[spoiler]
The whole film, really. It is set up as a mystery; with an amnesiac woman stumbling from a car accident and getting helped by a naive, talented young would-be starlet. As they investigate, they become lovers. In an apparantly unrelated subplot, meanwhile, a mysterious, sinister conspiracy forces a rather arrogant young director to cast a certain girl for a film, and really ruin his day in the process. It’s much weirder than that, but that description will do.
About three quarters through the film, everything suddenly changes. The naive young girl suddenly becomes a worn-out failure, the other woman was her girlfriend once but is now getting engaged to the director. All sorts of other elements and characters from the first part of the film reappear in different roles now.
This doesn’t really do justice to the sheer, hypnotic strangeness of the film though[/spoiler]
Mullholland Drive is exactly the sort of “dream logic” movie I was talking about. Don’t try and find an answer, because there ISN’T ONE! The whole point of the movie is what Mr. Tambo calls it “hypnotic strangeness.” I think the recent spate of puzzle movies has made people expect answers where there aren’t any.
But I don’t think Lynch and his ilk are, in the immortal words of Moe Szyslak, “weird for the sake of being weird.” He’s just not making strictly narrative movies. Granted, there are narrative elements, but they serve more to disorient and create a mood than tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Well, I think you have a pretty strange standard of good storytelling if it relies on something that exists only in the author’s mind and does not appear in the story at all.
My own story was very popular with my classmates and received an A, with a comment from my professor saying it was one of the finest stories she’d ever seen a student produce. I feel reasonably confident that it was not an example of “poor storytelling”, even though I could not tell you whether the woman was “really” possessed by a ghost or not.
**
You’re free to see the movie how you like, although I don’t understand why anyone would choose to interpret it as a disappointing failure of a murder mystery when you could instead interpret it as an interesting, perhaps even brilliant, examination of our imperfect perception of reality.
Uh, yes, if the writer/director wants the audience to come to one particular conclusion then of course the writer/director must know what that conclusion is. But if the writer/director does not expect the audience to come to one particular conclusion then it would be counterproductive for them to sit down and work out the “real” answer.
A few months ago I saw a made-for-TV movie called “Disappearance” with Susan Dey and Harry Hamlin. It was about a family that goes to an out of the way ghost town to explore, and all sorts of strange things happen to them (members of the family disappear, things go bump in the night, something disables their car, a mysterious force kicks up a wind that traps them, somebody gets attacked in a dark mineshaft, etc.). Throughout the movie, theories are offered as to what is happeneing: Maybe it’s aliens, maybe it’s supernatural forces, maybe it’s a family of cannibalistic mutants, etc.
The movie ends (and I don’t think this movie is worth spoiler boxes) with the family finally driving out of town. A mysterious something chases their car (you only see from its point of view), and the car is hit and flipped over. The next thing you know, the family is living in the town closest to the ghost town, acting as though they’ve lived their all their lives and not knowing one another.
The movie had some good suspense and scary moments, and the whole time you’re tryiing to figure out what the heck is going on (or at least I was). And then the movie just ended the way it did with no explanations whatsoever. I suppose you could say that this is a good thing, and that I can now speculate all I want as to what the movie meant. To me, though, it was obvious that the filmmaker didn’t have a clue what was really happening, and that the movie therefore had no meaning. It was just bad film-making, plain and simple.
Of course, it was a made-for-TV movie, so what was I expecting?
It will be very shortly. Until I put up my complete SIFF update (and resume regular reviews), I’ve been sending highlights to Ain’t It Cool, run under the name Harold Hellman. (Put “hellman” in the Search box in the left margin.)
I never said there had to be a real answer, just a real world.
In Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” it is not at all clear if there are real ghosts, or if the governess is a freak. However, it is very clear that the characters live in a world where certain events have transpired and some people believe in ghosts and some do not and some believe in ghosts but do not believe the governess.
The story would not work if the cook, for instance, started out being a staunch believer in ghosts, but in the last half of the book plot turns hinge on her insistence that there is no such thing. Just as the story would be a little disturbing if, in the first part of the book, the cook was described as a tall thin woman with red hair and a bad temper, and in the last half of the book she’s a another creature entirely.
Obviously, the point of a story like “The Lady or the Tiger” is to force you, the reader, to confront your attitudes about the predicament – something that would be impossible if the set-up didn’t convince you that there was a tiger behind on door, and a lady behind the other.
John Sayles movie “Limbo” has an open ending – and such an ending would be a huge cheat if you didn’t know enough about those characters and the world they live in to understand all the possibilities, and why those characters made that choice in the face of such possibilities.
I never had any trouble with Memento or Usual Suspects, but Mulholland Drive just annoyed me, despite the (nearly) saving grace of hot lesbian action.
Basic Instinct, though, has an element tacked on at the end that I found irritating since it completely undermined the plot’s al.ready-shaky logic. There wasn’t nearly enough hot lesbian action in that movie to make me forgive such a blatant insult to my intelligence.
(Hmmm, that last sentence sounded better in my head than it looks on the screen. Oh, well…)
I’ll admit, though, that some films invite more analysis than is needed. I’ve never understood the compulsion some people have to rewrite Blade Runner so Deckard is a replicant. To me, that idea ruins a perfectly-good movie.
Is MGC active again?