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.

Last November, I bought a bulky white turtleneck at a fast fashion store in Greece. I was not planning to buy anything when we went out shopping that day, but I was in the market for a white turtleneck and had not yet had the time to do some thrift store or otherwise more sustainable/good quality sleuthing. The sweater I found was what I was looking for and fit well and it was affordable so I bought it. My fast fashion footprint is otherwise close to zero, sue me.

And it is (was) a great sweater — I have worn it at least once a week, often twice, this winter, and as a result, it is in shambles. Not falling apart in a chic Chris Evans in Knives Out way, where you know it’s old but good quality, but piling all over and greying in the cuffs so rapidly that the frequency with which I am compelled to wash it is certainly not helping matters. I have had to retire it from something I can actually wear to work, it is now confined to WFH Zoom calls or casual judgment-free friend dinners. And okay fine: I got what I paid for.

For some reason, the more I read about Mulholland Drive, the more I thought about this sweater.

And here, I must delicately bring up the question of quality.

This year’s Oscars’ crop is surprisingly good, but nonetheless: a lot of TV and movies these days are, in fact, bad. They are simply worse on a level of craft and technique than older films. Less time and money is spent on pre-production or planning, leading to rampant green screen and CGI. Casting is driven by seemingly anything except chemistry or charisma. Then there is the more evergreen problem that some movies are confusing because the writers have been led to believe confusion is a good dupe for genius.

This is very much because how and why we watch TV and movies has (ostensibly) changed. “Content” is a) called content and b) more and more frequently designed for fast and easy consumption (like my sweater), in the background or to be watched and forgotten the minute a new something comes out.

En masse, TV and movies are not, it feels, created to be revisited and rewatched, they are not created, let alone produced, for longevity. Of course, not 100% of “old” movies were good either and yes, many contemporary movies and shows will stand the test of time, but it does feel like often left out of these debates is that the context of production has changed in a very real way.

There will always be the question of taste and the question of to what degree one enjoys being, say, confused, but to honestly interrogate the place of patience in art — whether and when and with which films we, as professed fans of film, should spend time — I think we must also be honest about the state of entertainment today. There is a lot of all-time great work being produced right now, but there are also a lot of corners being cut in the name of budget, the algorithm or both that results in work that is structurally, aesthetically and emotionally less sound than in the past.

I mentioned that part of the reason I was inclined to give Mulholland Drive a second viewing was because it lingered with me — I was left thinking about it days after I saw it. That, to me, is a feeling that is increasingly rare with new releases and that is, I believe, by design.

But back to the matter at hand, whatever that was. Instant gratification? Sure, let’s go with that.

We are so, so conditioned to want to feel and know and have everything immediately these days. There’s the internet, obviously, but it is also evident in the unrelenting dominance of SHEIN and Amazon, in the meltdowns of men (and women) on dating apps, in how food service workers get treated.

Moreover, not only are we primed to want to get what we want immediately, we are also primed to make snap judgments. That is, to reject it just as fast. To decide, equally immediately, whether something is good or bad — often with very little room for nuance in between or thought spent on how this rapid change of opinion impacts the person (or planet) on the other side.

(Rapidly decreasing media literacy is a separate issue but is in no way helping matters.)

No one needs to like David Lynch. It is certainly less of a societal imperative to spend more time with movies than it might be to shop less fast fashion. You like what you like and that’s fine, and there’s something to be said for knowing yourself and your tastes, but what I am asking — and maybe I am mostly asking myself — is to resist the need to decide right now.

Which is to say, resist the need, or more accurately, the desire, to be able to say definitively what something is (good, bad, overrated, underrated, for you, or not). To be open to sitting with something long enough to let your feelings and understanding of it develop, and — if it compels you — to giving it another chance, to see what it becomes upon a second or third viewing.

We do this, already, with the books and movies and series we love. We rewatch and we let their meaning evolve. It is an interesting challenge, I think, to ask ourselves to do it with the art that unsettles us too — that evokes a feeling, even if it’s not immediately clear what that feeling is or even if it’s a positive one.

(Unless you’re bored. If you’re bored by a movie, I feel relatively confident that future viewings are not suddenly gonna make it interesting. If you felt something the first time, those feelings can change, but only if they existed in the first place. Famously, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference so if you’re indifferent to Lynch, or whomever, carry on as you were.)

It’s funny, a little bit, the timing of everything — I saw my therapist for the first time in a minute this past weekend and we were talking a lot about a philosophical change (her words) that has taken hold for me, since about last November, in which I am generally less neurotic about needing to know exactly what everything is and will be, preferably several business days in advance. I am more comfortable with not only patience but also ambiguity. (She says this is a real breakthrough for my issues with trust and faith.)

Piecing my feelings together about Mulholland Drive (and my white sweater, RIP), it is strange to think that something that started with a pragmatic decision related to dating and since permeated into how I’ve approached and experienced my new job, is now somehow also maybe the reason I will give David Lynch a second chance, but so it goes, I suppose.