A film that challenges its viewer

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2008)

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is a film that finds its place among Lynch's other experimental expositions such as Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. While the film has been labeled, at times, as mere intellectual snobbery and experimentation, in truth, Mulholland Drive is a movie that challenges it's watcher's need for logical coherence and, to a degree, closure. What this means is, Mulholland Drive is an open-ended film that invites a bevy of radically different interpretations, all, perhaps, only half-truths.
Mulholland Drive's method is one of free-dream-associations  similar to the literary works of James Joyce. Characters and events flow illogically and with disregard to continuity, while the films major tone and mood are maintained. Events are both deflated and blown-up, out of proportion, because this is how the mind works during dreams. What is key is not whether events make rational sense, but how they fit into the structure and mood of the film.
It is beneficial to break-up the film into two separate parts  each with their own distinct story lines  but with important connections to each other. The first part is one of wildly fantastic, interrelated vignettes (or mini-stories) that are simultaneously farcical and disturbing in nature. There are bumbling hit-men, mysterious mobsters, and, unexplainably, a cowboy with important information. The main characters of this section  Betty and Rita  sneak around like detectives trying to restore Rita's mysterious identity, while stumbling onto dead-bodies, creepy neighbors, and haunting night-clubs.
The second major part of the film has been called a reality check, or wake up from the first section. In many ways it is. Betty (who is now called Diane) is very clearly woken up from her slumber, and the pathos of the film assumes a gritty feel. Yet again, as in the first section, logical coherence is disregarded and the various situations of the film remain grossly exaggerated to fit the character's changing moods. The second section ends on a down-note, an act of destruction and violence, in contradistinction to the first, which ended on a note of culmination, of creation and love.
On the whole, Mulholland Drive is a film that disregards its watcher. It exists objectively as a film, by itself, and then invites the watcher into its experience, without leading one by the hand and fulfilling the watcher's every need.