For those who like David Lynch

I was in college when the TV series Twin Peaks came out. I could never understand why so many of the students were into the show, with large watch parties. Recently, I watched Mulholland Drive, one of David Lynch's movies, as it's going to be on Flix tonight at 8:00 PM. As I was watching I couldn't help but think of Twin Peaks.

There's an opening prologue of a woman in riding in the back seat of a limousine on Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive, intercut with two cars full of young people racing down the same road. The limousine stops and the orders the woman (Laura Harring) out, but she refuses. Suddenly, one of the two joyriding cars has a head-on-collision with the limousine, killing a bunch of people but not the woman. Somehow she gets out of the car and stumbles down the Hollywood hills, hiding in the bushes near a formerly-posh apartment house where old-time people involved in Hollywood live.

Meanwhile, Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has recently won a jitterbug contest that we see even before the opening credits. She's had dreams of becoming an actress, so she flies out to Los Angeles to try to pursue that dream. She's got an aunt who just so happens to live in that apartment building where the other woman went to hide, and said aunt is about to go off to do some work on another movie, so she's told Betty that Betty is welcome to stay there for a while. Unfortunately, she never told the landlord Coco (Ann Miller) any of this. So when Betty shows up, Coco isn't expecting her.

Eventually, Coco gives Betty the keys to the apartment, and when Betty starts getting settled, she finds the other woman hiding in the shower, trying to clean herself up since she's got some abrasions and whatnot. It's here we find ot that the accident left her concussed and with a case of amnesia, as she can't remember who she is, calling herself "Rita" from a poster of the old movie Gilda starring Rita Hayworth. Rita surprisingly doesn't have any identification in her purse, just a bunch of money.

Meanwhile, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is trying to direct a movie. He's in a strained relationship with his wife, and worse, he's got a couple of money men who seem more a part of the Mob. They have somebody they'd like to see play the lead of the movie, and if Adam doesn't cast said woman, well, these two are going to pull their funding. Adam is displeased by this, and even more so when he's brought to see some "cowboy" who reiterates the message.

A third strand of the story involves a hitman who kills somebody for an address book and, botching the operation, kills two other people; one other tidbit has a character who claims he has a recurring dream about some diner and goes to the diner to see if the dream is actually real.

So what do all of these story-lines have in common? Well, Betty gets an audition for a movie while she's got Rita at her aunt's place, coming home to have a lesbian tryst with Rita. But just when the two think they've discovered Rita's identity, something weird happens that results in Betty waking up as Diane Selwyn, who is having a lesbian tryst with the actress cast as the lead in Adam's movie, even though Adam is going to get married to her.

Frankly, Mulholland Drive didn't make much sense to me, at least not the final third. If it had been a conventional mystery with the various plot strands coming together in a coherent way, it probably would have been a better movie. But then, that's not what David Lynch is known for. So instead, we get something that veers off in a direction where even the reviewers who liked the movie said you need to watch it multiple times to figure out what's going on. I guess the most logical explanation would be that the first two-thirds of the movie are a dream, with the second most logical being that the last third is a dream. But either way, I found that terribly unsatisfying.

People who like David Lynch, or just like weird for the sake of weird, however, will probably enjoy Mulholland Drive. So if you're in the mood for something out of the ordinary, you may want to give Mulholland Drive a try.