[After a brisk nap]

Originally Posted by Once A Villain

You're not going to get very far attempting to inform me of how Hollywood has "conditioned us". I'm no fan of Hollywood, and some of the very earliest silent films made in countries other than the U.S. also seemed to believe that film works well as a storytelling medium. Obviously art is not limited to narrative, but it would help Lynch's cause in Lost Highway if I hadn't already seen many superior non-narrative films.

It's certainly worth discussing Lost Highway's merit aside from narrative (I don't think it is perfect by any stretch), but it seems like that would require a very different debate than what we've seen so far, with claims that it has no substance, is weird for the sake of being weird, makes no sense, has nothing to say, etc.

Well, give me Béla Tarr for this any day of the week. Andrei Tarkovsky perhaps. Maybe a little Fassbinder, or as previously mentioned, Bunuel. Hell, I'd take Fellini too.

Dismissing Lynch as a surrealist, to me, is an awful lot like dismissing him altogether. I guess I expect anyone who admires Lynch to admit that he's a worthwhile surrealist.

I would rather be challenged than struggle with something that has no end to the struggle. Trying to make sense out of something even the director didn't seem to understand is pretty much futile.

Don't you think experiencing and appreciating is possible without complete understanding? It seems to me that the great works of art are those that refuse to be summed up with glib explanations.

Hmmm... While we are at it, can we edit Pulp Fiction into chronological order? Oh wait, I wouldn't want that, nevermind.

I'm not saying I would want it, artistically. I'd like to have a chronological cut of Mulholland Dr.:

a) To show to people who claim that the movie makes no sense and cannot possibly be understood.
b) As a way to examine it more closely.

Sorry but given the way I view Lost Highway, it almost sounds like you're saying a puzzle with a solution can't be art, while a puzzle with no solution CAN be art.

No, I don't think that. For one thing, I don't think Lost Highway is a puzzle with no solution.

What I'm saying is that a puzzle is different from a mystery with no solution. They have to be considered differently (For example, when an enigmatic element is not explained, that is not a flaw, as it would be in a puzzle that left loose ends.) Both are essentially devices, they don't determine the worth of the work by themselves.

However, puzzles do have a tendency to be gimmicky, detracting from whatever other interest the work might hold. This actually isn't, to me, a big problem with Mulholland Dr. My complaint is rather that there isn't much more to the movie than the puzzle of finding the explanation of what's happening in the film.

I enjoy puzzles as well as enigmas. In fact, I'm just reading a whole bunch of mystery novels by Patrick Quentin (pseudonym for, among others, Hugh Wheeler, who in his second career wrote Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music). But I guess on some level I do feel that questions with no answers are more interesting than questions you can figure out through a little bit of cleverness.

Tell me, would The Trial be a better book if, through close reading, you could figure out who accused Josef K? Would Rashomon be a greater movie if it finally showed us what really happened on that country road? Would Hamlet be a masterpiece if it kept us guessing about Hamlet's true motivations, then revealed them in a twist at the end? Would Picnic at Hanging Rock be improved if we knew what happened to the girls up on that mountain?