Susan and I watched it and then said, “Well, OK, then.” We had given up trying to follow it or become attached to any of the characters long before, so we just went ahead “for the ride” (as someone put it). To think, we could have been in bed instead.
After I saw Mulholland Drive, my brother pointed me to this article:
http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/10/23/mulholland_drive_analysis/index.html. It pretty much helped explain most of the movie.
You know, this is probably the best synopsis of MD that I’ve ever read.
And those two chicks were TOTALLY doing it.
The lesbian scenes are the only thing worth watching… fast forward… 
I think the biggest thing to consider is that it started out as a TV pilot. So this is the start of 20 plots that would all be explored and well, done in a tv series.
That and Lynch was not raised on this planet but rather one with an entirely different method of telling a story.
Lynch is extremely hard to follow. I saw him on an interview show, and he kept going on about how film is about truth, the truth will make the film, truth, truth, truth, blah, blah, blah. I loved Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man…but I couldn’t understand Eraserhead to save my life. I thought Mulholland Drive had the potential to be good, but it was just too disconnected for me.
Eve, I’m disappointed in you. The secondary writings on MD should make it pretty clear (unless they’re all a part of the vast conspiracy) that to call it “crap,” rather than simply saying that it didn’t push your personal buttons, is lazy criticism at best. Sorry; I’m one of those who think that there’s ALWAYS more to be understood in any piece of art than a first glance provides, so an initially negative reaction is more likely to give way to a positive one with further study than the other way around. I’m surprised that it didn’t at least intrigue you enough to give it another try.
Well, dave, you set yourself up for that one. To approach a Lynch film from a traditional plot-driven perspective–eSPECially MD–is to preordain frustration. That’s like going to a Jim Carrey, or Robin Williams, or Jerry Lewis film and expecting a well considered, thoughtful, subtle performance: that would just be silly, right? and to feel frustrated would be even sillier, right?
(Apropos, *Mullholland Falls * is a decent, if flawed, film by one of my favorite directors: Lee Tamahori, whose varied career includes the dark indie masterpiece Once Were Warriors, the criminally undervalued The Edge, and the best Bond film of recent vintage, Die Another Day. I’m a bit apprehensive, but curious, to see what he’ll do with the *XXX * sequel.)
Nope. I’m still goin’ with “pretentious, artsy-fartsy, self-indulgent crap.” But at least it did have Ann Miller in it.
Well, I know that you’re being at least a little tongue in cheek. But to call a piece of art definitively “crap,” especially “pretentious, artsy-fartsy, self-indulgent crap,” is to call its defenders liars. But this is a longtime, over-obsessed issue for me, and I’ll drop the hijack.
I’ve got an idea for a new piece - write “this is a pretentious, artsy-fartsy, self indulgent piece of crap” on posterboard, tape it to a stick, put it in a show, and watch the critics heads spin.
Well of course you didn’t understand it! You are supposed to watch “Lost Highway” right before it. Then it all makes complete sense!
I saw Mulholland Drive a while back, so the details are mercifully fuzzy. The pain does get better with time.
That said, my questions about the film didn’t have much to do with “what” was going on - they were ‘whys’.
“Why do people still let David Lynch have a camera?”
“Why am I watching this?”
“Why the devil would a director, editing his own movie for DVD, choose to blur nudity that was present in the cinema version?”
“Why, God, why?”
Once I realized that the Little Man in the Glassed In Room [TM] was a metaphor for the East German Military Industrial Complex in the early to mid 1970’s, the rest of the film made a lot more sense.
oh, and those chicks were totally into it
Just in case I gave the wrong impression when I mentioned the censored sex scenes - Are you saying that you’ve seen the DVD version and that it was blurred? Or are you assuming that I was watching it on DVD? I was watching it on TV (a non-premium cable channel) and that version was censored.
Of course it’s not. No more than calling a movie “really good” is calling the people who hated it liars.
But I’m pretty sure we’ve been over this ground before.
And from what I understand, the DVD release of Mulholland Drive was censored at the request of the actress, because she didn’t want a whole bunch of nekkid DVD screencaps of her floating around the internet. But she was okay with herself naked and fifteen foot tall in front of a crowded theater. This is one of those explanations that doesn’t actually explain anything.
Re: the DVD blurring, John Neff (who worked on mixing and editing the sound for MD) said:
Yeah but you both are missing the big picture.
Those chicks were totally doing it
Whaa? if you hated it you hated it. That doesn’t make it “crap”; it just means that YOU, as an individual, hated it. Fine. In addition, for things that require more effort to appreciate, it’s perfectly fine not to find, on first viewing, that it’s worth your time or effort to dig deeper. Fine again. YOU didn’t like it on first viewing. Again, that doesn’t make it “crap.”
I see it this way: you’re more likely to be able to convince someone, with effort, that a piece of art they didn’t like on their first experience of it is better than they thought, by *adding * to their knowledge of it, or suggesting an interpretation that hadn’t occured to them, or whatever–than you are to convince someone who likes a piece of art that it’s crap, because whatever good they see in it can hardly be unseen.
This is the value of critics, IMHO. A good critic can *add * to one’s understanding, and therefore appreciation, of a movie. There are plenty of movies that require knowledge, or consideration, or whatever, beyond what’s immediately evident on the screen, on first viewing. Take frinstance a parody. With most parodies, one’s appreciation of it will be greatly enhanced by familiarity with the object it’s parodying. Lacking that knowledge you’d miss a lot of what the parody is trying to say.
David Lynch is an extremely postmodern director. Postmodernism artworks, almost by definition, refer to things outside of what’s literally happening in front of you. That doesn’t make all postmodernism crap (although a lof of it is lazy and shallow), it just means that it’s a different approach to saying something.
In any case, I don’t think calling something “good” makes anyone who likes it feel like they’ve been accused of lying, so despite your semantic parallel I don’t buy your argument. Most people who thinks something’s “crap” will react to a disagreement by feeling themselves superior, for not being fooled by what they see as the emperor’s new clothes. My amateur psychoanalysis interprets that as defensive bluster–often; not always–for feeling “left out” of the joke, or whatever. Which is stupid. It’s every individual’s choice whether they want to apply specific effort to understanding something that requires that effort; that they choose to expend their efforts elsewhere doesn’t make such works crap; neither does it make them stupid.
But it does mean that those who have found something of value in a work have found something of value. Therefore, and absolutely, there is something of value in the work. Therefore, and absolutely, the work is NOT crap. To state otherwise is to promote your individual opinion to a statement of fact, and to call someone who claims to have found something of value a liar.
*In any case, I don’t think calling something “good” makes anyone who likes *hates ** it feel like they’ve been accused of lying . . .
Nope. Making a judgement regarding a work of art, whatever that judgement may be, is simply evaluating that artwork.
I liked Mulholland Drive quite a bit. I am, however, able to differentiate between Eve insulting a movie I like, and her insulting me. She has definitely not done the latter.
I saw a cloud yesterday that looked like a bunny. Was the bunny shape in fact a quality of the cloud, or a product of my interpretation of the cloud? Does my seeing the bunny mean that it absolutely is there, and not a product of my imagination? If someone else doesn’t see the bunny, does that mean that they simply aren’t willing to put in the effort to dig deeper and find the bunny in the cloud?
Finding something of value that someone else doesn’t find doesn’t promote one’s positive opinion into a fact any more than not finding something of value promotes one’s negative opinion into a fact.