Talk:Mulholland Drive (film)

Ebert didn't give it 4 stars at first

If I'm not mistaken it was around 2, and he changed it to 4 straight after it got awards and critical acclaim. 91.231.118.246 (talk) 13:11, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

I believe you are mistaken. If he did, he changed it before he and Richard Roeper reviewed it on At the Movies; here is his original review of the film on siskelebert.org: https://siskelebert.org/?p=12650 Cryptkeeperfun (talk) 16:55, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

"Classic"

"Mulholland Drive has been compared with Billy Wilder's film noir classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), another tale about broken dreams in Hollywood"

Is it ok to call something a "classic" as a factual statement in an encyclopedia? Isn't it more of a subjective thing rather than saying "it is widely regarded as a classic"? Is it against NPOV? I'm asking out of curiosity. Dornwald (talk) 00:35, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Sections in article

Currently there is a "reception and legacy" subsection, alongside "Home Media" and "Box Office", below the "Release" heading. And then there is a separate heading "Awards and honors" as well. Why have this confusing layout compared to other film articles on wikipedia? See any Lynch film Blue Velvet as an example. Should be changed to the following format: "Release" heading with "Home Media" subheading; "Reception" heading with subheadings of "Box Office", "Critical Reception", "Legacy", "Accolades".

Relatedly, why not include the film's nominations at the academy awards, golden globes, etc. in the table rather than needlessly listing them in a separate paragraph? Yeoutie (talk) 03:12, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

MOS:FILM says, "There is no defined order of the sections... he following subsections are presented in the order in which they typically appear, but the structure and ordering may vary between film articles. See also MOS:SECTIONORDER." There is no requirement for every film article to look the same, and if this became a Featured Article with this layout, it's likely fine, just different. Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 14:31, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Regarding the awards, interestingly, you can see the earliest FA version here, and it has a really nice-looking presentation of the awards. I think that should be brought back. Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 14:34, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Heather Love

Under the "romantic content" section there is extensive citing and discussion of Heather Love's article on Mulholland but it seems (to me at least) to generally misrepresent her point and cherry pick quotes to appear as a critique of Lynch's use of lesbian cliché as insensitive and homophobic and male gaze-y or something of that sort. Love is more interested, imo, in the use of the lesbian as an other and therefore a conduit for modern universalised/atomised tragedy -- and indeed directly shows that she doesn't really agree with those 'disturbed by Lynch's representation of lesbians as objects of male fantasy'. I find that this is a disingenuous citing of her work as an example of those criticising MH for perpetuating stereotype because that's not her point at all. I'm sure it was a common argument made and worth discussing, but maybe worth considering a different source ... (talk) 04:11, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Adam's sexual relationships (or lack thereof)

To avoid an edit war I am bringing this to talk and pinging @Vector legacy (2010) and Shtove:

Okay, I wouldn't personally have referenced the "casting couch" like Shtove did, but broadly speaking, I wanted to identify the PA's offer to sleep with Adam Kesher in the plot summary because Mulholland Drive critiques Hollywood's reputation for looking the other way when powerful directors entice actresses to sleep with them in exchange for movie parts.

Lynch's Clue No. 8 is "Did talent alone help Camilla", and while in the dream Camilla is cast due to a mob conspiracy, the reality section implies that Camilla is "hav[ing] sexual relationships with Hollywood figures to achieve her ends" (link); that Camilla is "sleeping with Adam in exchange for career security" (link); that Adam "cast [Camilla] as the new leading lady both in and out of his picture" (link); that "Camilla used her striking beautiful face and her physical appearance to seduce the men and climb higher positions in industry" (link). You get the idea.

Similarly, Cynthia's offer to sleep with Adam is "Lynch making another commentary on the film industry", which is why in Diane's dream, "Adam does the right thing and says that would be a bad idea" (link), but in real life, he dates Camilla.

I realize that with Lynch being dead (and being reticent in life) there is no way that we're ever going to be able to confirm this for sure, but Clue No. 8 points strongly in this direction. I'm not asking us to include this interpretation in the plot summary (which doesn't even say that the final act is a shift to reality), I'm just asking us to include a useful detail. Namelessposter (talk) 21:13, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

@Namelessposter: I'm not going to debate the soundness of all this theorizing, which may very well be onto something, but to my understanding of plot summaries on here (kludged together from MOS:FILMPLOT and WP:PLOTSUM), summaries should only include the main events of the film. This ten-second exchange (with a very minor character who mostly seems to exist for plot convenience and never shows up again) really doesn't feel significant enough for exclusion on the face of it, and expecting it to bring some kind of directly inferable insight about the film's view of Hollywood's sexual politics, just because the subject of sex is implied, is just really stretching things thin.

If you want to present the themes of the film and provide interpretations, why not do this in the, let's see, "Themes and interpretation" section? You're obviously smart enough to have done your reading, you've got your sources ready, and most of them seem to cut the mustard (except Editorialge, which gives me AI slop vibes, and the Film Crit Hulk thing, which is the only one of these that even mentions the exchange with the Cynthia character). If you want to present the view that "Camilla represents sex payola" or whatever, then you can elucidate that point much more clearly by writing about it in the actual body; adding a sentence about some bit character's offhand proposition (which Lynch maybe only left in because he thought it was funny, we don't know) is a significantly worse way of getting the point across. Vector legacy (2010) (talk) 23:42, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Like I said, I'm not asking us to include this interpretation, and I am not saying that this interpretation is controlling, but I do think we owe it to the reader to leave potentially relevant information in the plot summary when there is no controlling interpretation out there. We're under 700 words, so I think the onus is on you to justify removal, rather than on me to justify inclusion. I think this is all consistent with MOS:FILMPLOT ("If there are differing perspectives of a film's events from secondary sources, describe the events on screen as simply as possible in the plot summary and report interpretations in another section of the article."). I am describing details, not interpretations, although I understand the counterargument that the relevance of the detail is premised on the interpretation. Regardless, I appreciate your invitation to "get the point across" but the plot summary isn't trying to get any points across (except to highlight that various actresses double for different characters at different parts of the story, where the case for inclusion seems pretty straightforward to me).

I'd also note that Film Crit Hulk, despite the weird all-caps gimmick he used at the time, has written for various reasonably respectable outlets including The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, and Observer. Namelessposter (talk) 00:02, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

"The relevance of the detail is premised on the interpretation" pretty much closes the book on the whole thing from my perspective, and we both seem to understand it, so I really don't know what's left to discuss here since my onus was just completed for me. (And the more I write about this, about one sentence of text, the more embarrassingly excessive it feels.) That interpretation would be far better represented if it was developed in the body, and not left dangling from some tangential micro-instance. If the whole thing is about the symbolism of Camilla, then talk about the symbolism of Camilla (that is, "report interpretations in another section") instead of adding a bit into the summary about some mostly irrelevant character talking about sex for 10 seconds (not my definition of "simply as possible"). All I'm saying is that the "potential relevance" of this thing is a bit too tenuous to merit inclusion. It elucidates nothing, while talking about the actual intended meaning (the reason you want this to be included) would elucidate something. Vector legacy (2010) (talk) 01:02, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

My point about saying that relevance is premised on interpretation is that that fact applies to literally everything in the film. This is Mulholland Drive, where there is no controlling interpretation, so any detail might be worthy of inclusion, or it might not. The fact that I've tried to interpret the movie is not a reason to leave this this detail out because it's not a reason to leave anything in particular out. Everything in this movie is "dangling from some tangential micro-instance" because that is how the dream logic of this movie is structured. I think saying that "Adam's personal assistant offers sex, but Adam declines" (which is a trimmed-down version of my original one-sentence version) describes this scene as "simply as possible." It's just eight words. This discussion is excessive because you are taking an unnecessarily harsh stance on adding one sentence to a plot summary that's not even over the presumptive word limit. I hope this is a compromise you can accept. Namelessposter (talk) 01:17, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

If "any detail might be worthy of inclusion, or it might not", then there's not much point in including them in the first place, aside from very vaguely and inadequately boosting your own interpretations. You can do whatever you want, I'm not going to stop you, but you clearly have some kind of point to get across about this film, the one you started this conversation with, and this isn't a smart way of doing it. I tried to suggest more reasonable alternatives, but I can't force you to accept them. Vector legacy (2010) (talk) 01:40, 29 March 2025 (UTC)