This is where you admit that you didn't understand [film x], and someone else explains it for you (LIKELY SPOILERS)

Date: 30 August 1999
Summary: Haste war du cinema

Godard scholarship, lined along the axes of variants of French post-structuralism, would appear to have gotten it all wrong: a Godard movie can't be assimilated into a coherent and non-self-contradictory statement about work, gender, representation, or whatever academically approved topic you might name; it can't even be assimilated into a coherent process. What has to be confronted is that the work is essentially diaristic and subjective; these films are the more or less uncensored insides of Godard's head, not a white paper on a topic (no matter how "challenging" or "frustrating to expectations").

It also must be acknowledged that for Godard, even ideation is essentially sensuous, aestheticisable; ideas, like a piece of irruptive slapstick staging, a stale aphorism, a blast of the Mozart Requiem, are objects of delectation and desire, and finally repositories of aesthetic emotion--handwrapped presents. To say that the ideology of Godard's Maoist period was finally another aesthetic object for him is not to condescend to him as a radical-chicster. Very simply, Godard is an artist for whom the gland that produces aesthetic feeling works ten times more overtime than anyone else.

This produces the jarring and sometimes tonic feeling that we are overhearing the disordered and associative thoughts of God as He falls asleep. In a late, lyric work like HELAS POUR MOI, this quality becomes transcendent: the film is like a communication from a higher alien intelligence. In PASSION, that desire to aestheticize everything in sight, to wave a wand marked "excruciating beauty," in essence to make like a cinematic Goldfinger, is tripped up by the story Godard was required to tell in order to receive funding.

The necessity of telling a story is one of the (many) subjects that flit by in this production, which followed Godard's minorly popular comeback, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF. And the story Godard tells is so halfheartedly offered it disrupts the all-pervasive atmosphere of heightened lyricism he generates elsewhere. In essence, it's the same old movie about the making of a movie: the director (Jerzy Radzilowicz) is an idiot caught between a virginal proletarian (Isabelle Huppert!) and a slatternly hanger-on (Hanna Schygulla). The director pontificates, the producer (Michel Piccoli) avoids paying checks, and the inevitable phone calls for completion funds are delivered in dirty rooms.

If this reminds you of everything from BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE to LIVING IN OBLIVION you're right; but nothing in those movies compared to Godard's strategy of contempt-uously making his stars Huppert and Piccoli stutter and cough, respectively. Or to the moment when a grip tells a child extra out of nowhere, "O those who will come after us--do not harden your hearts against us."

PASSION reminded me of John Simon's review of LE GAI SAVOIR, which began in the manner of, "I have seen no movie more illucid, arbitrary, and, yes, insane as..." PASSION genuinely is insane--it raises every line, every gesture, every landscape to a plane of unbearable intensity, and refuses to draw any lines between them. The cumulative effect suggests the personality of a slightly depressed but highly stimulated schizophrenic. Godard's late work is so beyond the prison of our narrative and identificational expectations that we may have to wait several lifetimes for its voice to be genuinely, not just indulgingly, heard.

(my friend and i have a running joke about susan sontag's hyperbolic praise of certain movies)

Haven't seen TLADILA since it played in theaters! Gotta see that again.

Stuff and things.

That's it.

There's really not much to it, you're probably confusing yourself by overthinking it. Friedkin has already shown throughout the movie that he's fond of using cut-backs to earlier footage in order to establish something like thematic unity (remember the brief shot of Chance bungee jumping during the car chase scene that was there to drive home the point that he was constantly tempting fate?), and this is just a cut-back to Chance's earlier arrival at the chick's house. I interpreted it as further hammering home what we've already seen (through Vukovich adopting Chance's swagger and sartorial sense, beside the fact that he explicitly states that he's "in charge now", or whatever that last line in the movie was), which is that Vukovich is completely taking over Chance's role. Now he is the corrupt "bad cop", and has had that same thanatic compulsion that got Chance killed kindled in himself. In a way it's almost as if Vukovich's upright character is the one that dies, while Chance lives on in an utterly transformed Vukovich.

As for Grimes and Masters' girlfriend, I think it was just more material to establish that Masters wasn't just a common criminal; we're supposed to think that he was a really deep guy (as if him being an artist who hung out all the time with modern dancers wasn't enough). There's nothing between Grimes and the girl other than that they'd both been relatively close to Masters and they both (despite Grimes' assertion that it was "all business") recognized how special he was, or whatever.

Yeah, so what didn't you get? I think your description is probably the most insightful commentary on it I've ever read.....though you neglected to mention the supporting role of "Son-of-Man-Flesh-on-Bone".

Wether thats a copout or what I dont know, but thats what he's said. If I could find a link to a quote I would...

But maybe that's still a copout.

Music. An imitative polyphonic composition in which a theme or themes are stated successively in all of the voices of the contrapuntal structure.
Psychiatry. A pathological amnesiac condition during which one is apparently conscious of one's actions but has no recollection of them after returning to a normal state. This condition, usually resulting from severe mental stress, may persist for as long as several months.

That sums the film up quite nicely I think.

Still doesnt explain what the hell it was about though.

Lost Highway has basically the same plot as Mulholland Drive, but in reverse order. Fred Madison is suspicious that his wife is cheating him, though he has no real proof. His wife wasn't home when he rang her, and may have seen her with another man, but that may just be his imagination. However, he can't get over his growing suspicions and jealousy. The guy with the white make-up represents his jealousy, that's why he's "at your [Fred's] house" in the scene where he telephones the guy. The house represents Fred's mind, and the videotapes symbolize his growing madness/jealousy. Dick Laurent, mentioned at the beginning of the film, is the object of his suspicions, the one he thinks his wife is cheating him with. Fred's jealousy finally results in him killing her. He's caught, but suffers from amnesia - his psyche can't cope with the fact that he killed his wife.

In one interview, Lynch mentions a real, existing psychological phenomenon, in which the psyche of a person who suffers from overbearing guilt and mental stress can make him to forget his past and invent a new presonality, one which doesn't carry the guilt of the former. This is exactly what happens to Fred in prison; he turns into another person. The realist approach to the second half of the film is that happens inside Fred's mind, the surrealist option is that Fred's mind actually changes the world around him. You can take your pick. After Fred changes into Pete Dayton he wants to relive his romance with his wife, but in a purer form, free of jealousy. Because the second half of the film is basically Fred dreaming, it half steers away from realism, resembling a pulp novel or a cheap crime flick. Pete falls in love with Alice/Renee, a gangster's girlfriend who's afraid of her abusive boyfriend. The boyfriend is of course Dick Laurent in the guise of "Mr. Eddy". But even in his dream Fred/Pete can't escape his jealousy, which is why he again begins to suspect Alice's/Renee's relationship to Dick Laurent isn't as simple as she claims. The white make-up guy (Fred's jealousy) makes a reappearance, and because the dream didn't work as it was supposed to, Pete turns back to Fred and kills Dick Laurent, the object of his suspicions.

Realizing what he's done, Fred tries to warn his past self, using the door phone. "Dick Laurent is dead", he says to his former self - there's no need for jealousy. But because the film is structured as it is, this is only the beginning of the story, and he ends up killing his wife again and again. He's caught in a forever loop of jealousy and madness, the Lost Highway.

I know there are some pieces that don't exactly fit this puzzle (Pete's parents references to "that night", the detectives the photograph at the end of the film etc.) but Lynch himself has said that doesn't want his mysteries thoroughly solved. Mystery stories like Lost Highway are far more effective if they elude a final resolution, if they're left at least partially unexplained.

as for lost highway i always figured that bill pullman actually did turn into balthazar getty, i don't see why there is this ardent need to "explain" it in terms of psychological phenomena when it's a movie, after all. i guess the film does establish a certain rapport with psychological themes so it's not completely off base but still...

mulholland drive always seemed to lack the excitement and rigor and much of the mystery of lost highway to me.

I was just repeating what Lynch said on the interview. Actually, if I remember correctly, him and Barry Gifford had already scripted the film when they heard of the phenomenon, and were only delighted that their fiction matched something that can actually happen.

mulholland drive always seemed to lack the excitement and rigor and much of the mystery of lost highway to me.

My problem with Mulholland Drive is that it has the exact same the story as Lost Highway. Here's how it goes:

The main character gets jealous of his/her wife/girlfriend.
-> S/he kills her / gets her killed.
-> S/he can't bear the guilt, and escapes into a fantasy world, where their love story is purer, resembling Hollywood fiction. Also, s/he losts his/her memory of what has happened, but glimpses of the past are still coming through.
-> Ultimately, his/her fantasy won't last, and s/he returns to the the real world.
-> S/he kills herself / goes mad / is executed because of his/her sin.

The fact that the "dream" part of the film is the first half in Mulholland Drive, and the second half in Lost Highway, doesn't change the fact that the plot is very similar.

all Tarantino movies - Christian morality plays about getting your shit together in various ways. and, in particular, what 'cool' may or may not have to do with it.

Please.

Of course there was a moment when Betty/Diane (actually Diane Selwyn from Deep River, Ontario) woke up (only to kill herself a short while later). It was when the (dream) Cowboy (who she originally saw -- in our reality -- for only a second or two, when he walked by in the background at Camilla/Adam's engagement party, after which she embellished his character into the disturbingly implacable being who threatened Adam in her fantasy/dream-version) says "hey pretty girl, time to wake up," and she gets up, makes coffee, starts to hallucinate the tiny old people (probably her parents whose ultimate judgment she could not quite shake even in her earlier fantasy... hence their weird creepy fixed grins after they left her at the airport... ), masturbate, flash back a couple more times (to the hitman in the diner, to a couple disintegrating fantasies involving Camilla, probably to give us some semblance of bearings), then kill herself.

As for The Sylvia North Story -- yeah, Sylvia Plath was a famous suicide, and Diane came from the North, or Canada.

(OK, that last might be a bit of a stretch. The rest is solid gold, though. It's not like Lynch leaves us completely bewildered, after all. He litters this movie with clues: Just to take one fairly unheralded example, remember the audition scene, and when the Bob Brooker character says: "So don't play it for real until it gets real"? That quote's pretty much a Rosetta Stone for the entire film.)

OTM, it really is the greatest idea for a comic strip like ever.

Here are some explanations:

1. You have no gf.
2. You and your gf have been (are being) both educated in the same shitty school system.
3. You saw the same movie and both have the same pathological fear of ambiguity.
3. You

I think the best thing about Donnie Darko was the characters and the mood, and the whole mystery/sci-fi plot almost ruined an otherwise interesting flick. So I don't even want to try to look for some explanations.

it's pretty goddamn difficult.

(i mean it's kind of nuts enough that i wasn't actually anti it at all, but "earlier funny films" totally doesn't apply to "WKW": mid-period of modish pop clarity is more to the point) (in a GOOD WAY obv)

'it shows their separation in space', we were told.

this is all correct. the US general is an actor, and the information he gives the SS is wrong.

the OSS deliberately placed him in a 'crashed' plane as part of the deception.

but this is only the minor half of the op, which is the flushing out of double-agents in britain.

only richard burton, not el clint, is in on it, initially.

and the sole objective is to get the head of the SS (or whatever) confirm the names of the double agents. to get there they go through hella trouble.

i saw a japanese film at the LFF once -- shot on blurry video -- abt some fellows who walked all round north island, whatever it's called... one section was shot through the fron window of the driving cab of the train someone was travelling, and was just of the wipers wiping snow off the window, for TWENTY MINUTES yay! that wz awesome -- i'd like to see that again actually but i can't remember who did it even though they got up and answered questions at the end

-- mark s (mar...), March 1st, 2006.

SILENCIO

so how'd the guy kill jack?

That was a helluva silencer in The Passenger. I always preferred to think the guy crept in and found him already dead of an existential coronary.

http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/papers/wallace.html

Re: Picnic at Hanging Rock, what the fuck happened to those girls?

oh whoops I forgot this was an old thread

rewatches:
Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1991) - 7/10
Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997) - 7/10
The Fog (Carpenter, 1979) - 6/10
Midnight Run (Brest, 1988) - 8/10
Live and Let Die (Hamilton, 1971) - 8/10
Biggles (Hough, 1986) - 4/10
Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005) - 6/10
Interstellar (Nolan, 2014) - 6/10

1st time:
Trainwreck (Apatow, 2015) - 6/10
Foxcatcher (Miller, 2014) - 5/10
A Most Violent Year (Chandor, 2014) - 7/10
The Tale of Princess Kagua (Takahata, 2014) - 5/10
Jupiter Ascending (Wachowskis, 2014) - 7/10
Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellmen,1971) - 7/10
Vanishing Point (Sarafian, 1971) - 7/10
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau (Gregory, 2015) - 8/10

?