Probably the best compliment I can give David Lynch is that he is not all that original.
It was only two days ago, having moved to a new city, that I felt myself in a new apartment, without internet, wondering what to do next. I went to the Goodwill to get some lamps and maybe some curtains, but also found on the DVD shelf, a copy of Mulholland Drive. The cashier was strangely competent. I was biased at first, because she was also very elderly, and I was worried I was going to have to deal with a slow or clumsy cashier. But she knew what she was doing: she asked me whether I had checked the DVD for scratches, and I had not. She checked it and it looked okay: I thought of making a little joke about how little that would matter with a David Lynch movie, but then thought that that joke was a little too high concept for an interaction at a Goodwill, especially mumbling through masks. So I went home, and in my empty apartment, luggage still strewn on the floor, decided to watch Mulholland Drive. At least the beginning, I thought, if it got boring I could always do something else.
The first thing that I noticed was that something was off about the dialogue and interaction. Characters facial expressions, body language, and expressions felt just slightly off-putting. I was thinking of quoting the dialogue of the second opening scene, where we meet Betty coming into Los Angeles, and where she shares some well-wishes with an older woman she met on the plane. But there is nothing overt that jumps out at me about why it seems wrong: it just does. For some reason, most scenes in this movie seem stilted, unnatural, even wooden. There is some weird plot shit to be sure, but even when there isn't, the entire feel of the movie is just off. In what might seem like blasphemy to many film connoisseurs, the closest comparison I could make is Tommy Wiseau and The Room: this is just not how normal people act or talk.
There are many guesses about the plot of this movie. My own guess, that I came up with after finishing watching it, sitting on the empty floor of an apartment without internet, around midnight on an unseasonably hot September night, was not that far off from the consensus view of the plot. I have one other guess about the meaning of the plot, that seems to be outside of the consensus view, but not too far outside of it. There is also some agreement that certain aspects of the plot are aspects of the film-making process, and the change from the original plan to have this as a television show, with different subplots. One of the film's most iconic scenes involves two characters who are not named, have no established relationship, and have no bearing on the rest of the plot. We can say this is an artifact of the production process, but it still works: just one more unsettling thing to draw the viewer deeper in.
And this is why I said that the best praise I could give to David Lynch was that he was not all that original. The plot of this movie is not that original. The consensus view is that it is the tale of a jilted lover, told through an extended dream sequence. "Romantic jealousy, but it was all just a dream" is the work of a hack. The plot is not what makes it a Lynch movie. The feelings and textures he can engender in at least some viewers is what makes it a Lynch movie. David Lynch managed to take a cliched plot, fill it with wooden, unnatural acting, led me along for two and a half hours...and left me wanting more. I can't promise similar results to everyone watching this movie: it was perhaps me being in a liminal place, in the middle of a year that has changed the world. Maybe it is the reputation of Lynch that made this movie: if it was not credited to him, I might have just taken it for dullness and incompetence and dropped out thirty minutes in. But for whatever reason, it did work. Some combination of performances and images managed to alter my mind to the point where, by the end of the movie, the improbability of it had soaked into my brain, and made everything seem different.