To my surprise, I was perfectly pleased with that review. Of course I went back and re-read my original review from 2001. I'm currently preparing to include "Mulholland Drive" in my Great Movies Collection. As for David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." That was a film I took to the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where we spent five days going through it a shot at a time, trying to explain such matters as the little old people crawling under the door, the wolf-man behind the diner, the Cowboy, and the purpose of the Blue Box. Kubrick's command of film language created a poetry where you felt the meaning. What did that mean? I could give you my perfectly logical explanation, but I was there at the world's first public screening, and I can tell you no one seemed in revolt. Then the film's final episode, it involved an old man in a bedroom, somewhere in space. It was, and is likely to remain, the most audacious flash-forward in the history of the cinema. "2001" began with some apes at "The Dawn of Man," and after one of them hurls a bone into the air it dissolves into an orbiting space station. Both "Mulholland Drive" and "3 Women" involved two women who seemed to exchange identities, although it was more complicated than that. Many viewers complained they couldn't understand what was happening. What's missing is not realism but continuity.īetter examples of unrealistic films might be " Synecdoche, New York," " Mulholland Drive," " 2001: A Space Odyssey," " 3 Women," or " The Tree of Life." Coincidentally, all of these titles were on my best 10 lists. All of the stories on these channels are so good you'd like to see the whole movie, but what you see is what you get.
In my review of the film, I abandoned any attempt to answer a question many people ask, which is "what is the connection between the characters and the segments in which they appear?" I've seen reviews of the film conjuring the notion of viewers who are channel-surfing between separate stories on separate channels, many of them coincidentally using the same actors in different guises, which happens all the time. These kinds of films inspire audiences with a great need to "figure them out." Nobody ever walks out of " Iron Man" saying, "what the hell was that all about?" But after seeing a movie like "Cloud Atlas," they ask it even though it's perfectly obvious what it's about: Those possible things happened to those possible characters. Dream logic infects what Richard Linklater calls " Waking Life," and a character is suddenly no longer affected by the power of gravity.
Their identities shift, or they exchange them.
What seems to be developing takes an unexpected or illogical direction. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm thinking of a movie in which the characters do not inhabit the reality they, and we, thought they inhabited. Make up your mind.īy unrealistic I could, by definition, mean almost anything. Either Kryptonite is a danger to Superman or it isn't. But if Kryptonite suddenly loses its power over him, fans get pissed off. If Superman can fly through the air, stop a speeding locomotive with his bare hands and reverse the rotation of the earth, well and good. They resist it when a character isn't "consistent." They expect a movie to establish some rules early on, and play by them. When a film slips its tether and goes drifting through time, space and logic, some audiences grow uneasy. No audience expects everything in a movie to be realistic-they understand fantasy, hallucination and dreams-but they expect most movies to be realistic within their own terms. Realism, however, sets audiences at ease. Flash-forwards and flashbacks are so native to the art of film editing that even the earliest film audiences understood them instinctively. They feel no need to begin at the beginning and conclude at the end. Movies (and novels, too) have long felt fee to be non-linear.
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