So I’m watching Mulholland Drive right now and I’m finding it hard to get into. It seems like a pretty cool story, but I just can’t seem to enjoy it too much. Is there something I’m missing about this? What is it about?
I know that it was first created as a Television Pilot a few years ago and it was in theaters last year and I was intrigued about it when I rented it, but I guess it’s not what I expected. Just my ramblings…
Well… once it gets past the halfway point (you’ll know the halfway point when you see it), the movie picks up a whole lot, and makes the first half, in retrospect, seem much more interesting.
And here’s a word of warning… don’t try to make sense of it. I spent about three months trying oh-so-hard to come up with an interpretation that A: made sense and B: was linear…
The first half of the movie is, by most explanations, an idealistic - if someone lame and flat - fantasy by the blond chick (whose name I forget) as she’s masturbating… everything in the fantasy is SORT OF tied into reality… everything after the masturbation scene is real, though. Supposedly.
And the cowboy, in my opinion, is the creepiest character EVER to be on a screen, in ANY movie.
—And the cowboy, in my opinion, is the creepiest character EVER to be on a screen, in ANY movie.—
What about the pale guy in Lost Highway? That he was played by Robert Blake only makes it more creepy in retrospect.
Pale Guy: “I’m at your house… right now. (hands bewildered man a cell phone) Call me.”
So I finally finished watching it ( I took a break) and I still don’t really understand it. I’m really confused, but oh well. At least I finally saw what all the buzz was about.
I don’t know how to do the spoilers box, so SPOILERS ahead.
Who was the guy that in the beginning said he had a dream about being at Winkies and then he was there at the end when Diane/Betty was at Winkies with the hitman?
Anyways, it was a decent movie, but maybe I just wasn’t ready to commit the whole 2 hours and 20 mins to watch it all the way through.
Thanks for the insight SPOOFE.
Silencio
And who was that woman who sang that song you are reverring to in the theater! Or, I should ask, whose voice was it? I think she was Awesome!
There’s a great article at Salon (chock full of spoilers) that tries to address the different aspects of the film.
My take is similar:
Simply summed up, the movie is a tribute (?) to the dream/nightmare of hollywood. The fresh faced innocent who falls in love with a social climbing casting couch cushion. The innocence is lost and the dream shattered and death ensues. The film is filled with emotional and visual touch points that are repeated/expanded in the ‘dream states’ of the film.
Once again my interpretationReverse the order and it helps to understand. Diane was at Winkies and had the full realization that she has called down death upon the thing she loves most and that emotional reality was the most frightening thing in her life. At that moment she sees the man at the counter. In the ‘dream state’ of the early part of the movie that man is cast to play her role in a more visceral scene that opens the movie.
You should try to read some of the reviews at imdb.com - http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?0166924 - some of them are very interesting. They definitely helped my understanding about what the film was (or could be) about. Though I still don’t quite understand the scene in the theatre or the old homeless man 
god i loved that film, no reason i could put my finger on (maybe the hot sex scene, who can say) and no idea what it was about.
helped that we went online and read the “official” and “unofficial” versions of what the hell it was supposed to be about.
watched it again. loved it more.
still no clue why.
lynch rules.
I enjoyed this movie, but like most of Lynch’s work it probably ain’t for everybody. I second the recommendation to read the SALON article, as it goes through a whole host of the most asked about parts of the film and provides some good insight into what they “might” have meant.
In addition, there have been a couple of previous other threads about it.
Apart from the lesbian scenes, this Lynch flick did nothing for me. Granted, those scenes are not bad. Not bad at all.
A great description of Lynch’s movies that I heard was that they may not make rational sense, but they do make emotional sense. Lost Highway, for instance, doesn’t make a lick of sense in a linear fashion, but if you look it as a movie about jealousy and voyeurism it all comes into focus.
I still hate Blue Velvet though. Kyle McLachlan ruins it, IMO.
See, I always took it as a simple story about rejected love. If you take the last third and put it in front of the film, it seems to make a lot more sense. A young woman moves to Hollywood, meets a beautiful woman, falls in love, gets rejected, hires a hitman to bump her off, hitman fails, lover gets amnesia, girl A doesn’t know lover’s still alive, so in grief kills herself, and lover wanders around, finds new friend and the two go on a quest to discover who she truly is.
Okay, maybe I need better punctuation there, but hey, everything about this movie is disjointed and confusing, why shouldn’t the reviews be?
Overall, the film is incredible, if simply for the visual style alone. I just loved the look of the whole thing. I’ve seen a few of Lynch’s other crazy films, and I’ve learned that you can’t try to annalyse them for what they mean in terms of plot and the like. He’s very big on trying to convey emotions/sounds/colors in his visuals, and that just makes for some crazy ass stuff when you try and mix them into plot. Re-read Raygun99’s post again for a better explaination for what I mean.
My big question is: Forget the Cowboy, what the fuck is up with those old people? That was fucking scary!
Again my take:The represent the small town dreams and hopes that Jitterbug Girl held (and her small town parents/grandparents/neighbors held for her) coming back to haunt her in the end and drive her to suicide. They start out impossibly quaint, happy, and freindly in the ‘idyllic’ part of the film. At the end their laugher is horrifying in its reminder of what she has lost.
Raygun99, i would tend to agree with that. I never try to analyze Lynch films until well after I’ve seen them several times. I try and just let myself be carried away with the imagery. He doesn’t make scary movies, but I’ll tell you, when he wants to make you creeped out he has no trouble at all.
Very good at eliciting emotion, I think, in a non-Spielberg way.