Red Herring with a Mystery Sauce

Rating: Null/10 (21 April 2006)

It only took 24 hours, one Salon article, two conversations with smart thoughtful people, and twenty minutes of careful reflection on the way to the gym. I finally understand Mulholland Drive. Partially. Well mostly. Well sort of.
It's complicated.
The problem is that there are so many red herrings. And most of them are blue. In a complicated, non-linear, surreal type of movie you kind of expect that everything will be miraculously clarified, resolved, and tied back together in the end. I'm thinking of Memento, and Run Lola Run, and Go, and that episode of the Simpsons, for example. There's a certain expectation that no matter how weird it gets, it'll all be fine, because the director may dangle you over the edge, but he will definitely pull you back. With Mulholland Drive, you have no such assurance. All kinds of stuff is unexplained, and you're left with only a weak grasp of "what really happened." But don't sweat it. There's a whole lot of kinda robotic and predictable "girl love" scenes to console you.
There are also some familiar elements here. There's the sweet, innocent blonde character and the troubled, abused brunette with the very red lips. Kinda reminiscent of Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern in Blue Velvet. There is also the soundtrack  very familiar and almost an instant hook-up to that feeling David Lynch movies give you that the bizarre and macabre are right behind the pretty flowers, the nondescript door, the next turn. There are unforgettable scenes here, and I'm sure if I went back through it, and tried to connect the dots, I'd find more scaffolding to help me understand. It's not really necessary though. Taken as an aggregate of its parts, rather than a sum, the movie is still rich and provocative. Nobody makes you feel like this  excited, confused, horrified, complicit, and satisfied  like David Lynch. At the end of the film, I'd rather be surprised and incited than have everything figured out.