#3. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
(director: David Lynch; starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller and Justin Theroux)
I didn’t really like David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. when I first saw it. It’s not that I wasn’t open to something really experimental and non-conventional, I knew going into the film that became hard to follow, but I was careful to pay extra attention to the details so that way I wouldn’t be left scratching my head at the end… which is exactly what happened anyway. I went online to help me figure out just what was supposed to be going on in those last twenty-or-so minutes and found a detailed explanation on the IMDb that accounted for most of the Lynchian bizarreness, but I was still frustrated. It was the movie-going equivalent of a high school English class, where to ‘appreciate’ it we have to find as many counts of symbolism as possible in order to decode the hidden message. That’s not a work of art, that’s a word puzzler in the weekend papers. But later on I finally came around to Mulholland Dr. (maybe it was just finally having the puzzle solved for me so I could see how it was put together) and it grew on me in a big way. There was just something about it… the fact that the ‘dream’ that accounts for three-quarters of the runtime is more cohesively easy to follow and logical than when we finally awake to confront reality which is fractured and confusing; the way it manages to both completely embrace Hollywood conventions while simultaneously standing completely outside of them and accomplishing something radical and a little bit subversive; and even the moments of laugh out loud weirdness, mostly involving Justin Theroux’s endlessly tortured movie director. Of course even having an ‘official explanation’ of the movie’s inner workings will hardly explain half of it no matter how thorough. There are still many scenes that seem to be utilizing a language that operates outside the laws of logic, while at the same time remaining pivotal to the story Lynch is trying to tell. In that way Mulholland Dr. is a mystery that only becomes more mysterious the closer one looks at it. But rather than just playing pointless mindgames, we still subconsciously know that an answer lies just beneath the surface, it might be staring us straight in the face. But isn’t that one of the most diabolical paradoxes of the search for truth: even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you ever know it is the thing you didn’t know?
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