Mulholland Dr.: The Tale of the Blurry Dildo

Rating: 2/10 (10 September 2009)

Here is the only point I want to get across in this entire review: Watching Mulholland Dr. made me feel like an adult forced to see a children's film.
For every 1 parent that takes their toddler to see an adult (aka, violent or sexual) film, there are 10 parents that silently that scream foul. Perhaps, in the social safety of their own home, on their computer, they'll type up a bitter "Middle-Age Angst Comment" on their message board of choice. Perhaps, if they're pseudo-intellectual, they'll type of a cute little review of the film and self-publish it on all the websites like the one I'm using right now. Either way, their predictable message is always the same: "Movies ruin kids' innocence! (Even if I saw A Clockwork Orange when I was 3, and it didn't affect me one bit, they will HURT your children!)" I'm not here to debate this (unintentionally hilarious) group of parents, but, rather, I want to use their argument to help illustrate my point about Mulholland Dr.
Mulholland Dr. made me feel like an adult forced to see a children's film. Instead of destroying my innocence and adding complexity to my thinking (as the loss of innocence always does), I feel like it made me just a little bit dumber.
First of all, do not assume I'm one of the thousands of people who didn't understand this film. I got it. I understood it. Before attempting to write this review, I even read official sites and threads dedicated to understanding it, just to make sure I wasn't missing any of the "brilliance". I didn't.
Like all surrealist films, Mulholland Dr. is childish in concept. At root value, it uses the exact same plot as The Wizard of Oz, but adds some sex to make it seem more "mature". The only thing that makes the film hard to understand is the stupid scenes where David Lynch uses cheap camera/storytelling tricks to force confusion. Or, to force weirdness, if you prefer that word.
Think of the entire film way. Someone tells you that they hid a dildo in a box, somewhere in the United States. Then they tell you to find it. They give you a couple vague clues hidden in a film, and you're off.
Two problems: (1) Why should you even care? It's a dildo. That's exactly how I felt about this film. Why should I even care about these characters? They're just flat characters presented in a way that will eventually shock the viewer with David Lynch's oh-so-horrifying portrayal of a sexual topic that is about as common and accepted in the real word as "Racism is BAD!" There's nothing to care about here. It's sex. How many times have I seen cliché sex scenes in a movie? Thousands, millions. I just don't care. (2) This method of mystery is childish. In Mulholland Dr., Lynch does not create a complex story whatsoever; he just creates a story that is visually hard to follow. If you showed me a picture of a walrus zoomed up close, I wouldn't know what it was. If you create a typical Wizard of Oz rip-off, place the camera just off-center, obscuring the important bits, I don't know what it is. That doesn't mean it's complex. It means it's childish. It's just a child that steals another child's lunch money and plays Keep Away with it.
This is why Mulholland Dr. offers absolutely nothing original. It's a story that has been done before; it is just filmed a little out of focus. This kind of pseudo-originality is even less complex than Tarantino, who is a director who I only bring up because he seems to be hated a lot by Lynch fans, for whatever reason. Tarantino takes unoriginal concepts and pumps them up with original scenes and ideas and stories. Lynch just takes unoriginal stories and makes them a little blurry.
Regardless of the predicable story, the film is pathetic, even on a visual level. The acting is hokey, which is something that I think Lynch intends, but it only adds to the children's film concept. Hokey doesn't equal weird; it just equals: "Dude, seriously, when are you going to grow up . . . ?" Also, it's boring as hell. I can be patient if the story is original, but when you know everything that is going to happen, and have seen every scene before, I just don't care. Because of this, Mulholland Dr. was one of the most boring films I've ever seen. Not to mention that Lynch takes his blessed time by having characters stare at each other stupidly, like they're auditioning for a bad parody of Napoleon Dynamite.
In conclusion, let me say this: I can't tell the difference between directors anymore. I watch audio commentaries every time they're available on a DVD, whether I liked the movie or not. There may be a few exceptions, but 99% of directors say the same things. They look the same. They wear the same glasses. They have the same ideas on what is good. They all appear to have an understanding of what is "cliché", but there is always a plethora of clichés in their films. They all have the nonconformist attitude, but they all make the same unoriginal movies.
David Lynch is supposedly one of the most brilliant and weird directors in history. Maybe the popular opinion backs up that statement. Maybe the critics back up that opinion. But, really, folks, David Lynch is just a face in the crowd of surrealist directors. With Mulholland Dr., he adds absolutely nothing new to the table. Because of his popularity, all he does is sit a little higher at the table than the no-name directors that did what he did, long before he did, much better than he did.
2/10