Item: Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) slightly better than Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)!

Wherein I concede that Mulholland Drive is indeed better than Lost Highway. But only slightly - ever since Mulholland's release, I've been baffled by its status as the best-reviewed film of the aughts if not the century when I've always found it about on par with its lesser-feted neonoir predecessor. A recent rewatch of Lost Highway confirms the widespread notion that the film loses steam when Fred Madison (a perfectly cast Bill Pullman - like Robert Cummings in Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 Saboteur, he's the kind of average schmuck who makes the evil swirling around him all the more arbitrary and menacing) becomes Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). And Lynch still didn't know quite what to do with his female characters at this point in his career, so Patricia Arquette remains a juvenile fantasy as the this-sex-which-is-not-one femme fatale Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield. Then again, no one comes off as a well-rounded entity here, especially an even more perfectly cast Robert Blake who, in a scene creepier than any in Mulholland Drive, calls himself on the phone. Lynch's genius, such that it is, is for masticating narrative sense while maintaining his hold over us with psychological/emotional sense and Lost Highway still packs a wallop in the unspecified willies department.

Not wanting to add much too much more to the already existing mountains of discourse on Mulholland, I'll just note that its fans are a dreary lot for their insistence that the film does, in fact, tell a story. My take mirrors Jonathan Rosenbaum's: "The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable." Indeed, how could you possibly ruin the story with a Rosebud or Keyser Söze-like spoiler? It simply doesn't work by resolving an enigma or tying down loose narrative flaps. And even if one could prove that a story results from Lynch's plot, why would this be the primary mode of reception when, like Lost Highway, it's selling psychological, not narrative, sense? Great flick, though. And more hardcore lesbian than I remembered.

Lost Highway - A-minus 

Mulholland Drive - A