Mullholland Wake

[The Great Quail]

I for one really liked this baffling and beautiful movie. In fact, I 
have not been able to get Mullholland Drive out of my mind. I think 
Lynch is onto something much deeper than avant-garde wankery or 
sloppy surrealism, as a few critics have been saying. There really is 
something genuinely dreamlike about his movies, and I am not 
endorsing them on the basis of style over substance either, such as I 
would with Tim Burton or Dario Argento. I think Lynch goes a lot 
deeper than that. Ebert wrote a pretty good review:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-mul12f.html

I agree with the Chubby One when he says that Lynch has perfectly 
captured dream "logic." In fact, Ebert's comments about the movie are 
very similar to things said about Finnegans Wake, and in many ways, 
Lynch has visual captured some of Joyce's later hypnogogic style. 
(Yes! More Joyce references! I see them everywhere!) His surrealism 
gives every appearance of *seeming* to make sense. Especially in 
Mullholland Drive -- you get the feeling that things do connect 
somewhere beneath the surface. Your mind slides over the plot and 
narrative, suddenly finding yourself slipping into a Mobius strip, or 
a paradox, and you can never quite pinpoint *where* the disconnects 
occur, because things are nearly seamless. Identities shift, plots 
fracture, but still, nothing seems random -- it's not just simple 
discontinuity or sloppy contradiction. It's like an Escher painting 
-- is seems to make sense on a deeper level, a non-rational level 
accessible only in dreams. There's more ways to tell a story than 
through straight narrative. As Joyce said about FW,"One great part of 
every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered 
sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and 
goahead plot;" or as he would actually write in FW, it is told "in 
the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious 
tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world."

Oh, and then there's the hot lesbian sex. (Though I am not sure I can 
dredge up a FW quote for that.)

--Al
-- 
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The Great Quail, Keeper of the Libyrinth:
http://www.TheModernWord.com

"Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick 
as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of 
whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde 
from erde . . . (Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, 
what curious of signs (please stoop) in this allaphbed! Can you rede 
(since We and Thou had it out already) its world? . . . Speak to us 
of Emailia!"
          --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake