Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
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Here are some thoughts on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. I really don't want you to read them unless you've seen the movie. Probably best if you've seen Lost Highway and Twin Peaks as well.
* I can't imagine this is a novel observation, but this movie is basically the Rosetta Stone for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job. From the opening jitterbug sequence and its swing dancers crudely superimposed over a flat neon pink greenscreen background, to an illicit sexual romance in a huge and soulless Los Angeles mansion, to tiny little people emerging out of nowhere, to its overall positioning of uncomfortable material on the precipice between comedy and horror. Tim and Eric have talked about Lynch's influence in the past, and they've cast Ray Wise so it's not like it's some big secret, but having now seen this film specifically, I see just how direct that influence is.
* I got into this a bit with Matt Maxwell on Twitter, but this sure seems like an anti-love letter to Los Angeles, doesn't it? I know that's a facile reading. I've long defended Lynch against detractors who claim things like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are cheap sophomoric "look, suburbia/small-town America is FUCKED UP!" posturing, so I want to make it clear that I don't think this is a similar case only it's L.A. that's eeeeevil this time. Still, in Twin Peaks in particular there is clearly much that both the characters we see as trustworthy moral arbiters, and by implication Lynch and Mark Frost, see as good and worth preserving in their small town. I don't get that at all in Mulholland Drive The only people who seem happy with Los Angeles in this movie are either naive dupes or amoral assholes, or worse, of course.
* And there are additional cues, if not clues, that there's something wrong with this place. The elderly couple who escort Betty from the airport and wish her luck are revealed almost right away as...not...right. Their glee over Betty's arrival comes across like Minnie and Roman Castevet happily welcoming Rosemary into the Bamford. And the man behind the diner^..."There's a man. In back of this place. He's the one who's doing it." Given what happens at the end of the film, he's like the black beating heart of the city, the font from which the rest of the monstrousness springs. And he's right there behind the Winkie's. Say what you will about Glastonbury Grove and the Black Lodge, but they weren't right behind the Double R.^^
* To use a favorite expression of mine, one thing that really struck me is how my experience with Lynch's past work--not to mention my own generic preoccupations--had me looking at hoofprints and thinking of zebras. Once you've seen Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway, it's so tempting to see the elderly couple, the man behind the diner, and of course the Cowboy as agents of the supernatural, corrupting and destroying the innocent and surrounded by doppelgangers like a rock thrown into a pond is surrounded by ripples. After all, seeing Lost Highway's Mystery Man as a descendent of BOB, the Man from Another Place, the Giant, and Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, if not an actual resident of the Black Lodge appearing in an unofficial Twin Peaks sequel, is just as valid an interpretation of the events of that film as any other. So too, I thought, here.
* But! Once I did a little googling and came across the theory that the final fifth or so of Mulholland Drive is the terrible reality Diane attempted to mentally escape with the fantasy/dream that constitutes the rest of the movie, constructed Wizard of Oz^^^ style as her mind's remix of the truth, it all clicked. No need for the Lodge. Unless of course imagination is the fifth dimension, Batman R.I.P. style. ^^^^
* No need either for other elaborate theories. One that I quickly came up with and then discarded was that somehow Diane too was suffering from amnesia, and Coco and everyone else were for some reason playing along with her delusion. Another was that Betty was a performance by Diane, concocted to further torment Camilla. She is a great actress, after all.
* A couple days later, the part I can't get out of my head is how long it takes Adam and Camilla to announce their engagement in front of Diane. The pause between each phrase, the giggling, the meaningful glances...it's just unbearably awful. What a fucking scene.
* The movie's great achievement as a narrative, I would say, is in getting you to not only prefer the portion that isn't "real," but to make it feel more real to you than the reality. In discussing the film with my wife immediately afterwards, she said that compared to Lost Highway, the characters after the dividing line were far less fleshed out. And this is true, even though when you take a step back and look at it, their behavior was far more "realistic" than that of the Nancy Drew noir characters. But you end up believing the lie more than the truth. I've read some people who argue that this trick takes advantage of the simple fact that we're fondest of those we're introduced to first. The Psycho trick, in other words. It's smart filmmaking.
* The Winkie's dream sequence: As good as I'd heard. And by good I mean I reacted by saying "Ohhhhh, no, that's no good," and then rewinding it on behest of my wife to subject ourselves to it again. I remember doing that one time before: with the first subliminal flash of that face in The Exorcist.
* Also as good as I'd heard, better even: the sex scene. Lynch's sweetest and not coincidentally his hottest. Just another explosion, another sense to inundate and overload.
* Submitted: The ending of this movie would have been the only other acceptable ending for The Blair Witch Project.
* This is horror, to me. This is the horror I want. Shining black and awful and unbearable, like a crack in the world that should never have been opened. Magnificent.
^ By the way, a filthy hirsute homeless man who reappears at the end of the movie to take possession of a sinister magic box that transports the person who opens it to another plane of reality? I can't be the only person who thought of Hellraiser, can I?
^^ Speaking of which: the coffee at the Double R = "damn good"; the espresso at Ryan Entertainment = "shit." Case closed!
^^^ "Pay no attention to the man behind the diner!"
^^^^ Lynch's influence on Grant Morrison's Batman work and Final Crisis is clearer to me than ever as well. And not just in the general "it's creepy, it's weird, it doesn't make sense" way -- the specifics, the preoccupation with shifting identities and doppelgangers, the conception of evil as a corrupting hole in the world.
This is possibly my favorite Lynch film, and possibly my favorite film of the last 20 years or so, and one of those rare works that lives up to the old saw of "rewards more with every viewing." When I first saw it in the theater, it grabbed hold of me like no other film I've ever seen, I couldn't let it go. When I finally figured out that it was that last fifth of the film that was "reality", it was as great an epiphany as I can ever remember having in reaction to a work of art, and so satisfying. So it's been fun reading about your first impressions and I think you're pretty much on the money. And you've made me want to go watch Lost Highway again, which I've always considered to be one of his least successful films.
I'm not sure how you watched the film, Sean, but in the original DVD release, the entire film was coded as one scene, so you couldn't skip from scene to scene easily, which I always thought was a purely spiteful move on Lynch's to make it harder for horndogs to watch the sex scene over and over (I'll admit, when I bought the DVD upon its release, that was the first thing I wanted to do). But also, the spare package contained a sheet of "clues" about the film that you should try to find, they're fascinating and rare insights into Lynch's perspective...
I saw Mulholland Drive the first and only time in the theatre about a month after I moved to Los Angeles myself, and seeing it in that context really shook me up in such a way that all I remember are certain moments and images. For some reason I haven't watched it since, but man, does this make me want to.
(I may have that DVD version that Eric mentions; I can't remember if it survived my great DVD purge a few years back, but if I still have it I'll scan in the clues.)
I think it's a mistake to read MULHOLLAND as a poison pen to LA, when there's just as clearly elements of the love letter, even in the barren wasteland behind the Winkies Diner which is as compellingly beautiful as the dreamland nightclub.
But then I just as much love and am freaked out by LA, so perhaps I'm biased in this matter.
I also should watch it again. That almost sounds like more fun than some of the SDCC after-events that will be available to me...
Eric: The intensity of your love for Mullholland Drive echoes mine for Lost Highway. Putting aside movies that everyone loves, your Godfathers and Lord of the Rings and so on, I have a little group of five or six "favorite movies ever" and Lost Highway is among them. (Lost Highway, Velvet Goldmine, Eyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures, Casino, Barton Fink. I kind of keep more straightorward horror movies and comedies separate.) Here's something I wrote about it back in the day:
Indeed, I would say that a part of the reason I hadn't seen Mullholland Drive until now was that I'd gotten the impression that it was a slightly dumbed-down and smoothed-out remake of Lost Highway. (Just a part--it was mostly logistical.)
I think I bought the movie used so I have no liner notes. I need to check on the chapter breaks...
Gardner: Yeah, that'd fuck me up. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sucker." It'd be like moving to Manhattan in the '70s and seeing Taxi Driver by yourself.
Matt: I really don't see a love letter, I'm sorry. The place is so full of evil it hums like something out of Eraserhead. It's shot beautifully, but so was Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. It's a siren song. Plus the way it starts, with her arriving at the airport, is straight out of "We have begun our descent into L.A." from The Graduate. No offense to L.A., which I love just like Randy Newman.
I recommend thinking about it and watching it again. Even though I know it took awhile to find the time to watch this first viewing. I'm a big believer in the "Diane is dreaming" theory. It really ALL does make logical sense in a way no other Lynch film does.
My favorite revelation was that the first Winkie's scene is actually a dream that "Rita" has within Diane's dream. Like a sublimal warning within her subconscious.
I see the man behind the diner around L.A. a lot. Maybe it's the desert dust, making for a brand of black dry filth homeless person particular to L.A. over other cities....
(Side note, having moved here about 3 years back, re-watching certain very L.A. movies while actually being here is pretty great, whole new appreciation for them, as well as some newbies, some of the great L.A. nightmare films: Sunset Boulevard, Day of the Locust, Lost Highway/Mull. Drive/Inland Empire, The Big Lebowski....)
Watched Lost Highway for the first time since the '90's about a year back, which like Eric I thought was kinda weak, BUT now recognize as pretty great, although the soundtrack alllllmmost kills it for me. Kind of embarassing. I also hate the Beck song in Inland Empire. Don't even have anything necessarily against that kind of music, it just seems out of place in these films the way the '50's girl group, Roy Orbison songs are not. Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, especially, exist sort of outside time. Lost Highway's soundtrack rams it home right into the '90's. Too specific.
Now you have to watch Barry Lyndon! Shit, I'm envious. Wish I had a '70's era Kubrick masterpiece I'd never seen to look forward to. Just curious, what's kept you from watching it? Is it the period piece thing? Future nightmare war sex horror shit storm do make for the most seductive Kubrick movies on first glance....
Eye's Wide Shut and Casino are very, very high on my list, too, Sean... So have you seen Inland Empire? Another great film, almost a bizarro world remake, but not as great as Mulholland Drive...
I remember being irritated by the praise MH received because it threw into light just how lazy the critical response to Lost Highway had been.
That said, watching Mullholland Drive at the local art house was one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences of my life. It feels inadequate to call it a horror movie, but it is without a doubt one of the most disturbing, sad and terrifying films I have ever seen. It's also, in so many ways, astonishingly beautiful and beguiling. You should have seen it on the big screen, Sean.
What Morrison and Lynch have in common, beyond the specific details, is a love of atmosphere. They're as interested in how stories feel as they are in the plot. It's for that reason I get so pissed off when I see people whinge and scratch their heads when they come across sequences like the one at the beginning of Batman & Robin 13. To some extent the question of whether its real or not misses the point - how does it make you feel? It's supposed to be wrong. It's supposed to *feel* wrong, and it produces that effect, not simply by the story it tells and the impact of the visuals, but by not explaining itself!
Back to Mullholland Drive. Amy Poodle described the flick as a haunting, a disembodied working through of terrible pain. Strikes me as a much better description than reality followed by a fugue state. The whole question of whether or not the film even has a final ground in any straightforward sense is put to the question in this really rather excellent roundtable discussion, featuring Mr David Brothers.
First of all, let me apologize for all the comment glitches--the triple posts and spam and whatnot. I'm not happy about it.
Shags: I do not want to eat there.
Frank: Interesting.
Josh: Have you tried In a Lonely Place?
Re: the music in Lost Highway, that stuff is just so very very very me from that time period--'90s Bowie, NIN, Manson, Pumpkins--that it'll never bug me the way it might bug someone for whom that isn't "their music." But now that so much time has passed I wonder if we can't look at that movie as a period piece of sorts, riffing on the '90s the same way so much of Lynch's work riffs indirectly on the '50s.
Re: Barry Lyndon, i'm sure you're right and it was just the least cool-sounding of the Kubrick movies. It's certainly the one i'd be least interested in seeing in high school, which is when I first saw everything else from 2001 through Full Metal Jacket, or my freshman year in college, which is when I first saw Strangelove and Lolita and Paths of Glory. I've owned it in one format or another since 1999, so who really knows at this point. Sometimes I think I do this stuff to myself out of laziness, other times just to leave a mountain to climb.
Eric: No Inland Empire yet. Very high on the priority list now that I've gotten Mulholland Drive out of the way.
Zom: Ha, that's a good call about the critical response to MD vs. LH. I do think it comes down to there being a "logical" explanation to MD, while there's no way out of the LH Moebius strip that I can see...
My big big-screen experience from that time period was seeing Apocalypse Now Redux three times at 11pm screenings at the IMAX on 68th st, then walking back down to Penn Station through the abandoned streets at 2:30am to take the train back home.
Re: Amy's description--I think you can have your cake and eat it too. The dream interpretation works too well to be tossed out the window, esp. given Lynch's love of the Wizard of Oz, but that's not to say that once you reach that conclusion, congratulations, you've "solved" the movie and can safely not think about it anymore. One thing I really like about Lynch is how he defies that whole "fiction as code to be cracked/puzzle to be solved" framework so beloved of today's nerds despite loading his stuff with all sorts of codes and puzzles.
I think Lost Highway was the critical training ground. Without it I suspect that there would have been much more head scratching and less willing engagement when Mullholland Drive arrived.
I don't think Amy was suggesting that reading over all others. The dream interpretation is a very good one but like every other reading of the film I've come across it doesn't entirely account for what actually takes place on the screen. It only stretches so far. Amy's reading is at heart very similar to the dream one, but I feel that it accounts for more of the film's strangeness. It's a a fascinating way to think about the flick, that's for sure.
I completely agree that the movie is intentionally wide open to all sorts of interpretations: a critique of Hollywood and LA, a meditation on the nature of stardom and glamour, take your pick. That's not to say that it's amenable to any old nonsense - I've come across some deeply questionable readings - but it is incredibly richly textured with meaning.
In my view Apocalypse Now Redux and Mullholland Drive aren't a millions miles away from each other at one fundamental level. They're both superlative examples of what cinema is capable of. I think I could really get down ANR on the IMAX screen.
In A Lonely Place: Been on our Netflix queue for a while, will bump it up!
Lost Highway music: Again, it's not really that I have anything against that music, I liked a lot of that stuff as a teenager, too...It just makes the movie a little too glued to a very specific part of the '90's for my taste, bothers me a bit personally in watching the movie again, the thing is you don't see that in any of his other movies, there's the reoccuring '50's songs which work very well, but Fire Walk With Me for example doesn't have any I don't know, Pearl Jam or whatever was big in '92, Blue Velvet doesn't have any Cyndi Lauper, Mulholland Drive doesn't have any Cher Do You Believe in Life After Love, etc.....Still, a cool movie--
Barry Lyndon: It was one of the last Kubrick movies I saw, too. I look forward to your thoughts on Lyndon and Inland Empire some day---
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Comments (15)
This is possibly my favorite Lynch film, and possibly my favorite film of the last 20 years or so, and one of those rare works that lives up to the old saw of "rewards more with every viewing." When I first saw it in the theater, it grabbed hold of me like no other film I've ever seen, I couldn't let it go. When I finally figured out that it was that last fifth of the film that was "reality", it was as great an epiphany as I can ever remember having in reaction to a work of art, and so satisfying. So it's been fun reading about your first impressions and I think you're pretty much on the money. And you've made me want to go watch Lost Highway again, which I've always considered to be one of his least successful films.
I'm not sure how you watched the film, Sean, but in the original DVD release, the entire film was coded as one scene, so you couldn't skip from scene to scene easily, which I always thought was a purely spiteful move on Lynch's to make it harder for horndogs to watch the sex scene over and over (I'll admit, when I bought the DVD upon its release, that was the first thing I wanted to do). But also, the spare package contained a sheet of "clues" about the film that you should try to find, they're fascinating and rare insights into Lynch's perspective...
Posted by Eric Reynolds | July 20, 2010 5:30 PM
I saw Mulholland Drive the first and only time in the theatre about a month after I moved to Los Angeles myself, and seeing it in that context really shook me up in such a way that all I remember are certain moments and images. For some reason I haven't watched it since, but man, does this make me want to.
(I may have that DVD version that Eric mentions; I can't remember if it survived my great DVD purge a few years back, but if I still have it I'll scan in the clues.)
Posted by Gardner | July 20, 2010 5:53 PM
I think it's a mistake to read MULHOLLAND as a poison pen to LA, when there's just as clearly elements of the love letter, even in the barren wasteland behind the Winkies Diner which is as compellingly beautiful as the dreamland nightclub.
But then I just as much love and am freaked out by LA, so perhaps I'm biased in this matter.
I also should watch it again. That almost sounds like more fun than some of the SDCC after-events that will be available to me...
Posted by Matt M. | July 20, 2010 7:07 PM
Eric: The intensity of your love for Mullholland Drive echoes mine for Lost Highway. Putting aside movies that everyone loves, your Godfathers and Lord of the Rings and so on, I have a little group of five or six "favorite movies ever" and Lost Highway is among them. (Lost Highway, Velvet Goldmine, Eyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures, Casino, Barton Fink. I kind of keep more straightorward horror movies and comedies separate.) Here's something I wrote about it back in the day:
http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/oldArchives.php?BlogNum=392
Indeed, I would say that a part of the reason I hadn't seen Mullholland Drive until now was that I'd gotten the impression that it was a slightly dumbed-down and smoothed-out remake of Lost Highway. (Just a part--it was mostly logistical.)
I think I bought the movie used so I have no liner notes. I need to check on the chapter breaks...
Gardner: Yeah, that'd fuck me up. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sucker." It'd be like moving to Manhattan in the '70s and seeing Taxi Driver by yourself.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | July 20, 2010 7:18 PM
Now aren't you glad you finally watched it?
Posted by COOP | July 20, 2010 7:24 PM
Matt: I really don't see a love letter, I'm sorry. The place is so full of evil it hums like something out of Eraserhead. It's shot beautifully, but so was Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. It's a siren song. Plus the way it starts, with her arriving at the airport, is straight out of "We have begun our descent into L.A." from The Graduate. No offense to L.A., which I love just like Randy Newman.
COOP: You betcha.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | July 20, 2010 7:32 PM
I have been waiting for this post for so long!!
I recommend thinking about it and watching it again. Even though I know it took awhile to find the time to watch this first viewing. I'm a big believer in the "Diane is dreaming" theory. It really ALL does make logical sense in a way no other Lynch film does.
My favorite revelation was that the first Winkie's scene is actually a dream that "Rita" has within Diane's dream. Like a sublimal warning within her subconscious.
Also, I've eaten at that diner that was Winkie's.
Posted by Shags | July 20, 2010 7:55 PM
Don't forget that the theatrical singing bit from the end is lifted from a traditonal Greek "Mystery Play" which is a riff of re-incarnation.
Posted by Frank Santoro | July 20, 2010 11:13 PM
I see the man behind the diner around L.A. a lot. Maybe it's the desert dust, making for a brand of black dry filth homeless person particular to L.A. over other cities....
(Side note, having moved here about 3 years back, re-watching certain very L.A. movies while actually being here is pretty great, whole new appreciation for them, as well as some newbies, some of the great L.A. nightmare films: Sunset Boulevard, Day of the Locust, Lost Highway/Mull. Drive/Inland Empire, The Big Lebowski....)
Watched Lost Highway for the first time since the '90's about a year back, which like Eric I thought was kinda weak, BUT now recognize as pretty great, although the soundtrack alllllmmost kills it for me. Kind of embarassing. I also hate the Beck song in Inland Empire. Don't even have anything necessarily against that kind of music, it just seems out of place in these films the way the '50's girl group, Roy Orbison songs are not. Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, especially, exist sort of outside time. Lost Highway's soundtrack rams it home right into the '90's. Too specific.
Now you have to watch Barry Lyndon! Shit, I'm envious. Wish I had a '70's era Kubrick masterpiece I'd never seen to look forward to. Just curious, what's kept you from watching it? Is it the period piece thing? Future nightmare war sex horror shit storm do make for the most seductive Kubrick movies on first glance....
Posted by Josh Simmons | July 21, 2010 1:24 AM
Eye's Wide Shut and Casino are very, very high on my list, too, Sean... So have you seen Inland Empire? Another great film, almost a bizarro world remake, but not as great as Mulholland Drive...
Posted by Eric Reynolds | July 21, 2010 1:53 AM
Spam attack!
I remember being irritated by the praise MH received because it threw into light just how lazy the critical response to Lost Highway had been.
That said, watching Mullholland Drive at the local art house was one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences of my life. It feels inadequate to call it a horror movie, but it is without a doubt one of the most disturbing, sad and terrifying films I have ever seen. It's also, in so many ways, astonishingly beautiful and beguiling. You should have seen it on the big screen, Sean.
What Morrison and Lynch have in common, beyond the specific details, is a love of atmosphere. They're as interested in how stories feel as they are in the plot. It's for that reason I get so pissed off when I see people whinge and scratch their heads when they come across sequences like the one at the beginning of Batman & Robin 13. To some extent the question of whether its real or not misses the point - how does it make you feel? It's supposed to be wrong. It's supposed to *feel* wrong, and it produces that effect, not simply by the story it tells and the impact of the visuals, but by not explaining itself!
Back to Mullholland Drive. Amy Poodle described the flick as a haunting, a disembodied working through of terrible pain. Strikes me as a much better description than reality followed by a fugue state. The whole question of whether or not the film even has a final ground in any straightforward sense is put to the question in this really rather excellent roundtable discussion, featuring Mr David Brothers.
Posted by Zom | July 21, 2010 6:02 AM
First of all, let me apologize for all the comment glitches--the triple posts and spam and whatnot. I'm not happy about it.
Shags: I do not want to eat there.
Frank: Interesting.
Josh: Have you tried In a Lonely Place?
Re: the music in Lost Highway, that stuff is just so very very very me from that time period--'90s Bowie, NIN, Manson, Pumpkins--that it'll never bug me the way it might bug someone for whom that isn't "their music." But now that so much time has passed I wonder if we can't look at that movie as a period piece of sorts, riffing on the '90s the same way so much of Lynch's work riffs indirectly on the '50s.
Re: Barry Lyndon, i'm sure you're right and it was just the least cool-sounding of the Kubrick movies. It's certainly the one i'd be least interested in seeing in high school, which is when I first saw everything else from 2001 through Full Metal Jacket, or my freshman year in college, which is when I first saw Strangelove and Lolita and Paths of Glory. I've owned it in one format or another since 1999, so who really knows at this point. Sometimes I think I do this stuff to myself out of laziness, other times just to leave a mountain to climb.
Eric: No Inland Empire yet. Very high on the priority list now that I've gotten Mulholland Drive out of the way.
Zom: Ha, that's a good call about the critical response to MD vs. LH. I do think it comes down to there being a "logical" explanation to MD, while there's no way out of the LH Moebius strip that I can see...
My big big-screen experience from that time period was seeing Apocalypse Now Redux three times at 11pm screenings at the IMAX on 68th st, then walking back down to Penn Station through the abandoned streets at 2:30am to take the train back home.
Re: Amy's description--I think you can have your cake and eat it too. The dream interpretation works too well to be tossed out the window, esp. given Lynch's love of the Wizard of Oz, but that's not to say that once you reach that conclusion, congratulations, you've "solved" the movie and can safely not think about it anymore. One thing I really like about Lynch is how he defies that whole "fiction as code to be cracked/puzzle to be solved" framework so beloved of today's nerds despite loading his stuff with all sorts of codes and puzzles.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | July 21, 2010 2:56 PM
I think Lost Highway was the critical training ground. Without it I suspect that there would have been much more head scratching and less willing engagement when Mullholland Drive arrived.
I don't think Amy was suggesting that reading over all others. The dream interpretation is a very good one but like every other reading of the film I've come across it doesn't entirely account for what actually takes place on the screen. It only stretches so far. Amy's reading is at heart very similar to the dream one, but I feel that it accounts for more of the film's strangeness. It's a a fascinating way to think about the flick, that's for sure.
I completely agree that the movie is intentionally wide open to all sorts of interpretations: a critique of Hollywood and LA, a meditation on the nature of stardom and glamour, take your pick. That's not to say that it's amenable to any old nonsense - I've come across some deeply questionable readings - but it is incredibly richly textured with meaning.
In my view Apocalypse Now Redux and Mullholland Drive aren't a millions miles away from each other at one fundamental level. They're both superlative examples of what cinema is capable of. I think I could really get down ANR on the IMAX screen.
Posted by Zom | July 21, 2010 4:03 PM
Well, if it's a dream, it's the most detailed and tangent-strewn dream anyone's ever had, of course. :)
Posted by Sean T. Collins | July 21, 2010 7:09 PM
Hey Sean,
In A Lonely Place: Been on our Netflix queue for a while, will bump it up!
Lost Highway music: Again, it's not really that I have anything against that music, I liked a lot of that stuff as a teenager, too...It just makes the movie a little too glued to a very specific part of the '90's for my taste, bothers me a bit personally in watching the movie again, the thing is you don't see that in any of his other movies, there's the reoccuring '50's songs which work very well, but Fire Walk With Me for example doesn't have any I don't know, Pearl Jam or whatever was big in '92, Blue Velvet doesn't have any Cyndi Lauper, Mulholland Drive doesn't have any Cher Do You Believe in Life After Love, etc.....Still, a cool movie--
Barry Lyndon: It was one of the last Kubrick movies I saw, too. I look forward to your thoughts on Lyndon and Inland Empire some day---
Posted by Josh Simmons | July 21, 2010 10:56 PM