Looking back on our favorite movies of 2001
Mulholland Drive and The Royal Tenenbaums still shine 20 years later
Film Features Wes Anderson
Last week was 2001 Week at The A.V. Club, and as part of this multi-day retrospective of the pop-culture of two decades ago, we voted on the best movies from the second year of the new century. On a brand new episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife continue that discussion of the bygone year in cinema, including thoughts on their respective favorites of Y2K1: David Lynch’s beloved dream-of-nightmare Hollywood reverie Mulholland Drive, and Wes Anderson’s melancholy NYC family fable The Royal Tenenbaums.
Here’s what A.A. Dowd had to say about Mulholland Drive, which ended up at #1 on our best movies of 2001 list:
Does it say something about the ongoing blurring of lines between television and cinema that what may be the most acclaimed movie of the new millennium began life in one medium before settling in the other? Between finishing his seminal primetime soap opera on the big screen and restarting it on the small one with a third season some (including its maker) insisted was really an 18-hour movie, David Lynch transformed a failed TV pilot into a haunting highpoint of his increasingly avant-garde career: a daydream of Hollywood aspiration that curdles, in its harrowing final act, into a nightmare of rock-bottom desperation. Fans and critics have spent two decades poring over the secrets and ambiguities of Mulholland Drive, cracking open that mystery box just like wannabe starlet Betty (Naomi Watts) and her raven-haired, femme-fatale companion, Rita (Laura Harring). Yet one need not “solve” Lynch’s bewitching noir reverie to get lost, again and again, in its dark corners: the radiance and despair of Watts’ starmaking performance; the ravenous romantic-erotic intensity of its centerpiece sex scene; a slow wander behind a diner that qualifies as one of the most blood-curdling scenes ever committed to celluloid. In the end, it’s still possible to wonder where Lynch would have taken Mulholland Drive if it got ordered to series, but much less possible to imagine a version of it that would imprint itself as eternally on the mass cinephile subconscious, like an unshakeable dream built from memories of Tinseltown classics and also the sobering knowledge of what showbiz does to so many pulled into its gaping, hungry maw.
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12 Comments
Eyes closed, he sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“They need to know. They’d want to know. Someone needs to tell them.”
With a heavy heart, he raises his right finger in the air, in the universal symbol of “um, actually…”
“Um, actually, 2001 was the first year of the 21st century. 2000 was the final year of the 20th century. Put in the simplest possible terms, we start counting with one, not zero, so any year that is a multiple of ten will be the end of its respective decade, century, millenni–”
He breaks off as a single wad of moistened toilet paper strikes his face, just above the left corner of his mouth. A close miss. His pride bruised, he is nonetheless resolute. As he wipes away the spit-smelling projectile, he clears his throat, then continues.
“As I was saying, this misconception became increasingly common during the second half of the 20th century, as the first generation of baby boomers–America’s first teenagers–grew into adulthood, and the 20-year nostalgia cycle first emerged, and was immediately seized upon by marketers and corporations for exploi–”
A second spitball, this time directly in his mouth, as the “oi” vowel sound makes an almost perfect circle, a perfect target. He stifles a cough, gagging on this warm, damp intruder, but before he can regain his composure, another damp wad strikes, and another. It took a moment, but it’s almost as though the entire internet has animated to pelt him with spit balls.
His limbs become heavy now, covered with growing accretions of wet, slightly discolored pulp. His body feels heavy, like that time Heather’s mom let him inhale helium directly from the tank at the Donelson Senior Center, and much like that fateful day in 1993, his body feels leaden, almost as though he’s being dragged to the ground. He manages to land in a sitting position, no small miracle considering his bad ankles and high center of gravity.
The spit balls continue to accumulate, but they can’t reach him now. He’s carefully extricated himself from the back of the pile, crawling away slowly. As always, the certainty that he’d been right about something on the Internet warms his heart, even as his spit-dampened clothing chills him to the bone.
Once he’s sure he’s out of range, he returns to his desk. He hesitates for a moment, then logs out of his Kinja account. It is a Friday, true, but there’s still work to be done.
It isn’t SO crazy to count from zero. In math and computer science contexts it’s second nature to number the initial item in a series “naught”, proceeding then to “one”, “two”, etc.
None of that really matters, though. No one in Year 1 considered themselves to be at the start of anything. (That’s not Jesus’s birthday either. He was already a few years old by then.) The calendar is completely arbitrary to begin with. To put at least some measure of sensibility onto it, people have decided to look at the digits of recent years. Calling it “the 1980s” or “the 1990s” makes a lot more sense than any other way.
If none of it matters, then why did I spend my lunch break writing a story about a guy somehow being pelted with spitballs by every person on the internet, including an anecdote about the time I huffed helium at a birthday party in the 9th grade? I’m begging you take this at least as seriously as I did.
I so wanted to love Mulholland Drive. I so hated it.I’ll spare you the whys and whatifs. Either you love it or you don’t, either you get why or you don’t.
I like it, but think it’s overrated.
I definitely did NOT get it at the time. But it was my first Lynch movie and I was pretty young. I have rewatched youtube clips though and enjoyed them.
I watched that movie in the theater and it took maybe a half hour for me to entirely forget it. Like, to the point where I probably could only just now tell you Naomi Watts was in it, after having read this article. Boring and unmemorable.
I loved the first half, the part that was a pilot for a TV show about two pretty ladies solving a murder mystery in LA. But then it took a hard left turn into stylized padding and I lost interest.
I had the same reaction when I first watched it. I think I just wasn’t ready for it. I was 14 or 15, a budding cinephile, but one with little experience with more experimental narratives. A year or so later, I watched Blue Velvet, which I liked a lot more, and came back to MD, finding I liked it more once I had more aligned with Lynch’s style. It helps to go in KNOWING you aren’t going to understand everything, and that you don’t need to. That being said, it’s still not one of my favorites from Lynch; I still like Blue Velvet, Fire Walk With Me, Eraserhead, and Inland Empire all quite a bit more than Mullholland.
The Village Voice Film Poll did exist in 2001, and, interestingly, there are six films in their top ten that overlap with your poll, with the top three being the same films, same order. Elsewhere, the Film Comment poll also has Mulholland Drive and In the Mood for Love in the 1 and 2 spot respectively, while swapping Royal Tenenbaums and Ghost World for 3 and 4 (when compared to the AV Club poll). Film that took the biggest hit? Waking Life, which appeared in the top ten of both polls but failed to even make your top 25.