Ahad Samadi

An unforgettable movie. I saw its dubbed version into my language once in 1970 on the big screen and once again tonight on TV. I've always thought that it's an amazing movie. And the reasons? If a team of movie makers know how to make a movie, that should be enough to make a good movie to have the right impact on the viewer. That's all!

A magnificent Western whose quiet moments and lonely scenes make its action scenes much more exciting than they are! This is the most outstanding feature of this movie. The foregrounded elements of the narrative stand out in a harmonious manner against the elements in the background and it is then that a work of art is created.

To my view, the film is quite entertaining. Not every movie should fit in the professional critics' theoretical frameworks to be regarded as a cinematic success. A movie is a series of events turned into pictures to, in most cases, entertain the audience and this movie, according to my feelings, can satisfy the ordinary viewer's expectations. I personally have always enjoyed Michael Caine on the screen and while shooting the movie, John Sturges had enough experience of bringing about excitement in it to satisfy the ordinary moviegoer. Also, Larry Hagman as a reminder of my previous experiences of being entertained by moving pictures is another positive element in the movie. But let us not forget Robert Duvall, who alone is regarded as an actor that can carry the weight of any movie! What may then one expect from watching a movie? The other members of the cast each can turn into the center of any movie, too.

Is life meaningful? Some modern works of art as well as modern theories in humanities and social sciences have already suggested that life should be considered the occurrence of events that do not follow any order. If there were an oder, there would be meaning. Once the order is gone, one should look for meaning neither in life nor in works of art. Throughout our lives we experience happenings that should be taken as unexpected pop-ups on the screen of life and world. There are sometimes so many pop-ups that we get confused and frustrated because we cannot understand all of them unless we take samples and account for them on the basis of our theories and presuppositions. What results from this is the fact that we have allegedly understood a tiny piece of the events and the rest is still unknown. Would it be possible to understand the whole thing as colossal as the universe, then? A film like Mulholland Drive should be seen as a small realization of the view that life is chaotic and incomprehensible because everything including human beings are so complicated. The film can be evaluated on the basis of how it relies on historical achievements in the cinema to materialize the view. That's all. Do not try to watch it as if you were watching , say, Madame X (David Lowell Rich, 1966), although it certainly owes a lot to the achievements in Hollywood. MD uses the facilities in the industry others would use, too, but it uses them to show us the world from a different angle and critics usually agree that "to show" is different from "to tell".