Absolutely love this film. Really just manages to hit the absolute zenith of where arthouse, filmbro and tv trash hits. The first half is this wonderfully seductive mystery plot that just sucks you in and totally wraps you around its finger, and the second half is its complete mirror image, just unraveling the entire thing.
spoiler
One of my favorite sequences of any film is the part where Naomi Watts gets brought to the set where Justin Theroux is casting for his film, while "Sixteen Reasons" plays. There is of course the slow zoom-out revealing the set that opens the sequence, but even more I love the zoom-in on Naomi Watts face when her eyes meet Justin Theroux. Every time I watch this film, even though I obviously know every story beat inside out, having watched the film half a dozen times, in that single moment I genuinely believe that somehow magically this copy of the film has been switched out for some alternate universe version of it, where Betty's/Diane's delusion of Hollywood are actually real. That's the seductive power of this film, and of film in general, that it might make you believe that the dream is real.
For a short I had the instinct to want to dismiss Lynch as a "filmbros first arthouse film" director, but after getting to watch some of his other work on analogue film and maturing my taste in films a bit more, I couldn't disagree with that instinct more. Lynch has somehow managed to be a successful and popular filmmaker under the studio system and be a deeply original artist at the same time and he might be the only one who has managed to do so within the last fifty years. We will never have another filmmaker like him.
Absolutely love this film. Really just manages to hit the absolute zenith of where arthouse, filmbro and tv trash hits. The first half is this wonderfully seductive mystery plot that just sucks you in and totally wraps you around its finger, and the second half is its complete mirror image, just unraveling the entire thing.
spoiler
One of my favorite sequences of any film is the part where Naomi Watts gets brought to the set where Justin Theroux is casting for his film, while "Sixteen Reasons" plays. There is of course the slow zoom-out revealing the set that opens the sequence, but even more I love the zoom-in on Naomi Watts face when her eyes meet Justin Theroux. Every time I watch this film, even though I obviously know every story beat inside out, having watched the film half a dozen times, in that single moment I genuinely believe that somehow magically this copy of the film has been switched out for some alternate universe version of it, where Betty's/Diane's delusion of Hollywood are actually real. That's the seductive power of this film, and of film in general, that it might make you believe that the dream is real.
For a short I had the instinct to want to dismiss Lynch as a "filmbros first arthouse film" director, but after getting to watch some of his other work on analogue film and maturing my taste in films a bit more, I couldn't disagree with that instinct more. Lynch has somehow managed to be a successful and popular filmmaker under the studio system and be a deeply original artist at the same time and he might be the only one who has managed to do so within the last fifty years. We will never have another filmmaker like him.