Ope Pardon, No. 34: Strange, Calling Yourself

There is much to be said for instant gratification — so much, in fact, it hardly needs to be said. To feel immediate pleasure, or any kind of emotion, really, in response to a given stimulus is — by definition! — a rush. It makes one feel alive. Surely I don’t need to explain further why this is a feeling we humans enjoy.

Last week, I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for the first time. Displaying Herculean strength (and deterred mostly by the presence of a friend), I resisted the urge to check Wikipedia/Google even as I became increasingly confused by nothing short of everything happening on the screen.

When it was over, I told my friend that I didn’t think I liked it, that I would even go so far to say Lynch was Not For Me. I had been forming my opinion in my head as the movie progressed — a latent, perhaps, impulse of my critic days jotting down my reactions in real-time. At first, I felt it was slow, then compelling but not necessarily interesting, a film I would categorize as something I appreciated but didn’t like. After the turn, I was in it, but by the time the credits rolled, I was back to ambivalent — I was still confused! There was no clear resolution of how the two fit halves fit together!

My instinctual response was to argue that (because I didn’t get it) it didn’t work as an unresolved ending, you simply couldn’t leave that much unexplained. I invoked Memento and how, even at his most confusing, Nolan (an extremely different filmmaker) gives you an a-ha moment at the end. There is no a-ha moment in Mulholland Drive.

The night ended and I went to bed, planning to read more about it anyways — in part to see if someone smarter than me could explain it. Still, I felt strongly that I had made up my mind: I could maybe be convinced it was a modern classic on technical grounds, but I could not be convinced I liked it.

I am long past the age when my tastes propped up my personality, which is just to say, I feel no pressure to like certain things nor do I feel any pride or distinction in not liking certain things. But my post-viewing reading did begin to make me doubt myself. What I read provided affirmation that I had interpreted what I interpreted in the film correctly, but also every article made a strong case that you simply had to watch it a second or even third time to become a true evangelist. What hooked me was this admission:

Still, the question remained as to whether it is/was worth my time to rewatch something I didn’t think I liked to see if I liked it more the second time just because “everyone” said I should.

Now, if I had felt a little differently about Mulholland Drive, I think I would have stuck to my convictions and embraced an easy no. But there was something about Mulholland Drive that lingered with me — I didn’t think I liked it, but I couldn’t quite articulate why, and a part of me did like it, and couldn’t quite articulate why.

At play here in the back of mind as well was what I think is a cultural or societal over-correction to film snobbery. To generalize wildly, there was/is a pervasive movement asserting that so-called popular entertainment (blockbusters, action movies, etc.) are just as culturally significant and artistically valuable as critically beloved art films, indies and Oscar winners.

(We will pretend popular and critic are inherently, fundamentally at odds for the sake of argument.)

In theory, this is a good thing — however, it has often come with the extreme denigration of the latter category. That in order to appreciate that Legally Blonde or Ocean’s 11 are stone-cold classics (they are), we must assert that Citizen Kane and The Godfather are actively bad. (See: Every time a Marty Scorsese quote has been taken in bad faith.) Moreover, we must assert that anyone who says they like or even understand, say, Mulholland Drive, is straight-up lying. (See: Whatever the fuck is going on with Austin Butler catching heat for liking Radiohead and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.)

While I wouldn’t go so far as to question the sincerity of anyone who says they liked or ‘got’ Mulholland Drive on the first viewing (that’s simply none of my business), I will admit that I have become somewhat an advocate of not forcing people to spend more time than they must on something they don’t like. For example, I have stopped recommending (as forcefully) TV shows that take, say, 3-6 episodes to “get good.”

That said, I am beginning to believe that such … leniency, shall we say, exacerbates this false dichotomy and that part of the problem — part of the resistance, rather, to films or TV that are more, let’s say, challenging — stems simply from a lack of patience. There is a desire, and perhaps I am simply projecting and generalizing as this is something I have only recently gotten comfortable rejecting, to not only understand but to categorize (read: judge) anything that enters your life immediately and with minimal reflection.

To be fair, the whole machinery of capitalism is designed for us to think and behave and act (and consume) this way — but in terms of the many things we can and cannot do in the face of capitalism, spending even three more hours with something genuinely compelling to reach a deeper, more genuine understanding of our own feelings about said object feels…worthwhile, to say the least.