The Player

I watched Robert Altman's The Player recently and it brought David Lynch's Mulholland Drive to mind almost at once. Hollywood has always been fascinated with itself. The two movies seem to stand as sharp but contrasting mirrors. Both expose the gap between the dream factory’s polished surfaces and its darker truths, yet they do so in radically different ways. Altman leans on satire, embedding a murder mystery within the banal routines of studio executives, while Lynch unfolds a surreal fever dream where ambition, desire, and identity collapse into an unending nightmare.

At heart, each film asks what happens when people surrender to Hollywood’s logic. In The Player, Griffin Mill commits murder yet prospers, rewarded precisely because he understands the cynicism of the system. Altman’s Los Angeles is sunlit and ordinary, but its everyday chatter conceals ruthless self-preservation. Mulholland Drive follows the opposite trajectory: Diane Selwyn cannot bend herself to the industry’s demands, and her psyche simply fractures. Lynch’s Los Angeles is shadowy, electric, and uncanny, where the seduction of stardom curdles into despair.

The difference lies in tone as much as outcome. Altman’s critique is sly and ironic, laughing at Hollywood’s absurdity even as he implicates us in its allure. Lynch’s vision is operatic, frightening, and tragic, where dreams literally dissolve into dust. Together, the films bracket Hollywood’s self-image: one reveals the comedy of power, the other the horror of loss. Seen side by side, they suggest that beneath the shimmering surface, Hollywood runs on a mix of fantasy and corruption ranging from funny to  terrifying, but always consuming. I love it when one good movie makes me re-think my experience of another one, equally good.