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Comment by dj_gitmo | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.

The plots of his movies are often more concrete than people expect. I'm not saying a movie like Mulholland Drive is easy to follow, but it does have a legible plot. Feel free to read the wiki or something if you are not sure who some character is or what they are doing.

If you are just letting the experience wash over you, you may be missing some plot points that are not meant to be mysterious.

Obviously his movies are weird and not entirely legible, but don't assume everything in them is meant to be inscrutable.

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I wasn’t implying that there was no narrative, just that his movies were so much more than just the narrative. And often things that seemed perplexing were just things he thought were interesting or beautiful so he put them there for no other reason.

That’s, in my opinion, where some of the intractability comes from: is this bug buzzing around a ceiling light meaningful to the plot or just something he saw one day and wanted others to experience as well. Every once in a while he’d give a tell, often unintentionally, while talking about something else. But most of the time he let things into the world without explanation.

Mulholland drives plot isn’t even that hard to follow once you figure out the twist. You can definitely go crazy deep with the symbolism though

All of the comments about how hard Mullholland Drive was to follow are making me wonder if I missed something. I watched it a couple of times when it was in the theater and enjoyed it, but I don't remember being all that confused. Certainly not like Twin Peaks confused. I guess now is as good a time as any to rewatch it.

in my experience, this is just a very individual thing, warying from person to person. i watch a lot of movies on my own, and when i watch movies with others, i'm sometimes very surprised how much troube some people have understanding a movie.

i mean, Inception is one of those movies which is a tiny bit more difficult to understand, but i've watched it with people who had zero clue what was going on.

enough trashing other people - i loved watching Memento, but i must confess that i should watch it again, as i didn't really understand the full story while watching it.

then there are movies like tenet which just feel complicated as a gimmick, reminding me of the rick&morty copypasta, "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand X"

in summary, some people are good with abstract thinking and understanding, others are not.

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