WOW! In between the MelGibsonites & ArtHouseRabbits, there's still room for some feeling

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2002)

I waited too long to go and see it; as it stands now, I've seen it 3 times in the past week. More viewings will undoubtedly follow... I severely dug the testosterone-driven Lost Highway, but this, nothing more or less than its oestrogenic counterpart, really whacked my brain in a perpetual home run. Not seeing this one is NOT an option.
In reading the comments, the usual clanheads are roaming about. The MelGibsonites, complaining that they understood zilch and that it's way too arty farty, and that the story gets completely nowhere, while on the other hand the ArtHouseRabbits go on raving about how this really is a movie you can think & talk about for a week. Both cause severe convulsions. Coming out of the movietheatre, I didn't really understand Mulholland Dr., but I was immediately convinced that this was it, Magnum Opus Time. My all-time whatever, my what-would-you-take-to-a-deserted-island item #1. Why?
As I've stated myriads of times (also in some other comments on this site), a film is about IMAGES, meaning story-showing; NOT about story-telling. Books are much better at storytelling, so leave it to them. Most movies don't get anywhere beyond storytelling, while in fact they should be trying to take you emotionally to the same point as a good story would, only they should do it using only images. Every frame should be a painting, gradually taking you to an abyss or exaltation (or both, depends on how masochistic you are). This one does it continuously, epically and in an ultimately stunning way. You don't have to dig it all in order to enjoy this feast to the eye (and ear, for the prozacoids). So you don't have to expect a storyline (although Mulholland Drive has a very pronounced AND clear one), and you don't have to want to talk about it for a week (christ!).
Some focus on the bizarre. Well, I find most Lynch movies to be about L-O-V-E. Call me a hippie, but that's where it's at. Love and Paradise Lost. In other words, how love is there, but we tend to lose it (or almost) because of what we do/are. Check it out in Blue Velvet (most clearly about two kinds of love, the obsessive and the soothing), Lost Highway (what are the essential elements in male jealousy/rejection, and how does he solve it?) and of course Mulholland Drive (same thing, but the female side). That's why Roy Orbison often comes in: his songs are about the same thing.
The storyline of Mulholland Drive is roughly a mix of the lyrics of Orbison's "In Dreams" and "Crying". "In Dreams" is the script of the whole movie: it begins with a dream and then "I awake to find you gone", followed by "I remember/When you said goodbye", and then "Too bad that all these things/Can only happen in my dreams/Only in dreams/In beautiful dreams" and then she shoots herself, the only way in which she can perpetuate the dream of her (Diane) being together with her love (Camilla). In the beginning, the white light-image (which comes over the dancers) is Betty/Diane with the two old folks (let's call them Guilt/Remorse/Regret), while in the end, when both are dead, they are finally together again, the way they were in the dream (blonde Camilla), and the white light shows Betty and Camilla.
Now, "Crying" (Llorando) is THE central key to the storyline (so I don't understand anyone saying that the scene might be redundant). In the beginning (that is, in real life, the part which actually comes before the dream), Betty/Diane is severely p***ed at Camilla, to a degree that she has her love murdered. In the beginning, the dream is fine and stuffed with wishful thinking/dreaming, leading to the climax (in Betty/Diane's fantasy, and probably in mine) of the love scene. But then it comes: the theatre scene. Betty/Diane's feelings of anger make room for GRIEF (for the first time in her dream, she is in distress)! It's so obvious: at the start, the theatre is red, then it becomes BLUE (with aquatic shimmer, for the hardheaded). And it is this grief (which is represented by the Blue Box) that will finally and inevitably lead out of the dream, when it is opened by the blue key, representing her GUILT when she realizes she had her love murdered - in the flashback we see that shortly before the dream began she found the Blue Key on the table, meaning the killing job is done) straight to Regret/Remorse (remember the two little old folks first reappear when the beggar (Destiny?) drops the blue box). Then she realizes that Camilla is now gone forever, or, as Orbison put it: "Yes, now you're gone/And from this moment on/I'll be crying/Crying over you". There remains only one way for her to remain forever in dreams with her love: she kills herself.
Note, that this is not necessarily an unhappy ending. Romeo & Juliet would only have an unhappy ending if one of them died; not so if, like it is, both of them die for love. So, a happy ending after all, and what a movie.