Episode 11 - What The Hell Was That?

(We have a winner here for trailers made for the movie

the studio wishes it had rather than the movie it is.)

Wherein we debate William Goldman's Color of Light, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, discuss some snubs and pleasant surprises with the Oscar nominations and get into a shouting max over whether or not David Lynch knows how to focus a camera (seriously folks, this is a contentious episode with more arguing than usual).

Amy at one point mentions a quote that she ran across but was later able to find, from David Roche's The Death of the Subject in David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive (an essay really worth your time):

But this is the case only on the screen. On our side of the screen, the spectator is still trying to solve the mysteries. In other words, the detective has been displaced from the main focalizer to the spectator while the mystery has been displaced from the diegesis, the detective plot, to the film. There is a mystery or a puzzle, but it is the film itself, and the detective is none other than the spectator who can no longer rely on the character for focalization but must pick up clues as the movie goes along and try to work out its meaning(s), to the point that, in Mulholland Drive, only the spectator make associations between certain scenes, and in the end between the different parts of the film. So if Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are held together by a genre, and more importantly by the character-detective’s desire to solve the mystery, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are mysteries, not because of their genre, but as films, and are held together by the spectator-detective’s desire to make sense of them.

And from Randy we have the Salon article he references and some more information about the pilot that became Mulholland Drive.

Also, please enjoy the Internet rabbit hole that is theories about what the hell actually happens in the movie.
 
Next week is humor; we'll be reading Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat (free Project Gutenberg text) and watching the Broken Lizard movie Super Troopers (streaming on Netflix).

iTunes Link

Podomatic Link

MP3 link