Mulholland Dr.

I don’t like being laughed at. When I’m trying to be funny, people are laughing at things I say or my behavior, not at me personally. I don’t like my friends laughing at me, my family, or even people I don’t know. And I especially don’t like directors laughing at me.

I’ve heard Mulholland Dr. described as “David Lynch trying to be artsy-fartsy, but ending up just being fartsy.” That is true, but it goes a little bit deeper than that. Mulholland Dr. is obviously a project he had a lot invested in, and was not willing to let go of lightly. It started off as a TV pilot, but the television executives (rightly) said, “One, we’re not going to release it. Two, you should get your head examined.” So David Lynch just shrugged his shoulders and decided to make a movie out of it. That was better anyway, by his reckoning, because that was where his penchant for disturbing visuals and graphic sex could really be given free reign. You can’t have a naked lesbian sex scene on TV, breasts and all, but in the movies…

By the end of the movie, we can’t even be sure that the two women in the sex scene are even different characters, and that is not the only thing ridiculous about this movie. A lot of the plotlines don’t make any sense, the circumstances and some of the visuals are bizarre to the point of being silly, and not a single person in the movie talks like a normal human being would. And the entire time, it seemed that David Lynch is saying to the audience, “Ha ha, you stupid people! You’re way too dumb to understand this movie! Only I, with my superior intellect, can fully decipher it.” Well, screw you, Dave. I’ll just watch The Princess Bride. At least Rob Reiner has some respect for me.

Now, I understand that watching Mulholland Dr. is supposed to be like having a dream. In a dream, events don’t make sense, people do things that they would not normally do, and ridiculous circumstances seem commonplace. Also, if it were to run like a movie, it would be very poorly edited. Truthfully, shooting a movie that is supposed to be structured like a dream is not a very good idea. When you have a dream, you’re asleep, so you’re in a certain mode. But you’re in a completely different mode when watching a movie, plus you’re wide awake. Those two things, that fundamental difference, make watching a movie and having a dream incompatible. You can’t do one while you’re doing the other, and David Lynch shouldn’t try to make you.

This was an abysmal movie, and I didn’t enjoy it in the slightest. I get that the point was not really for me to enjoy it, but that is left for movies that really have something important to say. Mulholland Dr. doesn’t. It shows you all these weird images, and then asks, “Wasn’t that weird?” I didn’t spend any money on it specifically, but I wish it hadn’t taken up space on my Netflix queue. That was a space of time when I could have been seeing something worthwhile.

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22 Rating: -10

Particle Man