the same kind of way.) (And by the way, has somebody noticed the similarity between the small blue box and Dune's Gom Jobbar?)"Mulholland Drive" works directly on the emotions, like music.
You can read them here if you like.
You were clearly more patient with this movie than I was.
Re:My review
jdporter on 2002-07-15T18:05:07
Yeah, I guess you could say I was patient. Thing is, I kept watching hoping for clues that would help make it all make sense. Well, some people appear to have figured out a fair bit of it, but I was not able to on my own. Heck, I didn't even figure out that the first part was just imaginary.
Now I'm left with this disturbing sensation of incompleteness (i.e. lack of "closure")... perhaps even incompletability. That's the only reason I want to know "what's going on", just to ease that unease.
All in all, I thought the movie was very cool, very stylish, and visually very intriguing.
But the second part, being so very different in tone, was very depressing. Throughout the first part, I was able to be optimistic that things were going to "work out okay" and our protagonist would be happy in the end. In the second part we're told in no uncertain terms that the play is a tragedy, and no happiness will obtain for anyone.
Re:My review
ask on 2002-07-15T20:28:56
djberg, As far as I'm concerned you totally missed the point if you "lost patience" like that.
Maybe it works better seeing it on the big screen too. Big dark room. Big pictures. Big sound. Get absorbed into the oddness.
See it again with a more open mind.:-)
- askRe:My review
djberg96 on 2002-07-15T21:13:27
djberg, As far as I'm concerned you totally missed the point if you "lost patience" like that.Oh, I got the point (as much as David Lynch *ever* has a point). *My* point is that I just didn't give a shit.
Re:My review
ask on 2002-07-15T23:28:50
*My* point is that I just didn't give a shit.
How would you know? You didn't even watch the movie!:-)
- ask
