Mulholland Dr.

I don’t share the admiration for David Lynch or the love for his work. I tried watching Twin Peaks before, and it was fine — until he introduced the mystical nonsense. After that, I concluded that the people who praise his work the loudest are mostly pseudo-intellectuals who want to signal that they’re different from everyone else. It’s become a marker. And interestingly, it’s mostly men.

As for Mulholland Drive — I’d heard a lot of positive things about it as well and decided to give it a chance after Lynch’s death and after reading the description, which I found genuinely intriguing. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the film itself.

Before you assume, reader, that I simply didn’t get the ideas and references — let me stop you right there. I’ve seen and read enough films, series and books, and I have a genuine interest in psychology, so yes, I got it. I understood that the film’s timeline is non-linear, and it’s about a woman who ordered the murder of her lover, couldn’t live with it and killed herself, as well as it’s about illusion in various forms and everything else. It’s not that deep or difficult, believe me.

My problem with this film is that it tries so hard to be “not like the others” that it forgets to actually do a good job. You can argue that Lynch planned it this way, but honestly, I don’t care. For me, it’s poor execution. There are many other arthouse and unconventional films and their creators who do better work than Lynch ever has, and that’s enough for me.

One of the biggest issues is the number of unnecessary characters and storylines that add nothing to the plot — only that signature Lynch “not like the others” mystery, which I apparently have zero tolerance for. The more a creator tries to show off, the less I respect them as a creator. I don’t need to be told you’re interesting — I need to witness it. And in the second work of his I’ve seen, the only thing I witness is a large ego and a lot of bragging. Yes, those extra characters technically contribute to Diane’s story, but if you removed them, the audience would still get the overall picture, which means they’re useless. They just make the film tiring and boring. The ending with the small elderly couple was cringe and very on-brand for Lynch — another “look how weird I am” moment.

The second big issue is the female characters. They were so textbook “women written by a man” that it was physically hard to watch. The lesbian relationships and everything related to the women’s sexuality screamed that this is not how it actually is — this is how a man imagines it. The sexual scenes were too many and far too long. We don’t need to watch women have sex for that long to understand they’re in love and/or have relationships. These scenes were clearly made by a man for men.

The only two things I genuinely liked were the scene in the theatre where the woman was singing, and the overall concept of a woman going through the psychological process of accepting what she did; how her consciousness tried to repress it. But there are films that handle the same idea much better, Shutter Island for example.

And honestly, I’m really tired of seeing men in every industry do mediocre work and collect praise, while women get torn apart for small things. Hello, Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.