You don't stop here.

Last night, I went to see Mulholland Drive with my friend Peter, and it was everything I could have asked for. Naturally, two hours of discussion were required afterwards to tease out the story threads to our satisfaction, and today, after hunting around on the net, I found an article over at Salon that pretty much jibes with our interpretation, give or take a few blue keys.

Once again I find myself ensnared in the Lynch Trap, ie. trying to solve the film as though it were a puzzle with a list of answers at the back of the book. Of course Lynch's dream-logic means that although there are threads that can be teased out, and certain subplots jigsawed into one another, not everything is supposed to make sense - some things are there just for texture, to add a layer of experience rather than direct meaning. I love this about his work, and there's a real painterly aspect to this film. But unlike, say, Lost Highway, where you're meant to just absorb the film as a gestalt, approaching it more as one would a painting or art installation than a piece of narrative fiction, Mulholland Drive actually can be solved. Kinda. In fact, I'm amazed by the degree to which it fits together - at least once you take into consideration the fact that it started out as a pilot for a TV series, and therefore may contain a couple of loose ends originally intended to be carried through into further episodes.

See, I like to think I'm all 'with it' and open to uncertainty, parallel truths and ambiguity; indeed last night as the credits were rolling, the theorising of the people sitting in the seats directly behind us had me muttering "It's not an episode of 'Murder, She Wrote,' for chrissakes." But then fifteen minutes later I was all over that baby like ants on a ham sandwich.

'Cause dream logic is still a kind of logic.

One more thing. Here are the first two episodes of Dumbland, Lynch's stupid little flash animation series. They won't blow your mind, but the idea of him drawing these with his i-mac mouse, doing all the voices and making explosive farting noises into a microphone on his desk has to be worth something.

Silencio.