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Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
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.
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I honestly don't dismiss Lynch as a surrealist or as a filmmaker in general. I quite like him when he's "on". I do believe he's hit or miss though, and not a single one of his films would be on a Top 200 list of mine until about 160 or so.
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Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
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.
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Of course I agree. One of my favorite movies of all time is Tarkovsky's Mirror, which has the "logic" of dreams and nightmares. I simply don't think that Lost Highway can be defended in such a way. To be fair though, I haven't seen Lost Highway in about 4 or 5 years now. By the way, I think there are also great works of art that are relatively easy to understand. I think, for instance, that Ozu's Tokyo Story is a great work of cinematic art, but it's a very simple story that is easy to understand.
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Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
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.
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Well, I see Mulholland Dr. almost entirely as a character piece on Diane (Naomi Watts). So I think there's quite a bit there in addition to the mystery. It's done quite differently than most character studies and indeed I probably prefer other forms of character study, but I enjoyed Mulholland Dr. as a commentary on both her character and mental state.
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Originally Posted by After a brisk nap
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?
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First of all, please tell me you like Orson Welles.
You mentioned The Trial as a novel, but not the Orson Welles film version. Heh. And to answer your question: NO. But those are entirely different films. Of course I loved not ever finding out what happened in Picnic at Hanging Rock...it made the whole experience quite frightening in my opinion. And Rashomon is all about the nature of truth, and revealing what actually happened would destroy the whole thing. Heh. I just don't think Lost Highway is a good comparison with those films, perhaps I need to watch it a 14th time.
