mulholland muddle (1 Viewer)

[stewart borland]

I'm going to put it down to working 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, to get the new National Trust for Scotland's 3 million £ Visitor Centre in Glencoe open on 1st May, so don't flame me....
Watched Mulholland Drive last night, and it was the 1st HTF recommendation that sort of 'got lost' on me :frowning:
Maybe exhaustion, maybe I'm thick,
but I just didn't get it :b :b
Could somebody post a spoiler to explain it to me? (It's my first David Lynch too... maybe I should stick to Shrek )
Thanks,

 

[RobertCharlotte]

Here's a link to a spoiler:
http://www.themoviespoiler.com/Spoilers/mulholland.html
Disclaimer: I have not read the above spoiler, as I haven't decided whether or not I want to see this movie. So, I hope it's what you were after.

 

[Matt Stone]

There's a pretty good discussion thread right here at the Home Theater Forum.

 

[Mark Hobbs]

Salon.com had a great explanation of it. I don't have the link.

I got it, I just didn't like it.

 

[Mark Pfeiffer]

At this past week's Overlooked Film Festival, Robert Forster provided a pretty tidy summary of an explanation told to him.

A young actress leaves her midwestern town for dreams of stardom in Hollywood. She takes a job as a waitress and falls in love with another girl. She is terribly unsuccessful and commits suicide. The majority of the film, then, is her "dream" in the time between the time she fires the gun and the bullet kills her. The dream is what her life was and how she wished it had gone.

 

[Joe Schwartz]

Here's a link to Salon's article: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feat...ve_analysis/?x

 

[Mr. Brian]

There is nothing to "get" in Mulholland Drive. Just be open to its mood, music, and imagery. If you are, the film will have deeper meaning to you.

Brian

 

[Seth Paxton]

Well Mark, thanks for that tidbit from a solid source. Did he say this is how Lynch explained it to him or where this explanation came from?
Basically that is exactly the same explanation I have been giving here at HTF since the first time I saw it. I thought it was rather obvious once I started reflecting on the film, though at the times it was quite a mind blower. That Forster is backing that version makes me feel all the more certain that it was what Lynch was presenting to the audience.
I also was made more certain of this explanation when tying it into my viewing of Waking Life, a film exploring a similar situation but with a different thematic goal.

 

[Mark Pfeiffer]

Forster was doing some charity bartending when a guy came up to him and told him he'd seen Mulholland Drive and gave him the above explanation. It made sense to him. Forster ran this past one of the producers who said that although Lynch doesn't tell people what his movies are about, this pretty much hits the mark.

 

[Richard Kim]

I disagree with Forster's explaination. Here's mine:

The first 2/3s of the film is Diane's dream after she hires the hitman to kill Camilla. Notice after the jitterbug sequence we see a brief dark shot of a pillow before we get to the next sequence, indicating that Diane briefly woke up before sleeping again. After the blue box is opened, the dream is over. Diane wakes up and finds the blue key, indicating the job was done. We then see flashbacks of the events that lead to Diane ordering the hit. Feeling guilty about Camilla's death, she hallucinates the old couple chasing her, a symbol of her hopes and her failure. Unable to take it anymore, she commits suicide.

 

[Joseph Young]

edit

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

The interpretation of the pre-credit pillow shot is the main difference, and the way it appears in the film actually supports Forster's explanation better than Richard's IMHO.

Regards,

 

[Ed St. Clair]

Not even Free Lynch knows 100% of what this movie is about!

 

[Britton]

I honestly don't think the majority of the movie occurs in between the moment she fires the gun and when she dies. It has to be a dream, because why else would there be a POV shot of someone (obviously Diane since the bedsheets are the same) crawling into bed at the start of the film? Plus, in the real world, she does get out of bed when her neighbor's knocking awakes her.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

why else would there be a POV shot of someone (obviously Diane since the bedsheets are the same) crawling into bed at the start of the film?

I saw it as "falling", not "crawling". When you actually see the self-inflicted gunshot wound happen, it is as she is falling to the bed.

Regards,

 

[LarryDavenport]

Don't they have pot in Scotland?