The Rosetta Stone To David Lynch's Mind, Amazing...

Rating: 9/10 (22 September 2011)

Puzzles can really tie up your mind. After hours, days, years of toiling to resolve a conundrum you may abandon it, defeated. But a good puzzle - a truly great one - will always beckon you back mercilessly. After first experiencing Mulholland Drive in 2001 I was completely baffled. Had the 2 1/2 hours of cinematic hysteria merely been a hoax? A highly stylized scam? Could it be that this confounding, bewildering pantomime of Classic Hollywood tropes only been contrived to taunt me? That's certainly what it felt like, sitting there in that velvety shrine as the credits rolled past. Had I been conned? Deceived, duped, swindled? Or had I missed something? I decided, as did my group of fellow film goers - because we somehow intuited that David Lynch had wanted us to be so initially mystified - that we had best reexamine this daunting riddle. We sat through another showing that very same night & damn if we weren't just as flummoxed afterward. No one had a convincing theory to explain the relentless parade of captivating confusion that we'd just again witnessed. The solution, apparently, was going to require some diligence.
Deciphering this film became a chronic challenge for my group of determined detectives. Over the next 3 or 4 weeks we spent countless hours analyzing, discussing, dissecting, & debating its meaning, but nothing felt conclusive. Eventually we watched the queer dark spectacle yet again & came away with a whole fresh crop of notions, but these all soon withered under the intense heat of our examinations. We would ruthlessly eviscerate one another's forced & impractical conjectures. We each began clinging defensively, helplessly, to our own feeble theory, mechanically repeating it to one another in a tragic display of denial. We were all stumped but refused to accept it. It started to get ugly, even vicious, as we'd denigrate one another in our fury to be relieved of this terrible burden. We had to desist or we'd all end up with our throats torn out.
Fast forward five years to the low key, un-hyped, nearly unnoticed release of INLAND EMPIRE & the 3 core members of that old gang of Lynch fans. We were going to a Special Screening at a specially selected theater to which a friend of a friend had connections & we'd be among the very first in the entire tri-state area to attend Lynch's latest cinematic psychic assault. We were as giddy as school girls, but strangely, undeniably, we were all unusually polite with one another. We were treating each other rather gingerly, as though tip-toeing around some unseen sleeping monster. The heavy weight of our old Mulholland Drive encumbrance was upon us once again, but no one spoke of it. At least not then, not till after we had experienced that unbelievably, impossibly gargantuan Goliath of a mind f#@% that is INLAND EMPIRE.
INLAND EMPIRE so utterly crushed us, so completely destroyed us. Our awareness, our consciousness, our wit, our entire being - thoroughly pulverized. It was astonishing just how nullified we were by what we had just witnesses, had just endured. Our minds were arid, desolate, vacant expanses of vacuous nothingness. What WAS that?!! A horrendous demonic courier from the deepest, vilest recesses of David's Gothic psyche had just delivered to us a most outrageously sinister parcel that was now demanding to be inspected. It felt as though I had been immersed in a vat of pure uncut dread. A cloying, claustrophobic curtain of doom had descended, obliterating all light of reason. That unrelenting barrage of horrific paranoia had overwhelmed me with an unbearably thick avalanche of hopelessness. This was going to be a very hard movie to "get", is what we all three were thinking.
I have veered off here onto the INLAND EMPIRE trail because it had inadvertently rekindled our debates of Mulholland Drive. We seemed to sense that perhaps there may possibly be a key to unlocking Mulholland somewhere in the dense, impenetrable quagmire of INLAND EMPIRE. But where, and in what form would it be, and how would we even recognize it? Gaining entrance to INLAND EMPIRE was just too intimidating, and so soon, by default, we focused again on Mulholland Drive. Someone suggested that there seemed to be something of a circular form to its structure, but was clueless as to a point of entry. That phrase "Point of Entry" echoed in my gauzy mind, and then I recalled something that the agitated Polish men at the beginning of INLAND EMPIRE were discussing so emphatically: A way in. A way in to WHAT, I pondered? A way into the Rabbit Hole? What does that mean? I dunno. A way into America? Maybe. A way into the meaning of that damn movie?! Hmmm... AHA! OMFG! Lynch, you devious, sick bastard! I think I'm onto something here, I thought to myself. And indeed, I was because soon, and very effectively, I was scaling that formidable facade that had so discouraged me with its pretension to impenetrability. As I figured & felt my way into the INLAND EMPIRE labyrinth, I became aware of a very definite, precise mechanism at work in the action of its structure. The astounding realization of just exactly WHY INLAND EMPIRE was initially so impossible to fathom ignited within me a tremendous realization of just exactly what was also going on with Mulholland Drive. I began to test this theory, to see if the parts lined up, and it all very soon clicked perfectly into place. WOW! The whole film, rearranged & reconstructed in my mind, had gelled into a superbly coherent, fiendishly rational tale. Amazing! Absolutely gorgeous, the elegant beauty of its convoluted design. Mulholland Drive Solved!!! I didn't tell my two friends what I had discovered for at least one week, I was savoring that sweet rich feeling of superiority. It eventually occurred to me that they both might be doing the same...