When I recently watched Bugonia in theaters, it felt impossible not to read the whole thing as a climate-change parable that finally stops pretending humans are the heroes of the story. Teddy thinks Michelle’s company is literally killing the bees as part of an alien plot, which sounds like pure conspiracy at first, but the film quietly confirms that the true planetary threat is not some hidden sci-fi device. It is the world we already live in: Michelle’s Andromedan monologue points straight at climate change, war, and human violence as the forces destroying Earth long before any mothership arrives. The bees become a simple, loaded symbol: if they are collapsing, whole ecosystems are collapsing too.
That is why the final sequence lands so hard as a climate metaphor. Once Michelle reaches the Andromedan ship and drops the clear dome over the model Earth, every human on the planet simply shuts off, falling where they stand while everything else remains untouched. There is no exploding planet, no scorched biosphere, just a sudden absence of us. The last images linger on human bodies frozen in place and then cut back to Teddy’s apiary, where the bees begin to return. It is a brutally tidy reversal of the usual “save the Earth” arc: the only intervention that actually stabilizes the environment is one that removes the species that keeps insisting it will fix things someday.
For me, that ending recasts everything that came before as a joke with a bitter punchline. Teddy’s conspiracy fantasies, the pharma optics, even the alien royal court all turn out to be less important than the simple ecological truth the film stages at the end. The planet does not need us to survive; we need the planet, and we have been acting as if the opposite were true. When the bees come back to life in a world emptied of people, Bugonia imagines climate “recovery” that does not center human redemption at all. It is funny in the darkest possible way: the film gives us the apocalypse and then quietly asks whether, from the point of view of the Earth, this might actually be the first good decision anyone has made in a very long time.
Reading Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” framed Mulholland Drive for me as something less like a mystery that “should” resolve and more like a work that uses narration itself as its central problem. Bordwell’s description of art cinema highlights how it departs from classical Hollywood storytelling by loosening clear cause and effect, foregrounding style and authorial choice, and inviting the viewer to participate in interpretation rather than simply follow a chain of motivated events.
Bordwell’s framework is especially helpful because he describes art cinema as organized around two broad principles: a pull toward realism (psychological complexity, everyday detail, the sense of lived experience) and authorial expressivity (a visible shaping intelligence that can be felt through patterning, symbolism, and deliberate narrative uncertainty). Mulholland Drive constantly oscillates between those principles. On one hand, the film offers “realist” textures, like the awkward industry networking, auditions, and the humiliating vulnerability of wanting to be seen as talented and desirable. On the other hand, Lynch repeatedly interrupts anything that looks like stable plot momentum with sequences that feel like authorial punctuation marks, moments that insist on mood, dread, or formal play more than explanation.
A good example is how the early portion of the film initially resembles a classical setup: Betty arrives in Los Angeles with an optimistic goal, Rita has amnesia and needs help, and the structure suggests that investigation will restore identity and produce narrative clarity. But Lynch keeps inserting events that do not sit comfortably as steps in a single causal chain. The hitman’s botched assassination plays like dark slapstick, the Cowboy appears as a kind of cryptic herald, and the diner sequence at Winkie’s feels like a self-contained nightmare. If we try to force classical psychological causation onto these moments, they resist it: they carry emotional and thematic weight, but they do not function like clean “clues” in a detective story. Bordwell notes that art cinema often replaces tight causal logic with gaps, digressions, and a more episodic chain of incidents, where motivation can be partial or retrospective.
This is where Bordwell’s vocabulary of motivation becomes useful. In classical narration, we tend to assume that everything is motivated in a legible way, usually by character goals and causal logic. Art cinema, as Bordwell describes it, is willing to shift motivation onto other grounds: realism (life is messy), authorial patterning (recurring images, symmetrical scenes), or even uncertainty itself as a guiding principle. Mulholland Drive makes us feel that shift most strongly through repetition and doubling. Names, roles, and relationships fold over each other. Scenes echo earlier scenes with altered emotional meaning, as if the film is less interested in “what happened” than in how desire, guilt, and fantasy can reorganize the same material. Instead of a straight line, the movie feels like a set of refrains.
Club Silencio is the scene that most explicitly announces this art-cinema contract. The performance insists on emotional truth while simultaneously telling us that the band is not real, that sound and spectacle are produced, that what moves us can be fabrication. Bordwell argues that art cinema often makes authorship palpable, allowing style and narration to comment on themselves and on our habits of spectatorship. Club Silencio does that in a way that feels almost like a thesis statement: the film is warning us not to treat representation as transparent, and it is preparing us for the major narrative rupture that follows.
That rupture, the shift into Diane’s reality, is where Bordwell’s emphasis on ambiguity becomes the key term. Bordwell describes ambiguity as a dominant principle in art cinema, where the viewer is encouraged to weigh competing explanations rather than receive definitive closure. After the blue box sequence, the film does not neatly label what came before as dream, fantasy, alternate reality, or subjective distortion. Instead, it forces the viewer to move backward and reinterpret. Betty becomes Diane, vitality curdles into resentment, romance becomes exploitation and pain, and earlier images begin to read like displaced wish-fulfillment. This is not simply “confusing for the sake of confusing.” It is a structured reorientation that makes interpretation part of the experience of the film, which is exactly what Bordwell identifies as central to art cinema’s mode of practice.
During my further research into The Grand Budapest Hotel, I was most interested in a video analysis of the creation of the movie’s score. The video, posted by “Inside the Score” on YouTube, highlights the apparent challenge in creating music from an imaginary country. The soundtrack was constructed by Alexandre Desplat, a talented French composer who also collaborated on other Wes Anderson films, including Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, French Dispatch, and Moonrise Kingdom. Desplat and Anderson situate the fictional country of Zubrowka on the easternmost border of the European continent. Desplat identifies the broader geographical area as “Mittleuropa”, or Middle Europe, stretching from Switzerland to Turkey.
In order to strengthen the authenticity of the fictional Zubrowka, Desplat utilizes traditional instruments from neighboring regions. For example, in the main theme music, he uses a cimbalom, a stringed instrument popular in Hungary and the alpine regions, thus giving the music a nostalgic and distinctly Central European tone. During winter scenes, he incorporates tubular bells, sleigh bells, and glockenspiel, creating a whimsical sound reminiscent of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. In contrast, for dramatic scenes, the movie uses brass instruments that often mirror marching percussion, signaling the arrival of the fascist groups.
