― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 18:17 (seventeen years ago) link
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Thursday, 26 October 2006 09:42 (seventeen years ago) link
― Antimax (Antimax), Friday, 3 November 2006 11:18 (seventeen years ago) link
People say it's Lynch's most difficult film. It's not difficult, just formally dense. His usual style of expositing through metaphors is in effect. Metaphors that catch, tangle and coil together in a serpents' mating ball, mind you, but metaphors nonetheless.
You have to suspend disbelief. Surrender to its metaphysics. Eventually, I parsed it as a rational, psychological, linear story, but that sure wasn't how I felt in the darkness.
Can this movie be understood? In your dreams...
Interpreted: Who was dreaming and why, the reconstructed flow of events, the space the characters inhabited.
Didn't interpret: the letters on Nikki/Susan's arm (what letters were they, again?), the word "AXXON" painted on a wall (Exxon + axon maybe - oil spill + neurotransmitter?), lots of little details.
Has Peter watched it yet? Anyone else?
― Syra (Syra), Thursday, 4 January 2007 19:27 (seventeen years ago) link
― Syra (Syra), Thursday, 4 January 2007 19:28 (seventeen years ago) link
The story to me is about an actress (or an artist, or any of us) who is horrified to discover that one's own life, unlike the lives that we can inhabit temporarily for creative purposes, cannot be so easily discarded or escaped for another. An actress can take the role of an adulteress or a whore, then drop it and forget about it later; but the real adulteress can't walk off the stage and finish the movie. When the actress becomes the subject herself, flirting with an affair that may as well have been pulled from her script, she becomes trapped in her own film. But none of us writes our own movie, and so her movie is not hers, either. It's frightening and unfamiliar, and the ending is a mystery. She goes through a catharsis; she comes to understand the character she is playing, and all the real people who may have inspired it, because she is one of them. She sees herself on the screen, and then embraces the one who has been watching her there, allowing each other to return to their proper places. Each sees the other through the screen, which is really a mirror.
On a lighter note, I loved the final scene as the credits rolled. I do love movies that end with dance scenes, the music was great, Laura Harring shows up, monkey dances in the strobe light, the red-lit stage curtains (in my very Lynchian theater in Portland, anyhow) close at just the right moment, and I've just had one of those rare, once-every-few-years moments that is a new David Lynch film.
― Matt Rebholz (Matt Rebholz), Sunday, 14 January 2007 09:21 (seventeen years ago) link