a masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (6 November 2001)

It seems to me that there is a sort of ongoing fight between people that have been genuinely moved by the film, gushing about it, and people who hated the film and think that anyone who liked it is saying they 'get it' to feel intellectually superior to those who didn't like it (this is absolutely ludicrous).
To all of the naysayers out there-you don't have to like the film. You don't, and you are completely entitled to voice your dissent. The problem I've been noticing from negative reviews, though, is an almost complete ignorance of what goes into filmmaking. People seem to only be talking about the 'message' of the film, or lack thereof. Other things that make the film everything that it is-sound design, cinematography, editing, imagery, etc.-seem to not even matter.
This is David Lynch. Criticizing his movies for not having a linear narrative is like criticizing a football player for not hitting a home run. Stanley Kubrick once said that an artist feels his films, he doesn't think them, and I believe this. I think the people who say things like 'he cannot tell a story', or 'he is weird for the sake of being weird' are just dismissing the film. They're engaging in the intellectual snobbery that they accuse others of, because if they can't find an easily identifiable 'message' or something that makes them feel like they've been thinking for the past two hours, they dismiss it as trash. Meanwhile, David Lynch is working on an intuitive level, not an intellectual one, and so people looking for a 'Usual Suspects'-type plot or even something like 'Memento', where things can be pieced together, are looking in the wrong place. It's apples and oranges.
That being said though, I think that intuitive filmmaking is a much more powerful and effective use of the tools the cinema provides. Lynch can capture, better than any other director I've ever seen, the feeling of dreams and the powerful and almost unspeakable emotions that come with them. It's like when you have an incredibly powerful dream that moved you in ways you never thought you could be moved, and then you try to articulate that feeling to a friend and can't even come close to accurately describing what you felt. The same is true with Lynch's films, especially, in my opinion, this and Fire Walk With Me. And you don't need to. The idea that movies have to give you some sort of message and have a linear structure that actually ends at a specific point is an idea that stuffy pop film critics have given the American public, and it's just not true. In terms of sheer artistry, and a near-perfect grasp of every single element of the cinema, Mulholland Drive is leagues ahead of a film like American Beauty, but which one has the best picture nomination?
Anyway, just pouring out some of my feelings on what I feel is Lynch's best film to date (although he has no bad films, with the exception of Dune). The reason that people who hate this film see no value in it is because they immediately dismiss it as 'weird' instead of just surrendering to it. You feel it, and the emotional payoff is more of an experience than anything I've seen in theatres in a long time. Lynch always says that the last reel of a movie should play out in the viewer's head, and that is the case here. He avoids specific meanings of things because this allows the viewer to project their own subconscious thoughts onto the proceedings, making it a personally different experience for every viewer, and I can't think of a better way to describe 'art'.
I'm not going to say anything about what happens in the actual movie, because it's all been said, but I will say that Lynch is one of the most creative, fertile, valuable artists we have living today, and everyone should be at least a little appreciative.