Why Mulholland Dr sucks balls

https://callmesteiner.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-mulholland-dr-sucks-balls/

Nonlinear narrative style is nowhere more ambitious, nowhere more fragmented or assertive in the competitive filmography of David Lynch than in his baffling, frustrating, and plainly ludicrous postmodern opus, Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s ninth feature film is arguably most famous for defying comprehensive, critical narrative analysis. Published analytic reviews of the film tend to praise it; however, one common feature among this praise, perhaps the only consensus, is that ordinary sense simply cannot be made of Mulholland Drive. It is an unsolvable maze, comprised of a series of loose ends which never tie up no matter how many times the film is re-watched. Critical disregard of the nonsensical nature of Lynch’s work is most disappointing, irritating, and speaks loudly to the modern, vulgar pride of intellectuals.

If you want to feel like David Lynch is masturbating inside your brain, watch this movie.

It is the opinion of this blog post (and its author, obviously) that Mulholland Drive does not belong in the critically acclaimed light in which it currently resides; in fact, it belongs nowhere near it. The Matrix, a crucial postmodern film of actual intelligibility, currency, finesse, wild originality and intelligent applications of key postmodern concepts was released in 1999, the same year Lynch shot most of Mulholland Drive, and is superior to it in every conceivable regard, except perhaps for the number of nude female co-stars engaged in sexual congress, if such a thing may be regarded as a category.

In the same, wholly superior vein exists David Fincher’s Fight Club, a postmodern film (based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same title) which calls attention to vapid, meaningless consumer society and the disenfranchisement of the individual and its inherent humanity and the resurgence of the id through a personality split at the expense of the conscious self. Fincher’s film employs non-linear narrative conventions but unlike Lynch’s film, Fight Club is intelligible, surprising, effective and highly entertaining.

Stripped of its undeserved accolades, Mulholland Drive is a failed television pilot (conceptually similar to Lynch’s Twin Peaks). Good directors integrate symbolism, dreams, and various meanings into coherent, narrative structures, exemplified by Fincher’s and the Wachowskis’ films respectively. Bad directors, as Lynch was in this case, do not. This blog post shall not entertain the notion that by not making sense, this film has somehow transcended or elevated itself above the standard mode of moviemaking and is praise-worthy simply for ignoring the rules. There are plenty of dreamlike, surreal films which make sense. Mulholland Drive is not one of them.

David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as a television show. Similarities to Lynch’s previous work Twin Peaks abound, from the close familiarity of the eerie electronic musical themes to Lynch’s characteristic use of femme fatale characters and women who are either in danger or who are, themselves, the danger. When pitching to ABC for a first season run, an executive recalled, “I remember the creepiness of this woman in this horrible, horrible crash, and David teasing us with the notion that people are chasing her. She’s not just ‘in’ trouble—she is trouble. Obviously, we asked, ‘What happens next?’ Lynch responded, ‘You have to buy the pitch for me to tell you’” (Woods, 206). Although the origin of Mulholland Drive as a television pilot may provide a reason for the film’s tangled, irregular plot, it offers no help to organize or explain the narrative mess on-screen.

David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive without question departs from traditional Hollywood forms. However, the departure enacted is not liberating, but contrarily painfully frustrating. Lynch’s film is a collection of plot set-ups and mysteries never developed, which have no business clumping themselves together and declaring themselves a film. The film’s two halves, if they may so be named, constitute the difference between the portion of Mulholland Drive which is composed of the roughly ninety minute pilot David Lynch originally shot, and the portion which David Lynch, quite entrepreneurially, made up in order to re-package his product in postmodernist, feature film wrapping.

Mulholland Drive is recognizably television pilot matter; firstly, it is cheap, as evidenced through its ill-fitting, out-of-date costumes and awkward, out-of-date effects, inexpensive sets and general lack of concrete detail. Additionally, the film contains lists of unnamed, undeveloped, inarticulate and senseless-seeming characters and fragments (loose ends), which, when included in the first episode of a television series logically create anticipation, eagerness and suspense for the viewer and logically urge the viewer to continue watching to observe their development throughout the season...