Picking up on Shian's distinction between "open" and "closed" films, it may be possible to distinguish, with shameless ease, genuine narrative mystery from formula or mystfication in the movies, just by identifying where authorial control is exercised.

A filmmaker who allows, or has the talent to permit, the material to be ambiguous at the foundational level, of unconscious, myth and the religious impulse, with the material growing out of those roots, is going to make a very different movie than one who asserts authorial control very near the surface of conscious will and observance of movie conventions, to create suspense or "mystery" by misleading or manipulating the audience in obvious ways.

This distinction could be one reason why (for example) Tarkovsky is mysterious, but Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles and Spielberg are, despite their technical control and visual imagination, not at all mysterious, or only rarely so; the latter's manipulations are evident at every turn and inform every development on screen. Absolutely nothing in most of their movies suggests openness or possiblity exceeding the filmmaker's own will to make the movie or, in some cases, to make money from the movie. It's a lifelessness at the heart of the venture, however elegant and accomplished it may be.

Consider the scifi genre, as the most obvious example of a movie which is supposed to be mysterious, at least on the surface. Tarkovsky can put 3 men on a railroad car trolley, and do nothing but move it through desolate countryside, and yet this scene goes very deep, somehow or other. Far more so, say, than that ambiguous refrigerated museum gallery at the end of 2001, or those lovely iconic reflections on the astronaut's helmet.

Is this distinction too simple or simple-minded to be true? Somehow I don't think so ... at least, not for the movies.

But you didn't.

For those who took this thread WAY TOO seriously - my apologies. I was making a point about something that had nothing to do with anyones opinions; likes or dislikes. I know now that it offended a great many. But the point I was trying to make doesn't hit home unless you get upset.

And sometimes text doesn't accurately convey intentions. Oft to my detriment. I need a less dry sense of humor I suppose.

This thread brought to mind the Mulholland Drive DVD I'd been meaning to check out for several months. I just finished viewing it in a single, uninterrupted session, with no advance knowledge of the plot. While I was once a fan of David Lynch, in his Eraserhead and Blue Velvet periods, I eventually burned out on Twin Peaks and really despised Fire Walk with Me.

Mulholland Drive, however, kept me guessing the whole way through, and left me enthralled with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring's compelling performances. When Lynch is inspired, he can somehow imbue the most hackneyed tropes with a combination of unnerving passion and surreal alienation.

But I can see why many would resent Mulholland Drive's moralistic take-down of Hollywood, because it is neither sarcastic nor bitter, but compassionate and psychotic. Lynch's characterizations combine heart-felt emotion with sociopathic ambition, a deeply unflattering portrait of a town that is more typically mocked for its superficial fixation on fame and glamour.

@MirrorMan quite ironic (and tragic), isn´t it that Lynch himself got sucked into such a cult? (detached from reality, deep inside the rabbit hole)