Lynch's Mulholland Drive (and potential spoil alerts)

I just watched this one this evening. I remember wanting to watch it several years back but it wasn’t available on the streaming services I use but I checked today and saw it.

First thing I’ll say - I do remember watching Eraserhead and feeling like that particular movie was one where his esoteric / occult ideas were at least relatively transparent if you had background in Rosicrucian and Hermetic concepts. Blue Velvet and beyond is where he throws the thing in the blender and makes it a bit more opaque (with the exception of Twin Peaks where he seemed to clarify it again just a bit for lay audiences).

Mulholland Drive though struck me as him almost saying two things at once:

  1. Most basic general level - you couldn’t lick enough toads to understand what Source or the Dao is doing with us.

  2. That if either of the sets and settings were physical incarnations in the way we’d understand it (tracking Naomi’s character) that the system will throw you through contextually-connected loops with through-lines that would seem deeply bizarre / incongruous from within said system. Also for the people I’ve heard comment on it who tried to draw morality stories about lust - I drew the mistakes to be more of projection (kind of the same thing I guess though but a very different way of looking at it, ie. that the only thing stable enough to handle that sort of lust is God Itself, not a fallible person you’d project it on) and that the first half of the movie was something like the universe trying to equilibrate her by almost reversing the roles between Diane and Camilla with respect to who depended on who.

With David Lynch’s movies and shows it seems like he likes to play with the concept of something like an astral mafia of sorts that exerts the higher-order levels of will in the system downward, like seeing Betty crowbarred into a movie role but being called ‘Camilla’.

Curious if anyone else has any thoughts or comments about what he’s doing with that and how much it reflects his own beliefs about the cosmos. Funny enough I was watching Dune 2021 just two nights ago and, along with a lot of Daoist themes (from Herbert - I remember that from the book) there was very much the heavy Mars / Venus visceral energy and hairpin turns between the two, which is also something Lynch likes to play with as well, ie. desire and danger/conflict. In a way he almost makes it seem like it’s much more the center-point of what this system is focused on (from an upper level) rather than just piety or what Nietzsche referred to the Apollonian (vs Dionysian) path in Birth of Tragedy.