you people don't know nothing, do you?

Rating: Null/10 (10 December 2002)

*spoiler spoiler spolier alert!!!!*
alright, for all you people who want to insist that this film makes no sense or that lynch is just screwing with his audience i offer this explanation of mulholland dr.:
and, before i go into it, you should be aware of three preoccupations of mr. lynch's: psychoanalysis (which is the foundation for surrealism, by the way), hollywood cinema of the studio era (specifically the work of hitchcock), and the avant garde. these crop up again and again in his movies, blue velvet even uses shadow of a doubt as a foundation
okay, in the opening sequence of the film we see a) a bunch of people dancing and b) a pillow accompanied by heavy breathing. at the end of the film, diane (naomi watts) will say that she got to hollywood by winning a jitterbug contest and then she will commit suicide on her bed. so, basically, doing the jitterbug led to this girl's suicide which is why those two images are juxtaposed prominently in the beginning of the film
the last third of the movie (the portion after they visit club silencio) is the "real" world, of course there is no "real" it's a movie people. but yeah the scenes of a struggling actress named diane who was the lover of another more successful actress named camilla and was then dumped by camilla for the director of the film they were both working on is what constitutes "reality" in the movie. diane was dumped and humiliated by camilla and so she hired a hitman to take care of camilla and received a blue key after the hit was done then she was haunted by freaky old people who represented her overwhelming guilt and was driven to suicide.
now, the rest of the movie is diane's brain in its death throes reorganizing the stuff it experienced in the past couple days and trying to come to terms with having been penetrated by a bullet. the suicide becomes the car crash on mulholland dr. and diane's personality is split into two polar opposites, rita and betty. the polar opposites investigate the car crash and are led to the discovery of betty's suicide at which point they are reconciled and rita takes on the likeness of betty and they make with the whoopie. all the other stuff that happens to the other people is diane's brain giving new meaning to trivial and significant things it saw, in her fantasy she is a great actress of course this the psychoanalysis part
one of the more interesting things the movie does is present its first half in a distinctly hitchcockian style (lots of motion concealed cuts, and pov to reaction shots) and offer a pretty conventional amnesia two snooping girls plot in an easily digestable manner. then, when they go to club silencio they see a show that explains all they are seeing is a recording just as all that is on screen is a recorded illusion not actually happening. the exposure of the illusory nature of the cinema was a big no no in hollywood films of the past and was thought to be disruptive. this moment of disruption leads to the exposure of the "real" world which is presented in a very formalistic narratively disordered style which is what art is supposed to be. there is a thinly veiled commentary on the nature of the cinema here as what is "real" intratextually is presented in a more formalistic manner than what is strictly fantasy
my point is this: just because you can't figure out how something operates doesn't mean it doesn't have a logical (perhapes not rational) means of operation. all art operates on some terms no matter how unclear or arbitrary they may at first seem to you. and sure there's a lot of stuff i'm not covering here and honestly i don't even understand it all (like the scary bum) but hey mysteries are meant to be solved and as such CAN be solved. build on what i have said