The movie's alleged incomprehensibility has been used as Exhibit A by its detractors, and it's been
praised in equal measure by some of its most fervent fans.
But, as Flak writer Andy Ross said in his original piece on the film,
"the filmmakers clearly went to great trouble to give Mulholland Drive a logical, complex
structure, and giving up on the search for that structure does the film a disservice." As an aid to
putting it all together, Flak offers an mp3 audio commentary for the film. It's not concerned
simply with reconstructing the narrative; the Flak commentators hold court on the movie's
themes and symbols, craft and artistry. It's the audio track you wish the DVD had included, but didn't.
Why didn't the DVD include commentary? Because Lynch doesn't want to explain the film and hearing
an artist tell you exactly what's on his mind can be terribly reductive. This commentary doesn't
seek to reduce the film, either; it poses as many questions as it might answer, in an effort not to
quash discussion of the film, but to encourage it.
But that's not intended to sound like a loophole to justify elements we can't explain. We hope you'll
find our commentary complete and we'll even tell you about the blue box.
Instructions for Downloading
To play back the commentary, you'll either need a portable mp3 player,
a computer with mp3 playback that you can listen to while you watch the film or a CD burner and player.
(The commentary is split into two files; each file is short enough to be burned onto an audio CD.)
The first track should start at 0:00:00;
the second at 1:14:03 (on the cut between Betty outside the studio and Betty inside the producer's
office for her audition). Many mp3 players can be configured to jump from the end of one track to the
beginning of another with no time inbetween and no crossfading; if your player lacks this, you'll want
to pause the film at 1:14:03 and cue up the second half. (While you might expect an mp3 DVD commentary
track to have one mp3 per chapter, the Mulholland Drive DVD has no chapters. The commentary is
broken up into only two chapters to minimize the need for listener synchronization.)
A selection of mp3 players, many freeware or shareware, can be found for different platforms at
Download.com. Many of these can also make CDs from mp3
source material, which will be necessary to turn these tracks into audio CDs. (Simply
burning mp3s onto a CD as data files does not result in an audio CD.)
To download the following, right-click (for Windows users) or click and hold (for Mac users) on each
link until a menu appears with an option to "Download Link to Disk" (Internet Explorer) or "Save
this Link as
" (Netscape).
Part One
Part Two
Sean Weitner and Andy Ross
(sean@flakmag.com and
apross@earthlink.net)