Mul Whine

I just watched the first hour of David Lynch's movie Mulholland Drive. It's two-and-a-half hours long, so I escaped from it without even reaching the halfway point. Yet still, I left with the sense of having wasted an hour of my life I'll never get back.

David Lynch conceived of the story as a television series, a sort of heir-apparent to Twin Peaks, following a number of separate stories about disillusioning struggles in Hollywood. ABC declined to pick up the series after viewing what Lynch had created, so he went back and filled it out with additional material, releasing it in theaters as a full movie.

There's the first flaw, right out of the gate. The entire thing looks like a cheap, made-for-TV affair. It honestly doesn't even look as good as most TV of its era (the early 2000s); cheap sets, cheap film stock, cheap lighting, and cheap costuming all make it look more like a product of the late 1980s.

Then there's the acting -- horrible from top to bottom. The opening sequence features a car accident in which a character played by Laura Harring loses her memory and stumbles away into the city. Her performance is stilted and robotic, and sets the tone for everything that follows. The main characters only come off remotely realistic by being surrounded by even more phony secondary characters. After this "read from cue cards" performance, it is a wonder Naomi Watts had a career.

But worst of all is the narrative -- or utter lack of one. The film plays like a fever dream. Imagine a delivery boy running around a studio lot with an arm full of scripts to deliver to six different sound stages. Some guy on a bicycle rounds a corner fast and slams into the delivery boy, scattering pages of all the scripts everywhere in a shower of paper. So he just scoops up the loose pages in random order (and losing several pages in the process) and delivers the jumbled mess as though it was a single, coherent script.

The entire film is a put on, the cinematic equivalent of a pop artist who rubs his feces on a canvas and then challenges people to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Several prominent critics fell under the sway of this, praising the film and proving unwilling to speak the truth: this movie is utter nonsense. It's in a dead heat with Dark Star for the ignominious title of Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen (Part Of, Anyway). F doesn't begin to cover it.