After watching Mulholland Dr and discussing this and other narrative styles, two major themes immediately stood out to me as crucial reasons why these films are loved or hated.

The first is the sense of community, when a film can bring disparate characters together and make them interact in a way that’s believable, it can really get an emotional connection to the audience, because it taps into the basic human need for connection. No one wants to be alone.

One of my favourite examples of a multi-strand narrative film that achieves this with aplomb is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel (2006). A film which follows 4 groups of people, separated by clashing cultures and sprawling distances, each dealing with their own isolation and grief, but unexpectedly linked through a series of events find themselves pushed to confront their fears and ultimately shows how connected we all are.

The other element which i think engages audiences is the need for people to ‘solve’ the puzzle. The detective drama has been a classic hollywood plot line since the genesis

of film noir in the 1940’s, exposing audiences desire to be a detective. People love to pick up on visual clues, plot hints and discontinuity, seemingly innocuous dialogue, and put it together themselves, and if they can figure out the solution before the film reveals it, then they have won.

This is also the same reason why some people are turned off by films of this genre, such as Mulholland Dr, because they simply don’t get it. The solution may be too complex, too unbelievable or too psychological for them to ‘get it’, an important thing in many movie goers minds.

A very polarising example of such a film is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), a film with such a mind bending narrative structure that some peoples brains melt and all they want to do is put on You’ve Got Mail and drift off into a coma. 

Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum when the die hard problem solvers, who re-watch the film a number of times simply to figure it out, and then get the dvd and watch the nerdy chronological re-cut of Memento.

I wont reveal which camp I am in!