Review of Mulholland Dr. (1999) by Tiberio S — 08 May 2017

It dares to go there, all the way.

Original 2012 Review:

From what I've gathered thus far, this is a director's heightened, darkened, paranoid Hollywood memoir. Everything about this film is from the point of view of a Hollywood director who is saying something about artists working for 'the man,' the envy and desperation they're forced into, the mold that they have to cut pieces of themselves away to fit into. Diane (or Betty, however you choose to look at it) begins her journey to Hell in the prologue (this is all very similar to my own Death Odyssey), her life fading into an ugly trip that will eventually have her chipping away more than a few parts of herself to fit into a mold; her extreme desperation, coming from the slums of life, can only forsee splattering a boldfaced message on that mold, exhausted from the routines she's forced upon herself, and that have been forced upon her.

Ironically, this basis for a story is told amidst a framework antithetical to the consumer demand movie 'the man' would have you molding for, so we get to explore two extreme contrasts told within each other. We get this indirect sense of Lynch's conspiratorial paranoia when we see 'the man' speaking from the control room, delivering orders from the top of a heirarchy. We know nothing more of 'who' they are than Lynch himself, other than that we know these rooms and these people exist in some fashion, and they control our lives.

The film works because it's "hypnotic" (as Roger Ebert put it), but it's over-the-top in trying to be clever, and I believe most audiences will just feel too far removed, as even I did for the most part. There's more than just an impression Lynch is making, and that's where he should've stopped himself, because the structure of the script acts as though it encodes some greater meaning that the audience can't access as much as they would if this structure was ignored. It would've been more interesting to not loop the structure and return to scenarios from different angles, but rather continue moving forth with the same impressions in a spiral journey. abstract linear form.