I have now added to my ever-growing Blu-ray and DVD collection David Lynch’s 2001 protean production Mulholland Dr and it has been considering the nature of logical order in film and fiction.

Fiction generally behaves in accordance with its own internal and decipherable narrative logic that allows the reader or audience to suspend disbelief and accept the characters and events are credible representations of some reality. This spans the gauntlet from grounded ‘realistic’ dramas such as The Remains of the Day to fantastic and physics defying spectacles like Avengers: Endgame. The cause-and-effect logic of the story dictates the progression of the characters actions, emotions, and growth with a clear and understanding relationship between event and outcome.

Mulholland Dr abandons all sense of narrative logic in favor of dream logic. The audience is denied a firm, clear, foundation of logical rules by which the film operates leaving them swept by the currents of imagery, raw emotion, and sound into a whirlpool that each individual is solely responsible for interpreting. The film is most often compared directly to a dream where major events and sequences have only the barest of connecting narratives flowing freely from one to another with a logic that feels present but is forever just beyond discovery.

I cannot tell you what Mulholland Dr is about. I cannot give to you a definitive interpretation on what maybe reality and what may be dream if such a distinction even exists within its narrative. It is like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but with is cold clinical style replaced by one that is unsettling, disturbing, and even horrifying.

I have seen this film called the best horror movie of the early 2000s and it is hard to argue with that assessment. Horror works best when not only the characters but the audience is forced to face threatening events that defy understanding. The dead do not rise and feed upon the living, magical beasts do not prowl the night, and science has not produced monstrosities savaging the countryside. But eventually in horror films and fiction the new rules are discovered, the vampire must rest on earth from its grave, the uncompleted tasked finished so the spirits my rest, the nature of the beast is understood and through that defeated returning the world to an order that again rational. Mulholland Drnever resolves its internal logical, the world unbalanced is never again rational, and the unsettled horror of a cold uncaring universe that beyond understanding remains, haunting the audience far beyond the film’s 146-minute running time.

I do not pretend to understand Lynch’s vision but I do feel it and that I think that was his intent all along.