The theme of absorption of one dream into another was already cinematically explored by Luis Buñuel, especially in _Un Chien Andalou_ (1929) and _L'Age d'Or_ (1930). Surely finer films (both aesthetically and politically) than even the best works by Lunch, not to mention the fact that they were truly shocking and scandalous in their days. Lynch's films can at best only play with the idea of the scandalous (e.g., the underside of sexual horrors underneath "suburban innocence," which is itself revealed to be sickening sweetness, in _Blue Velvet_), whereas Surrealists thought that "Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny -- in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed" (Bunuel _My Last Sigh_, p. 107) and occasionally made works that lived up to their intention (at least for their times).
Among recent films, David Cronenberg's _eXistenZ_ (1999) made a better use of the dream theme than _Mulholland Drive_. -- Yoshie
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