Not a complete story

Rating: Null/10 (26 August 2002)

I'm a big-time David Lynch fan -- I even like his original cut of "Dune." And, without question, "Twin Peaks" is my favorite TV series ever, even the second season (well, most of it, anyway).
All that being said, I was looking forward to Lynch's new TV series "Mulholland Dr." and was quite disappointed when I heard it wasn't going to be picked up. When I heard he was releasing the pilot as a feature film, the only thing I could think was, "Twin Peaks pilot, European release."
"Mulholland Dr." does exactly what the European release of the "Twin Peaks" pilot did -- set up lots of interesting story lines, and then have to rush to a conclusion that made little sense and didn't tie up anything. The only difference is that we had the rest of series to make some sense of "Twin Peaks."
"Mulholland Dr." simply isn't a complete story. At a certain point, roughly about the time Betty and Rita start getting naked, the story became incomprehensible.
Sure, I can piece together a story from the mess that Lynch threw together here, but why should I have to? It's one thing for a story to be ambiguous, another thing entirely for it to be so obscure as to be little more than random scenes tossed in a bowl and flung across the screen. And, honestly, the story that I piece together is so trivial and banal that it really isn't worth the effort.
Of course, the same could be said of all of Lynch's work -- much weirdness to disguise the complete lack of anything to say, all form and no substance.
Even so, I sure did like it, more or less.