Comment by jonhohle

"Los Angeles, every day, hot and sunny, today, hot and sunny, tomorrow, hot and, for the rest of the… hot and sunny, every single day, hot and sunny. And they love it. 'Isn’t great, every day, hot and sunny?' What are you, a @$%^& lizard?"

- Bill Hicks

LA weather is either "coastal low clouds will burn off by late morning, it'll be a lovely day", StormWatch(TM), or Santa Ana winds.

There's no other options :P

I was also under the impression that sometimes his weather report was more like a him stating how he was feeling that morning

I wasn’t implying that there was no narrative, just that his movies were so much more than just the narrative. And often things that seemed perplexing were just things he thought were interesting or beautiful so he put them there for no other reason.

That’s, in my opinion, where some of the intractability comes from: is this bug buzzing around a ceiling light meaningful to the plot or just something he saw one day and wanted others to experience as well. Every once in a while he’d give a tell, often unintentionally, while talking about something else. But most of the time he let things into the world without explanation.

All of the comments about how hard Mullholland Drive was to follow are making me wonder if I missed something. I watched it a couple of times when it was in the theater and enjoyed it, but I don't remember being all that confused. Certainly not like Twin Peaks confused. I guess now is as good a time as any to rewatch it.

Mulholland drives plot isn’t even that hard to follow once you figure out the twist. You can definitely go crazy deep with the symbolism though

Yes! I tell people to focus on the emotions that come up when they watch his stuff, and to focus less on trying to piece everything together.

I want to push back on the surreal end slightly. It's true that his movies are extremely resistant to analysis, and it's true that much of his imagery is de-facto surreal. But his movies still have narratives assembled from humans in concrete situations with concrete problems and easily understandable actions and reactions. In other words, you can enjoy his movies as an experience at relative face-value in a way many other forms of surreal art resist.

Some more than others, perhaps—the man produced Dune and Eraserhead pretty damn close together, and Eraserhead is not generally considered an easy movie to watch. But the man was never afraid or dismissive of giving us straightforwardly enjoyable cinema, even if we can't easily articulate why!

Perhaps more to the point, the fear that parenthood will destroy "the art life".

As a father that was much more obvious than when I saw it for the first time at 16 ;-)