Watched it again, this time with K. She was transfixed, but later admitted, “That movie was terrifying, like being drawn into someone’s nightmare.”

The women in the plot, such as they are “women,” have no fixed identities. There’s a lot of displacement between 1) a woman who watches a film on television, 2) the actress (played by laura dern) who plays the lead in that film, and 3) the character whose story is played by the actress. According to interviews, Lynch only ever says that the movie is about “a woman in trouble.” I think he means that there’s really only one woman, but she’s lost in art, and as such she is manifested as several different women. And because time is uncertain, the film jumps from one to another and back and forth in a narrative unexpectedly.

To top that off, much of the film is metafilmic—laura dern is an actress who is filming a movie that she gets lost in—calling attention to the artifice of it all.

I think I want to watch Mulholland Drive again.

Aside: On the DVD’s second disc, David Lynch does a cooking show. He makes a quinoa dish and tells a story about a woman who spit Coca-Cola out her nose. It’s quite surreal.

by greg—Dec 3, 07:47 AM