Unlocking Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, and the Monstrous Hollywood Dream Machine

This class is gonna give you four things:

First you get to watch Mulholland Drive which is basically the best movie of all time. Literally. Fancy-pants people have put it on cinema classic lists, and sometimes it is at the very top.

Second, you know that T-Shirt that says “I get the Muppets on a much deeper level than you?” Well that’s gonna be you with this movie. Some people think it’s a druggy movie that is not supposed to make sense but I’m going to show you that it is actually a very well built little machine, with a great story, that functions perfectly sensibly once you get past the, you know, insanity.

Third, you will leave with a total understanding of this word “Lynchian” that people throw around (usually incorrectly) when they are talking about art or music or TV or whatever. Like a lot of very smart people—Beckett for example, or Kafka—Lynch works his shit out by doing variations on a theme over and over. So once you really get one movie in your pocket, all his other movies make a lot more sense. Not 100%. But mostly.

Fourth, we are going to talk about Hollywood, because it turns out that is David Lynch’s real subject. You know the Allegory of the Cave, from Plato, where he compares life to a cave where people sit in the dark and watch the shadows that are cast from a fire behind them, and they mistake the shadows for the real things? Well that’s a fucking movie theater, that’s the temple where we all go to worship, that’s where our dreams are manufactured, and David Lynch has a few things to say on that subject.

Join me for three 90 minute classes, where we will watch a chunk of the movie, pausing occasionally to look at details, and discuss the chunk we just watched, till it’s all over. If you have not seen Mulholland Drive before, see it for the first time here, as I will be enforcing spoilers.

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Neuehouse Madison Sq.

110 E 25th St, New York, NY 10010

Tickets $15

Geoff Klock has a doctorate from Oxford and is an associate professor at BMCC-CUNY, where he teaches mostly comp, but sometimes film, and old school Brit Lit. 8 years of that. He is the author of three books, two about comic books and one about poetry. His new one will be about Hannibal Lector, the TV one.