What can you remember about your first experience?

What grabbed you?

Why are you talking about this film now?

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I never saw MD in the cinema. In fact I'm struggling to remember if I even saw it on DVD or whether it was a VHS rental. I'd seen a couple of David Lynch films as a lazy, stoned student but I was always passing between obsessions. It was film for a while, and then the film interest faded as I had to make more time for music, and then eventually I shifted back to film again.

I think I saw it at the end of 2002 for the first time, and I knew that basically there was some MASSIVE twist part the way through that would mangle my mind. I also had briefly seen the 10 Clues/Keys, but could only remember #2 - notice the appearances of the red lampshade (somehow I though that retaining this clue would help me upon viewing).

But anyway, I rented it and I set off watching, completely engrossed and remember particularly being blown away completely by the Dan/Herb Winkie's scene. As I got further into the film I was waiting for the twist, almost pre-empting it at times. Sometimes I wonder if Lynch expected a bit of a hoopla around it and so intentionally put things in there that would throw you off kilter in thinking you were switching worlds in the film and guessing the twist before it happens:

• Diane and Rita reading through the audition before the camera pulls back to reveal it
• 16 Reasons before the camera pulls back to fully reveal it
• The actual audition scene (another stand out moment the first time I watched)

By the time Diane actually wakes up and drags herself out of bed I'd almost forgotten that it was coming, and so when it did, I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I completely missed the fact that she woke up and dragged herself out of bed. Names and places turned on their head but with a sense that somewhere underneath it all made sense.

There are very very few films that have had such an emotional effect, and even fewer that have awoken the inner detective in me, but I kind of knew that this one was special. So I watched it again a couple of days later. And then I set off online, first coming across the Salon.com article. And then eventually the forum at RT.

I think I have something of an addictive personality and something about the film got under my skin.

So I guess you could say that's sorta why I came here ...

You?

The first time I saw this movie was back in 2002 or 2003, on cable. At the time I would travel several hours to spend the weekend with my, then, boyfriend. (We're now married) He had this bad habit of falling asleep soon after I arrived. So I flipped on the TV and caught this film right as Carol began her audition.

It was funny because I thought when Melissa George came out that she was Carol again, but with a blonde wig. Lol! I had the sound turned down too low to hear what was being said but I could hear the music. I was about to turn the channel, thinking "How dorky is this?", and then I saw that corpse! I was stunned! I went from seeing a 60's style, innocent-era, dorky movie set to seeing a rotting corpse.

When I heard Rebekah sing, I cried a little, myself. It was very moving, that first time, hearing her sing that song. And then all of a sudden she's dead! But I can still hear her singing! Was she so sad that the sadness killed her? I'm still crying, a little harder now. Wait a minute, now I'm mad. I was duped into crying. It was fake! If she could see me crying she would laugh at me for being such a fool. My tears were for her sick pleasure. (Yes, I really did feel this way. Lol!) Now that blonde chick's disappeared! WTH? What is this? What's going on now?

Then, at the end, I cried again for Diane. Before this film, no other film had made me feel such despair and sadness for someone. I felt like I could relate to Diane even though I'd never experienced what she experienced. It was weird.

This was all without hearing the words being spoken. I just had to watch it again the next day. Future hubby was just gonna have to have some patience. Lol! The second time around I got the privilege of seeing the film from the start...and being shocked by the scariest bum I'd ever seen! I almost died with Dan.

Unfortunately I did not have cable at home. So, it was a few years before I was able to see it again. But this 'dorky' movie is one of my all-time favorites!

And there's nothing like that first time. That Rebekah chick didn't fool me again. Lol!

I went about things backwards - somehow, I stumbled across Alan Shaw's dissertation on Mulholland Drive and read it, knowing very little about the movie beforehand. Having read that left me with no choice but to see the movie, as it seemed so utterly bizarre. I purchased a used copy of it on DVD and watched it that night. Upon my first viewing, it seemed to tell a very easy, basic narrative - a girl goes to Hollywood with big dreams of making it but realizes how things work there, is corrupted, and eventually can't deal with things anymore and kills herself. I still tend to think of this as what it's really about, but there's so much in the film to speculate about that I enjoy reading others thoughts on it and discussing it. I loved the movie from the first time I saw it. David Lynch just has such a way of putting things together, from the narrative to the twists to the style it's shot in (the scenes on the way to Club Silencio and through the parking lot into it are some of my favorite). Even though I believe the movie has a very basic, simply narrative to it, when you see the original pilot and consider how things could have developed and what the original intentions were, it's quite intriguing to think of what it could have been. One thing I'd like to see discussed more is the ending of the pilot (one of the greatest/freakiest endings to a TV show ever) - what was the connection between the money, the key, and the bum originally supposed to be? Was the bum really going to be the one controlling it all? Was it a metaphor for something else? So many questions are left unanswered.

I'm from central PA, and my friend and I were visiting her friend in Akron for a night during Christmas break two years ago...I knew the host only through the Internet, so it was a slightly odd visit, but we wanted to try this restaurant there. So after dinner we hung out and started channel surfing. We weren't sure whether to watch the latest cheesy movie on the Sci-Fi channel or try this Mulholland Drive movie on Logo. Somehow we decided on MD and came in during the opening credits. Once we got to the bum scene, I was hooked. Of course, with commercials, it ended up being three and a half hours, and by the end I was pretty confused and very frustrated. But we found this site and read through the theories, which made it a lot more fun.

The movie was always in the back of my mind, but I was kind of scared to watch it again. For some reason, I started to think about it a lot at the beginning of this summer, and I've watched it a number of times since then. It's become my favorite movie, without a doubt, and I enjoy introducing my friends to it

I can't remember the exact year I saw it, but it was around three or four years ago. I was around fourteen or fifteen, and I was a huge fan of the survival horror videogame series called Silent Hill. David Lynch was noted as a major influence for the games, so I decided to check him out.

I picked up Mulholland Drive on DVD from a public library near me...and I didn't watch it! My initial reaction to looking at the cover and back cover of the DVD was that it was going to be a sleazy movie (American DVD cover), so I put it off. Another reason was that the film was two and a half hours and I didn't feel I could sit through another long movie. I returned it on its due date.

I picked it up once again a second time and I watched it in one sit. Wow! What had I just seen? It was unlike any movie I had ever seen before (at the time I was young and wasn't much of a movie buff)! The only problem for me was this: What the hell just happened the last thirty minutes of the movie?! So I looked it up and found what is known as the classic interpretation of the story at IMDB. But my interested turned into an obsession. To date, I've watched the movie probably over twenty times (it's a long movie, give me a break lol)!

As I watched it over the years, it somewhat got close to home in a sense. There was someone I knew who I really liked (my best friend, also a boy) who didn't like me back, and I felt they were just teasing me along. When that happened, watching Mulholland Drive made me cry, especially at the end. The reason is because I've had dreams of this person of whom loved me back in the dream. I'm getting a bit too personal with this, but in some odd way watching the movie helped me with deal with my own issues.

Currently, I watch the movie maybe once every few months. Personal feelings apart, it was the first David Lynch movie I had ever seen and turned out not to be my last.

I have never seen the film in a theatre and missed my chance in fall 2001. It was released in the Northeast in October, 2001. I never even knew it was out even though I would have definitely seen it as I enjoyed some of Lynch's other films. But this was one month after 9/11 and in the greater New York City area, we were busy attending memorial services and other more pressing matters. Going to the movies? Lynch's film could have hardly had much worse timing as far as its release.

At Thanksgiving (nine years ago today) my cousin told me he saw MD. The only thing he mentioned is that when the lights came on at the end, everyone just looked at each other as if to say 'what the heck?'

I purchased the dvd on a whim, although the film had received some buzz upon its April 2002 dvd release. But I got it more from just being curious as to what my cousin had said about it than anything else.

I don't remember many details about watching the film other than I watched it by myself as my wife just thought she wouldn't last given the film's length. It was late summer and it still pretty warm out so I had the windows open. Where I live there are no street lights and houses are far apart so it's pretty darn dark on top of I like to watch films without the lights on. Before getting really into the film, I remember that the sound of crickets outside sort of meshed well with Rita heading down the hill into town. After that, I quickly got into the film and don't remember anything else than feeling blown away.

Curious, I somehow found the RT forum in the fall of 2002 and was amazed at the level and the quality of the posting going on. I just read stuff and read stuff. There were posts from people who had only seen the film in the theatre and with no benefit of watching and re-watching scenes on the DVD. Then there were others that were busy dissecting the dvd for clues as the hidden mystery was a strong element of the discussion. There were some amazing early posters. Some of which had already said their peace and and had moved on by that time or were only very limited posters anymore. So the first full year was pretty darn wild with me really coming in at the end of that. I was just an observer for probably about three months before my first post.

ctyankee wrote:I have never seen the film in a theatre and missed my chance in fall 2001. It was released in the Northeast in October, 2001. I never even knew it was out even though I would have definitely seen it as I enjoyed some of Lynch's other films. But this was one month after 9/11 and in the greater New York City area, we were busy attending memorial services and other more pressing matters. Going to the movies? Lynch's film could have hardly had much worse timing as far as its release.

"Can there be another movie that speaks as resonantly—if unwittingly—to the awful moment that marked our decade? Viewers grappled over the meaning of the movie’s “blue box,” finding little purchase. But in the troubled autumn of this psychodrama’s 2001 NYC release, we might have understood it all too well. Mulholland Drive is the monster behind the diner; it’s the self-delusional dream turned into nightmare."

http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/56542/the-tony-top-50-movies-of-the-decade?page=0,5

Great thread and great stories... so here's mine:

It must have been in late 2003, I was staying in Valencia, Spain, at the time, enjoying my life around exchange students. A lesbian friend of mine (don't underestimate that silent fan base) recommended the movie to me long before, but I never came around to watch it. At the time I wasn't really into movies, didn't know anything about Lynch or this work of his, I just picked it from the local DVD rental on a whim.

I remember the set-up: three guys, each of us with a piece of freshly prepared beer pancakes in our left and a beer bottle in our right, leaning against the wall, staring at the laptop screen two meter away. Little did I know what we were in for. When the end credits rolled, I was simply blown away. Don't believe, I have ever seen a open-ended movie before in my whole life. In fact, during the few seconds after the blue-haired lady uttered "Silencio" and before the credits started rolling, I was expecting more scenes to come to actually wrap-up this incomprehensible mess of disjointed scenes. It just didn't happen. I can truly say, even though the circumstances didn't seem ideal, this first exposure to MD was a life-changing one that let me to become a real movie buff.

I believe much of the fascination with MD come from a subconscious level and is hard to explain rationally, so I won't even try. Regrettably, at the time I didn't feel the urge (inner detective) to look for a solution myself. So the next day I was all over the internet, cause I had to find out what was going on in the movie. I found what's now being referred to as the classical interpretation, and it just drew me deeper into the vortex. I spend time working through the pilot script and rewatching the movie until I could lip-synch to all the dialogues. And then I found the RT forum, which let to more MD-ism (first post).

danieltx wrote:I went about things backwards - somehow, I stumbled across Alan Shaw's dissertation on Mulholland Drive and read it, knowing very little about the movie beforehand. Having read that left me with no choice but to see the movie, as it seemed so utterly bizarre. I purchased a used copy of it on DVD and watched it that night.

What an odd way to approach the movie - well done.

Going to sticky this as I love the stories, plus I think it gives a good opportunity for newcomers to say something more than a quick hello.

3 times, theater.

You suckers missed out.

So jealous, lol!

I saw Mulholland Drive for the first time last evening and I was and am instantly hooked...it has made it into my top ten favorite films. I will be watching it again tonight as a matter of fact. I am glad to have found this board, but admit to having fun discussing the different possible meanings of it with my boyfriend...it almost feels like "cheating" coming on here to see some other interpretations, but in any case, it is always refreshing to discuss different points of view.

I saw it for the first, second and third times in the cinema (in three consecutive evenings). I remember some people in the audience laughing during the final scene, completely clueless, not understanding a thing of what was happening in front of their eyes. I wasn't laughing, I was truly amazed. I'm still amazed after all these years.