Kitty film rec: Mulholland Drive

[Cipher]

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Originally posted by Sarah Bennett :

I'm glad he doesn't have chapter stops. I actually agree with Lynch's idea there - movies aren't like music CDs. You should watch the whole thing, otherwise it only spoils it.

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Having chapter stops doesn't prevent you from watching it all the way through or make it any harder or less convenient to do so (or different in any way, when that's what you want to do), and people generally do watch movies all the way through because that is usually the best way to enjoy them. But people don't always want to enjoy them only that way; sometimes they want to enjoy them in different ways such as skipping to their favorite parts (maybe they don't have a long enough block of time to watch it all), or skipping over parts they don't like to watch, or going back to rewatch a scene to improve their understanding of things connected to a later scene while the viewing is still fresh in their mind (particularly likely for a Lynch film?).



Nothing prevents anyone from watching it all the way through as it was intended when they want to... unless something comes up that requires that you interrupt it and return to it later (too long to leave it on pause, or how about if your power goes out while you're watching it), and gosh shouldn't you have every right and ability to do that when you've shelled out a significant chunk of change in support of the movie so that you could watch it at your convenience in your own home?

[shellybean]

Ok, I just finished watching this movie after renting it from blockbuster and was I confused. I read someone's interpretation or translation of what was going on which helped me understand it a lot better, but I'm still a bit confused. Either way it was a great movie and Naomi Watts was so incredible. She really deserved at least an oscar nod for that.

“I choose you." - Katie to Jessie "Once and Again"

"Sometimes things happen between people that you don't really expect. And sometimes the things that are important are the ones that seem the weirdest or the most wrong, and those are the ones that change your life." - Jessie Sammler "Once and Again"

[Thespia]

Sassyeggs, I totally agree with you. That question was Xita's, not mine. I just couldn't manage to use that darn quote thing...

[Sarah Bennett]

From Cipher

Quote:

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Nothing prevents anyone from watching it all the way through as it was intended when they want to... unless something comes up that requires that you interrupt it and return to it later (too long to leave it on pause, or how about if your power goes out while you're watching it), and gosh shouldn't you have every right and ability to do that when you've shelled out a significant chunk of change in support of the movie so that you could watch it at your convenience in your own home?

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I still see it as David Lynch's perogative, not our right. It's his movie. It's his art. And there's no law saying all DVD movies need to have a scene index. So...



It's the same with music. Many music CDs don't have separate tracks (especially instrumental music). And that's because the music artist wanted their album to flow continuously without the breaks, and they consider it a complete piece - where the whole is worth much more than the sum of the parts. It's like an artistic choice.



Saying Lynch "should" have included a scene index because some viewers expect to have the "right" to be able to jump to different bits of the movie is no different to saying they "should" make all photoprints of the Mona Lisa painting, available in separate parts - like a jigsaw puzzle.



Some people particularly like Mona's eyes, or her nose, or her mouth, so why not give people the freedom to dissect it and look at each particular part individually? It may sound stupid, and you can bet Leonardo Da Vinci would hate the idea. Yet his reason for hating that idea would be precisely the same as David Lynch's reason for hating DVD scene indexes



Sarah.

[JoanneHillier]

Yeah I agree Sarah

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[Cipher]

The advantage of disk media over tape is that disk are random-access--meaning it is easy to jump to any part of it from any other part--whereas tapes are linear-access and must be wound at limited speed in time proportional to the index distance between points (though not exactly because tapes can wind different speeds at different parts of the tape due to changing radius on each wheel). But this also creates the disadvantage that if the memory of the current position is lost such as by stopping or ejecting the disk or due to a loss of power (depending on any fancy features to remember through power-off and power-loss), you can't just resume where you left off automatically. Fortunately you could just use the random-access nature of disk media to jump right to where you were, or if you forgot you could quickly jump around a few spots until you find the best point to resume from. This is one thing chapter stops are useful for, though there are other ways of providing such conveniences without relying on chapter stops. But since most DVDs include chapter stops it's probably not that common for vendors to go to the trouble of providing the more complex interfaces necessary to do this without them. I consider that a down-side of the chapter-stop approach; it encourages vendors to be lazy and allows content providers to disrespect the people ultimately paying for all of this.



The Mona Lisa doesn't have to be cut up into pieces in order for you to jump to viewing any smaller section of it, it's 2-dimentional visual nature and the physiology of vision makes it possible to do so in an uncut version, including the original (though you have to be there where it is on display, of course). But movies and music can only be experienced over time and the audience's time does not belong to the artist to dictate how they must spend it. Public performances such as concerts and movie theaters have practical limitations that require scheduling a specific block of time and the audience must choose to fit that block within how they spend their time in order to experience that performance. But when you buy a copy of a recording to experience within your own home the scheduling becomes up to the individual and has no impact on anyone else (other than others watching it with them). This includes watching (or re-watching) some portions and skipping others depending on how you want to spend the time you have.



When you create art you have a lot of license to make it how you want it. You can create a movie that shows scenes in reverse order (as Memento), or that has bizarre jumps in context that are deliberately unexplained (as Mulholland Drive). That's the art you create and there is a natural way of experiencing that art that you rely on for the desired effect (eg. watching a movie from start to end in one sitting, the way it was intended to be viewed in theaters). (Note that the DVD for Memento includes a feature to watch the scenes reshuffled into chronological order, which could make for interesting viewing (after seeing it the suggested way first), but probably isn't the way you'd normally want to watch it.)



But once you share that art with the world, contributing to entertainment and culture and earning compensation for the work, it ceases to be your sole property over which to dictate total control. It becomes a shared idea subject to different interpretations and different experiences by different people at different times. It is absurd to tell other people how they have to experience it when they can do otherwise at no inconvenience to others and without disrupting the natural (suggested) experience for others, just as it is absurd to tell people they can not spend half an hour staring only at the Mona Lisa's eyes and no other part but must instead experience it only by letting the whole of the picture wash over their eyes and never concentrate on any one part.



Anyone with any sense would first experience it in the most natural and intended way (looking at the whole painting, watching the whole movie normally). But after that some people will find more in the experience by examining certain portions of it more intently. (Even the first home viewing might get interrupted and require taking a break in the middle and resuming it later, perhaps without time to rewatch from the beginning again.) This does not take away from the original experience (or people would be foolish to do it), and usually does not detract from later experiencing it as a whole again (sometimes even the first viewing takes away from later viewings, other times a second viewing is quite meaningful, as with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and probably many viewings of Mulholland Drive will continue to provide an interesting experience, which is one reason why people would buy a home video copy to watch many times--the other reason being so they can control the experience and see it in ways other than straight through in one sitting).



Having chapter stops doesn't prevent people from experiencing it in the intended way nor make it particularly less likely to happen. Not having chapter stops doesn't prevent people from experiencing it in different ways (there's still pause, fast-forward, and rewind); it just makes it less convenient to do so. Since people can have many good and legitimate reasons when they choose to watch a movie other than from beginning to end, making it less convenient for them to do so by ignoring the convention for that medium (providing chapter stops) smacks of arrogance and is disrespectful to the people who ultimately pay for the artist's livelihood.



If it were possible for people to go in and add their own chapter stops to their own DVD copies this wouldn't be such a big deal. But DVDs aren't designed to be modified and most DVD players aren't able to write to them (recordable DVDs are much more expensive and presumably use a different disk media than pre-recorded read-only DVDs), so there is no way for people to provide the convenience to themselves in most DVD players (computer-based players could store supplemental information on the hard drive and could implement user-defined sub-chapters or other secondary index, but most DVD players probably can't do that). If most DVD players provide time-index jump features (jumping around quickly by time index rather than by chapter) then this isn't that big a deal, but my impression is that such features generally aren't provided because it's easier to just implement chapter navigation and vendors expect content providers to provide chapter stops. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know.

[TwiLightJoy]

My gf and I watched this last night. We didn't notice that the disc wasn't divided into different scenes, and Michelle's mom has this habit of walking in when we're watching something and starting to yammer on about something or other. We paused the disc and when her mom left, I wanted to go back to the beginning of the scene to catch what had been said. It took us a while to figure out that we'd have to fast-forward through the whole first 20 minutes (very glad that it wasn't later in the film when we discovered this!) to get back to where we were. I have to say that yes, it's his movie, but he must not have people interrupt his movie-watching very often. For us it happens pretty regularly, so a scene selection would have been greatly appreciated.



Plot-wise, we were pretty much fine up to the point where Betty disappeared. From there we tried to follow and put things together, but didn't do a very good job. I'm gonna read through the whole thread (I pretty much just read the first and last pages coz I'm lazy) and see what kinda helpfulness you've got.



~Joy

[Gatito Grande]

Hey, I knew this thread was around here somewhere (actually, right at the bottom of our New "Plastic" Forum. I'm just glad I didn't have to wade through page after page of threads over on the K!).



Courtesy of Starz Free Preview Weekend, I have *finally* seen this movie. Thank you, DirecTV! (As I trust everyone else who wants to see it, has, there be spoilers down yonder).



I had genuinely mixed feelings about it: at it's end, I thought, "Well this is another one for the Lesbian Cliche FAQ, right?" (Is it?) Yet, as an Ol' Peaker (revived last year when I caught all the TP eps on Bravo), I certainly could appreciate those familiar Lynchian touches (Did you know my brain actually formed the coherent thought "Hey, this sounds like 'Twin Peaks'!" 2 seconds into the start of the movie, before I remembered this was a Lynch pic? Though I regret to admit that I didn't remember it was the music of Angelo Badalamenti until I saw his name.)



In trying to understand the non-linear/supremely surreal plot, I'm kind of surprised that no one here has mentioned a similar gimmick: namely, compare the "blue key" of MD, w/ the penny of Somewhere in Time. Each is an artifact which knocks the protagonist (Christopher Reeves' character in Somewhere, Naomi Watts' "Diane" here) out of their preferred reality, and into a much less desirable one.



OK, another point for the Cliche FAQ: as wonderful as the sex scene was, did anyone notice how quickly things fell apart afterwards? "'Rita'" starts talking in her sleep about "Silencio," which turns out to be the surreal (more so than previously in Lynch-World) Club Silencio. "Everything is an illusion" we're told. Rita and Betty cry (along w/ "Crying" in Spanish), there's a blue light, and suddenly the Blue Box appears in Betty's purse.



Did anyone else scream "Don't open it! Don't open it!" at the screen? Even before "Rita" opens it, Betty has disappeared, and then Reality-as-We-Have-Known-It-To-This-Point disappears completely. For, IMO, the Blue Box represents not death, but illumination: the illumination which takes Diane Selwyn back to her shabby garden apartment (was Diane supposed to be a prostitute? She looked very similar to the prostitute---crack 'ho?---we saw talking to the hitman earlier), and the blue key lying on her coffee table, which silently (silencio) accuses (and convicts) her of killing her lover. Naomi Watts pathos in these latter moments is truly heart-breaking, as she tries (inc. "lending a hand" ) to bring back the happy reality of her lover (whether it's "Camilla" or Rita---it doesn't matter), and can't. At that point, there's nothing left but to enact the creation of the corpse she saw earlier: cliche complete. (I thought the frantic delusion of the troll-like old people was superfluous, and detracted from Diane's dignity. Her grief would have led her to kill herself, no madness was necessary.)



Oh my, but was Naomi Watts yummy! *Totally* get it now (how has she been in later films?) Laura Elena Harring is not really my type, but she *did* look great w/ Naomi (in her own brunette hair---as a blond, she looked kind of like a drag queen to me). Y'know, I think I liked their relationship chemistry (as Betty and Rita) even more than their sexual chemistry. Loved how Betty kept putting Rita first (over family and career), and how Rita, despite her paralyzing fear, kept looking out for Betty (pulling her out of the line of sight of whom she believes to be baddies). Of course, that this chemistry is the delusion of the woman who has been thrown over by the Rita-Doppelganger (and in turn had her murdered) only makes the previous B&R "teamwork" (not to mention grrl-on-grrl action, and Betty's declarations of love) all the sadder. (The *narrative* chemistry is a delusion, that is: what Naomi and Laura Elena had---like Amber and Aly!---is real as all get out )



At the end of the day, MD represents Tragic Love Gone Wrong. It's not so different from the kind of Het Love Gone Wrong that we've seen in dozens of movies (Vertigo comes to mind). It's only the absence of equal numbers of *happy* endings (ala all those Het Romantic Comedies) that makes it feel so much more sad.



GG Man, wouldn't it be nice if I had both the $ and the urban setting to see movies like this *when the come out in theaters* instead of years later! Out



ETA: Just back from my second viewing (this is that kind of movie): did anybody spot the BTVS connection? That's Katherine Towne (aka "Sunday" from S4's premiere, The Freshman) playing the director's Gal Friday (as it were! Sunday as Friday, get it? ). I knew I recognized her the first time, I just wasn't sure why . . .



I think this movie is even sadder the second time around. Poor Diane: her Alternate Reality (as Betty, w/ Rita) is better on just about every level, isn't it (and isn't it interesting how AlternaWorld is completely chronological, while "Real Reality" is fractured by flashbacks and flashforwards)? You can see why---quite apart from having Camilla murdered---she'd want to stay in AlternaWorld.



But . . . Naomi Watts can call me!

Edited by: Gatito Grande at: 9/29/03 5:28 pm

[Sheridan]

Not having chapter breaks does not force anyone to actually watch the movie all the way through. The DVD drive on my computer can skip along at 16x FF whiles I'm watching. So unless DL is going to break the FF controls on all DVD's(and video players for that matter) he's fooling himself.

Willow: ...I have to tell you....

Tara: No, I understand you have to be with the person you l-love

Willow: I am

[Chameleon girl]

Oh, I just loved this movie, after seeing it a few times of course. The first time when it ended I was like "what the bloody hell... no, you can't leave it like that! What?...my brain, it hurts..." and so on.

Every single time I watch it I get all teary eyed and emotional, especially at the moment Betty steps out of the taxi for her big audition, that music, WOW! I loved connecting all those little threads to figure out how all the seemingly unconnected characters and scenes came together.



It seemed to me in Diane's Betty fantasy, she wanted Rita to have to depend on her for everything because Diane had relied so much on Camilla to get her those small parts in all of the plays, which Camilla was so obviously the star of. And wasn't Diane just so bitter and angry at that fact. She hated Camilla for getting the parts which she desperately wanted, being the success that she never was (but was in her fantasy, in which everything was swapped around), but she loved her unquestioningly at the same time.

Rita always looked so sad, as if she knew that it could never last, that the foundations of their reality had already started to come apart.



And Naomi Watts did it so well, she just blew me away! The starry-eyed innocent small town girl to the bitter, defeated woman with no way out. I doubt that she will ever surpasse the brilliance of what she did in this role.



Gatito Grande-

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But . . . Naomi Watts can call me!

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Damn right! Too bad she's with Heath Ledger...sigh.

[Hyo Shin]

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Damn right! Too bad she's with Heath Ledger...sigh.

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Not anymore.



Heath and Naomi Split





Australian acting couple Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts have split, blaming their hectic work schedules. Sources close to the couple claim their romance fizzled out over a month ago. The pair had been struggling to find quality time together ever since they first hooked up last year, and have found they're often working on different continents. Mulholland Drive star Watts, 34, is currently shooting with Ewan McGregor in New York, while Ledger, 24, has been making The Brothers Grimm in the Czech Republic for the past month. The couple met and fell in love on the set of Ned Kelly, which is released next year. Nevetheless, news of the split will come as a shock to many - in a magazine interview published in Britain last week Watts dismissed the couple's 10 year age gap, and even spoke of her desire to start a family with the young star. She said, "I'm dying to have a child and we'd like to have kids at some point. But right now we're both busy with our careers."

[Gatito Grande]

Thanks for the dish, Hyo Shin!



Now I can carefreely go back to fantasizing that the faboo Ms. Watts has cleared her romantic decks for Yours Truly!



Hey, at least I'm closer in age to her than her ex . . .



GG . . . and almost as pretty! Out



Oh, one last MD observation/question: the movie starts w/ Swing music, and the (dream) characters names are "Betty" and "Rita"? The two most notable WWII pin-ups names (for Betty Grable and, in point of narrative fact, Rita Hayworth)? What's up w/ that?

[Candleshoe]

I didn't understand this film, but luckily the girls at AfterEllen didn't either:

Review of Mulholland Drive

[xita]

Sadly the girls at afterellen don't know much about David Lynch. ABC didn't pass on the project as a tv show based on the entire movie. The pilot was only an hour like most pilots. A lot of the film was added post that pilot including the lesbian stuff.

And if you look to David Lynch movies for a linear movie that everyone can understand you are looking at the wrong movie. It's the brilliance of Lynch that you can look at a film over and over and still not fully "get it."

It's definitely not for everyone though. I understand that.

[dorksrcool]

I think this is an excellent film. Naomi Watts is brilliant! But I've pretty much liked all of Lynch's movies.

[Gatito Grande]

Heh: quite a bit has happened since I first saw (and posted about) this movie two and half years ago.


For all its faults (and it has them), MD has become one of my favorite movies of the New Millenium: it's just brilliant on so many levels...

And I have fallen ever farther into Naomi Watts Obsession: saw King Kong 3 times, mainly to just look at *That Face* (and longingly lust after her )! That she wasn't nominated for an Oscar for her performance in MD (and who won that year? Halle Berry's melodramatic turn in Monster's Ball? Sorry, not even close) is one of the Academy's Great Crimes. <*>

But back to MD itself: I confess, I watched it twice (more) recently, and had fun writing down its 182 separate scenes. The more you watch it, the more brilliant it gets (and there's this fun game you can play, called "Deconstruct/Reconstruct Diane Selwyn's Actual Life, based upon Her Dream". Her dream reveals some things, and conceals others).

Yeah, at the end of the day, it's still a Tragic Tale (and since it's about lesbians, it does fit the cliche---in a surreal kinda way, of course). But if you can just get past the tragedy (Or better yet, do what I do: use your own surreal imagination to keep going, and fix everything---like maybe Rita, still freaked about the afternoon's corpse-discovery, just had a nightmare that night---and hence, everything from "Silencio!" onwards is a dream?I recommend another round of love-making w/ Betty to sooooothe away those demons! ), MD is a flick which keeps on giving.

GG Always another level to peel back, and fire the imagination---and if it's Betty&Rita together, boy is my imagination fired-up! Out

<*> NW love-life update: she got back together w/ Heath, then they broke up again . . . pretty definitively, as he got together w/ Michelle Williams (of Brokeback of course). She then got together w/ Liev Schreiber , but I've heard that they've recently (since the KK premiere) broken up, also. So, last I've heard, NW's still available for GG's lovin!