What's going ON here?

Rating: Null/10 (10 November 2001)

David Lynch movies pretty much exist to annoy me, so why I even bothered with this is somewhat of a mystery. In truth, a friend of mine who really did want to see it (and loved it, by the way) more or less twisted my arm, but I never particularly expected to enjoy it. And I was not disappointed.
I'm not gonna go on about it, though: Lynch is someone you either like or you don't, and I just don't. His desire to tell stories devoid of narrative, or at least with a punctured and messed-up sense of narrative, is not really entertaining to me. Perhaps if his visuals and atmospherics were more compelling, I might be willing to just groove on them in the absence of story. (As a counter example, I *can* groove to, say, the imagery in Blade Runner, and enjoy watching the film just for that, even though I don't find the story to be particularly interesting or well told.) But that's just a personal call: if you like Lynch at all, you must like his style and visuals, and that's fine. I just don't - they don't do anything for me. But I think we can part the ways amicably on that.
However, I can't leave this film without lodging one fairly serious complaint - one that I believe holds validity whether you're a Lynch lover or not. For about three-fourths of the way through, the story actually DOES make sense: it's not told in the most conventional way, perhaps, but it is at least something you can follow. Unlike Lost Highway, which (from what I've heard) was confusing and tripped out from the beginning, Mulholland Drive has a throughline that does appear to be headed somewhere. Then, just as on the TV program Twin Peaks all those years ago, it's as if Lynch decided, "Oh my gosh, this story is actually GOING somewhere - I can't have that!" And so at the eleventh hour he does a double flip-back whammy and in the final fifteen minutes turns it all into incomprehensible weirdness - for no better reason, seemingly, than that, well, he's DAVID LYNCH after all. A little consistency here, Dave, would be nice: if the whole film is going to be like a "dream state" - or whatever it is you're going for - establish that closer to the beginning of the film. But this is just yanking the audience's chain, pure and simple.
Anyway, that's my opinion. Lynch fans can (and probably will) have a field day with me, but there it is.