Frankly speaking, the film “Mulholland Dr.” is not that difficult to understand, what had David Lynch done is to disorganize the plot of a detailedly created complex case and remix it again. The same “nonlinear narrative” pattern was successfully used in Christopher Nolan’s first film which was called “Following” already. The creating process is like to put the essential elements of a complete film (such as the characters, events and key items) into a giant blender, disintegrating, and then recombine them.
It seems to be pretty easy as saying, but the procedure will be quite hard to achieve. The smooth story-line at the origin was cut into pieces. Facing so many complex and non-logical human moods and story fragment, how to assemble them properly so as to make people understand the whole thing? And what makes the situation more perplexed is that the viewers have their own thinking methods. In contrast with the one or two story-branches of the mentioned film “Following”, “Mulholland Dr.” has such a bulky and complicated story structure. To control the operation on the whole level, which shows the extraordinary talent of the film director.
*The film criticism was written by Simplified Chinese at first (which is my mother tongue), then I translated into English for your reading convenience. And down there is the original version.
说到底，《穆赫兰道》其实并不难懂，大卫·林奇只是把一个精心虚构的复杂案件的情节打乱并重新拼凑。同样的非线性叙事风格，在克里斯托弗·诺兰的处女作《追随》中就已经成功尝试过。创作过程就像是将构成一部电影所需的完整元素（人物、事件、关键物）置入一台偌大的粉碎机中分解，再将之重新组合起来。
但是，说起来好像很简单，但是其中却充满了重重困难。原本流畅的故事主线被打断，面对如此繁复的非逻辑性的人物情绪与情节残片，应该如何组装才能令人能够理解？观众在观影时有着自己的思考。反观《追》仅是一、二条支线，而《穆》却是如此庞杂的故事架构。这样的整体性把控能力，正是导演的功力所在。
A×R×T 