More than anything else, Mulholland Drive is an incredible cinematic experience. You laugh, you wince, you fall in love, you hold your breath, you cringe, you mutter "Oh my God." The movie is a nonstop catalog of classic Lynchian moments, from extreme discomfort (composer Angelo Badalamenti, a longtime Lynch collaborator, is ineffable as the espresso-rejecting mobster) to nostalgic reverie (a candy-colored doll with a beehive hairdo lip-synchs Connie Stevens's "Sixteen Reasons" in a delightfully improbable movie-audition scene) to utter desolation (abandoned by a lover, a distraught woman seeks solace in masturbation; in a point-of-view shot, we see the brickwork above her fireplace snap in and out of focus) to sheer terror (embodied, finally, by two extremely creepy senior citizens). The only problem — and I need to lay my cards on the table and say that it wasn't much of a problem for me, although for others it might be a big one — is exactly what the hell happens in this movie.

It's pretty clear where Drive takes off from its TV pilot version; the lesbian scenes are a tip-off, plus the use of space within the frame opens up considerably. But Lynch did not use the big screen to tie up the loose ends of his various plot lines in a neat, or you might even say coherent, way. While the film's emotional conclusion is quite definitive and remarkably devastating, the fact is that this is a mystery film where a lot of the riddles remain unanswered. It occurred to me, shortly after trying to shake off the emotional power of the film (it's the kind of movie that makes the real world seem even weirder than usual when you step out of the theater), that Mulholland Drive is, in an oblique way, really a remake of Lynch's first film, Eraserhead, and that left to his own devices, Lynch will, in some form or another, just make the same film over and over again. Roberto Rossellini once remarked of Chaplin's A King in New York, "It is the film of a free man." Mulholland Drive is the film of a slave — a slave to his own, undying obsessions. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

— Glenn Kenny