I should also point out that Cookie, the fellow with an interesting moustache, is one character who I don't think has a parallel in the final 1/3. Maybe this is signficant, but I'm inclined to not wrap up every element in this film as if it's all pointing in the same direction. I'm betting that Lynch liked Forster in the cop routine, so he kept him, likewise, Cookie, and wasn't that concerned with making everything perfectly fit some preordained form.

That's enough from me for now,

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Dave Fiore:

we're more in agreement than you know Charles--pragmatism, after all, is simply a secularized Calvinism (transcendentalism begins with the kind of subjectivism that you impute to me--with a self-reliant rejection of all limitations upon the self that, as you point out, merely reinforces the old metaphysics...but it moves very quickly toward Emerson's "Experience", which is the birthplace of pragmatism, and I'm pretty much still there!)...

I have to disagree with you when you argue that metaphysical doubt is "unimportant", though! Without it--there could be no change, and, so far as I can see, no desire/history/life either! You say that Betty is at fault for desiring to control circumstances... I agree, I suppose, but I would go further and suggest that to accept a given circumstance is also to exercise a form of wholly unwarranted control! As soon as you say--"this is just the way things are"--you are really absenting yourself from the situation, and associating yourself with "Reality"... it's the oedipal shift on a grand scale--"I'm not under daddy's thumb--I am daddy...or, at least, I've imagined myself into daddy's position"... The decision to act only within a set of given parameters is not pragmatic--it's a capitulation...a refusal to admit that sometimes, despite all appearances, the parameters have to be smashed! (and humans have been smashing parameters with alacrity since the Reformation--all I want is a more of the same!)

I can't read Mulholland Dr. as a parable about giving in to circumstance (or, as you put it, letting life speak)... Life speaks whether we let it or not--the question is whether we are going to join in the conversation, even if we know that one side of it has been pre-recorded! We are always hoping that, somehow, through some magic, the recording will halt and the real voice that laid down the tracks will make a spontaneous reply... I think you misinterpret my skeptical position on language Charles (not unexpected!)--I'm not arguing that talking is useless, I'm saying that it never says it all (and I'm not saying that I want it to, I'm merely arguing that our desire to say it all is what drives us forward, and makes us try different means of solving an insoluble problem!)

on Adam--I really disagree with you here... I don't see him as being controlled by Betty in the dream--I think he is Betty... and so, yes, it's definitely a look of recognition, but it's also a look of love...isn't that always the way? Not sure if you caught (or what you think of) my little investigation of Adam's conversation with Cynthia (Katharine Towne), but it's really moving to the center of my analysis of the film... "you don't know what you're missing"... it's true... we never know that... we can't... when you get right down to it--we don't even want to know! it's not control that poisons life--it's certainty... like Morgan Morgan in Minnie and Moskowitz--"I know where my wife is buried"--if you know that, then you know where your life is buried too--if you can be sure of the one, you can be pretty sure of the other...certainty forecloses upon desire...and this is the tragedy of Mulholland Dr.--Diane/Betty's conclusion that there's nothing left to want coupled with our own powerful--but unformularizable--sense that there is someone on the other end of the line, even if we never see them--and we'll never know what we're missing...