Mulholland Drive

It was originally gonna be a tv series apparently, but didn't get made, possibly because it was so strange, maybe considered too strange for tv? I saw it in the cinema and loved it, big fan of Lynch. I've gotta really good book about his films which would answer your question immediately, but unfortunately it's at my other home in Norwich!

Found this helpful: http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/10/23/mulholland_drive_anal... Cheers, Tony

That website helped, although I always feel a bit like I'm cheating if I read up on what a Lynch film is about. I usually finish watching his more incomprehensible films with that warm feeling where you havent understood it all but for some reason you really don't care... cheers

I think I know what you mean Spack - like you don't need to have understood the plot/events entirely, you just get an overall feeling or sense of atmosphere from the film? That's what I generally get from them anyways...

Mulholland Drive was the best film I've seen in ages, and one of Lynch's best to date. I agree with Beef - with Lynch you should just forget about conventional plot, that isn't what he's about. When he wants you to know what his films are about, he lets you, like with his more 'normal' movies (The Elephant Man etc). He's about evoking mood and atmosphere, and making things a little big more ambiguous, exploring different ideas than other film makers. I just got Lost Highway on DVD and love it - now just trying to get hold of Twin Peaks Season One boxed set!! "Damn fine cup of coffee!"

Yes, but it has Persona as an "overtext" and the movie becomes a subtext. That is, Persona by Ingmar Bergman. The actress loses her memory after she is hit on the head. She recovers her memory with the help of the other woman in the film. The hit on the head is an event that initiates not only amnesia, but something that connects itself to her initial childhood trauma. Having completely lost her memory, she slowly begins to appropriate the habits and clothes of the other woman she is staying with. She goes through a "mirror stage" which leads to her remembrance of the trauma that broke the spell of the mirror stage of her childhood. Mirrors convince us that things are continuous and we mirror other in order to feel that we belong and that we share a continous identity with others. Vampirism is a mirror. We come to know another's secrets by mirroring them and then understanding their gestures in terms of what we conceive to be their personal semiotic. The scene in "Interview with a Vampire" in which the mirror image of Lestat about to bite into a young boy's neck signals the death that Claudia is about to exact upon Lestat for killing Louis' mother. But once the mirroring begins, the stages that lead up to the breaking of the mirror, the initial trauma that breaks the continuity between the girl and the world around her, become synchronous. Both traumas are experienced simultaneously and they are forced to view the recurrent show that occurs... the magician and the show that he puts on and the terrible finale. After trauma, there is an elementary division that occurs in the psyche between one and the other. In order to escape feelings of shame, the girl says that it was the other who experienced the trauma and learns to keep the other private. Once she absorbs the trauma that has occurred to them, they become intact personalities. The other girl, however, cannot break the division between herself and other, and thus, she exhibits all the sympthoms of an aberrant personality. This is a psychological explanation and an oversimplified one, but if you watch Persona, you will see almost direct parallels. Susan Sontag wrote a wonderful essay on Persona in her famous book, "Styles of Radical Will."