cowboy
Mulholland Drive resembles a movie only superficially. It's more like a 2.5-hour act of pattern-making, continually rearranging totemic objects into different configurations. By "totemic objects" I mean not only charged items like that blue key, but the film's people. The two lead actresses are beautifully shot and imbued with mystery, but that's about all they're imbued with. Lynch intends their very appearance on the screen to be so charged as to impose a pattern on their surroundings, like the opposite poles of a magnet impose the contours of their field on iron filings. To his credit, that's exactly what happens, but as a result the women become symbols that signify nothing. Mulholland Drive is very pretty to look at, and it does better than most movies in that it never bored me, but the characters are so subservient to the style that they're barely human. It's impossible to become invested in them, other than to hope that if you stick with them they will eventually provide a solution to the involuted puzzle of the plot. (Trish came up with the rather clever theory that the first two hours are all a masturbatory fantasy.) You can't deny Lynch's talent, but he's just fucking around here. Also, there wasn't that much sex.
