I don’t like to read Mulholland Drive as a movie about a woman having a dream or something, although I have come to accept that this reading is available. In general, interpretations of anything along these lines don’t interest me — “it’s all a dream” or “it’s all a hallucination” or “it all occurs in the moment before she dies”. These readings pretend to break out of the delusion at the heart of film but actually re-entrench it. That delusion, I mean, being that anything exists in a film.
The dream-or-something twist pretends it’s so clever, and it thinks you’re so stupid. It provokes a flinch of repulsion and offense. The same as when you ask a man at a party about what he’s been watching lately and he says, “Have you ever heard of a little director named David Lynch?”
I don’t like being condescended to about ideas my interlocutor would assume I’d had if he gave me the benefit of thinking I was reasonably clever. This is how it feels to hear, “has it ever occurred to you that part of a movie could be not real?” None of it is real. No movies are real. Movies are a more or less ordered collage of simulated images. Mulholland Drive wants to make us aware of this.
Continue reading “where did you go?”