It was with some regret that I recently chose not to go and see ‘Mulholland Drive’, a recent favourite of mine, at an open-air-screening in London. I had neither the energy nor the money (nor, quite possibly, the company, although that might have been arranged) so it seemed sensible to do what I did instead; watch it on DVD in the comfort of my own home. It had been a while since my last viewing, and I tried to convince myself that, despite several no 1 and top ten positionings in various ‘Films of the Decade’ lists, I had probably been a little too smitten with the film in the past and overlooked its faults – therefore satisfying myself that I was right not to take the time to watch it in a rare public fashion on a reasonably warm and dry British summer night. This point-of-view, as well as being convenient to my decision-making at the time, had been bolstered by the fact that a few people whose opinions I respect had reported having issues with the film, in some cases seeing it as a narrative and artistic failure. So I watched it for the, I think, fifth time, expecting to kill off any remaining fascination I had with the work and consign it to memory lane for good.
That didn’t happen.
I realised, utterly and without doubt, that I had been right and they had been wrong. ‘Mulholland Drive’ (MD) is a masterpiece, probably my favourite film of all time and certainly one of the best American films ever made. Obviously, I saw fresh things in it even on a fifth viewing (and will undoubtedly be watching it again in the future) and, although I could still see reasons why the film was not necessarily for everybody, it really started to gnaw at me that some people were unable to see the artistry, intellect and emotion that went into this thing. Why were some people turned off, frustrated, or even angered by the film? I have some theories about that, but an easier question to answer would be ‘Why do I love it so much and believe it is one of the highest examples of cinematic art ever produced?’ Whilst watching my DVD copy, lamenting the fact that I wasn’t watching it out in the open on a huge screen framed by the stars, I was at least able to scribble down nine or ten reasons, but when I reached the scene in which the favoured young starlet Camilla Rhodes sings ’16 Reasons (Why I Love You)’ I thought ‘that’s a cute angle for an piece right there!’ And it wasn’t difficult to think of the other reasons, ensuring that I was covering the evaluation from multiple angles; directorial, industrial, dramatic and thematic. I also tried to weave answers to the first question into my musings. Ultimately, I wanted to produce a convincing argument to the doubters and naysayers that this was a film worth investing time, thought and multiple viewings in. Recognising that the biggest problem some people have with the narrative (an important, but not the only, element in a work of cinema) is its seeming lack of resolution, its twisting, elliptical journey that for some goes way off the rails, I thought I’d better start with that.
(I was intending to do a slightly longer analysis of what the story actually was but, after writing all my notes, I did some research - surprisingly for the first time - on what other theories/essays were available online and found many that supported my interpretation of what was going on but went, convincingly, far deeper than I had thought possible. If you want a particularly insightful interpretation, including a scene-by-scene analysis, I suggest reading Alan Shaw’s essay at www.mulholland-drive.net/analysis/analysis01.htm but, if plot comprehension is a major part of your issue with the film, and time/lack of eyestrain/thinking for yourself are of the essence, I think my briefer plot summary should suffice.)
So let’s start the 16 reasons with the assertion:
1. Contrary to widespread belief, the film’s narrative makes (almost) perfect sense.
Two disclaimers need to be made before I delve into the labyrinthine joys of MD’s narrative. Firstly, the narrative only makes (almost) perfect sense if you understand how the film should be viewed, which is asking a lot of viewers and, despite the clues being there in the film, is next-to-impossible to do so correctly the first time it is seen (see Reason 2). Secondly, it is not a pre-requisite of a successful work of art that it ‘makes sense’. Hamlet, a piece of work that I love almost as much as MD (and a minor influence on it), does not make perfect sense, and the fact that its contradictions and paradoxes are still being debated 400 years after it was first written and performed is fine. Other works by the director David Lynch do not make (almost) perfect sense and he is more than fine with that, discouraging over-interpretation and preferring to let the individual viewer find his or her personal meaning in the images and editing he chooses to use. Interesting then that with this film he decided to do something rather bizarre, by his own bizarre standards; he included in the publicity ten ‘clues’ in order to aid viewer comprehension of the mysterious drama! I think that was seen by some as a cop-out, an attempt to impose meaning on a half-baked, meaningless project. I, naturally, see it differently. I think Lynch was so chuffed with the organic way the previously-scuppered project had been completed (see Reason 3), by the way the new ideas he’d teased out, whether conciously or subconciously, had magically created a cohesive piece of work in which all the seemingly-random scenes now made sense within a context that hadn’t been the intended one, that he felt compelled to tell the movie-going world ‘It works! Despite all odds, it works! And not only works, but works spectacularly well!’ As long as you know how to view it. And, although his ‘clues’ were both typically elusive and a slightly crass marketing gimmick, and although an astute, observant viewer can unpick his or her way through most of the movie’s vagaries without them, they are evidence to show that this is, in the director’s eyes, the one that inarguably adds up to something. So, while acknowledging that other interpretations are both possible and desirable (see Reason 16) and without even touching on the accrued elements of numerous meta-stories that are alluded to within the film and can be constructed outside of it (including the, to me, take-it-or-leave-it suggestion of childhood abuse by the main character by her grandparents, evidence for which is undeniably there), here is my summary of what MD is about, plot-wise.
Before the credits we are shown images of the jitterbug competition in Deep River, Canada, that Diane Selwyn (seen, briefly, smilingly accepting her award) mentions toward the end of the film, the winning of which fuelled her ambition to make it as a successful actress in Hollywood, where her (dead) Aunt Ruth had had some success. With her Aunt’s inheritance money she made her way to LA with the typical out-of-towner’s dreams of success, glamour and celebrity. When the money ran out and the roles didn’t arrive the dream started to turn rapidly sour. However, hope was renewed when she met Camilla Rhodes, a slighlty-older, voluptuously-beautiful actress of unspecified Hispanic origin, during auditions for ‘The Sylvia North Story’. Camilla, presumably wrenching up the sex appeal, impressed the director, Bob Brooker, much more than did Diane; Camilla got the part, her star began to rise; Diane and her started a relationship, passionate but probably one-way in terms of genuine affection. Diane’s career went nowhere so she turned to Camilla to help her get small roles (and most probably other, less legitimate work ) for money. With Camilla the only thing making her disappointing Hollywood experience bearable, it was inevitable that Diane would lose all hope, and much of her sanity, when she found out that the scheming, ruthlessly-pragmatic Camilla was working her way up the Hollywood ladder by sleeping with top director Adam Kesher. When she discovers, at Adam’s house on Mulholland Drive, that Camilla is marrying Adam (and thus definitively leaving her), she hits absolute bottom, and a monster is born behind an inoccuous eating establishment called Winkies, where she hires and pays a hitman to end Camilla’s life.
Now, the problem with all this perfectly-comprehensible back-story, lurid but nevertheless easy-to-identify-with, is that most of it is revealed at the end of the film, and then in non-chronological fashion. This is why at least two viewings are necessary to get a real sense of the underlying structure. The only clue we get to the nature of the first two-thirds of the film on first viewing is the second pre-credits shot; a point-of-view of a person (Diane) possibly inhaling from something (drugs from a bong?) and then positioning herself on a bed, dopily lowering her head onto a pillow (on subsequent viewings, we can infer that this shot takes place after she has received the blue key from the hitman indicating that the job has been done.) So what we see from the title shot of a road sign at night, at least until the point where the character known only as The Cowboy says ‘Hey pretty girl, time to wake up’, is...a dream!
OK, I know that this is another off-putting issue for selected viewers. ‘Oh, so it’s like bloody ‘Dallas’ is it? It’s all a dream. The oldest cliche in the book!’ I have some sympathy for that initial scepticism. But hang on. This isn’t any old ‘it was all a dream’ scenario. When you see that the bulk of the film is a fantasy, a projection of Diane Selwyn’s in which all the elements of her troubled psyche play a role to aid or abet, in which numerous aspects of her life and deeds are commented on obliquely or directly and, most importantly, all the characters therein are versions of herself, what we have is one of the most astonishing and fully-realised representations of a dream-life in the history of art, all the better for taking place in, and simultaneously commenting on, the Dream Factory itself.
Part of the pleasure of watching the film again is in seeing how all these frequently odd, alternately sensual and shocking, funny and frightening, scenes within the dream illustrate or (mis)represent the underlying dramatic pull of whether or not Diane can escape from her own guilt, fear and self-loathing and reinvent/rediscover herself as the innocent she feels she used to be (‘Betty’) while protecting the vulnerable 'Rita’ from the awful forces conspiring against her, so I won’t say too much about that here; suffice it to say that after the bright young Hollywood newcomer and the beautiful, malleable amnesiac turn from strangers to friends to detectives to lovers, and a creative apogee is reached during a successful audition – carefully-constructed wish-fulfilment! – the sinister Hollywood power network, each representing facets of Diane’s anxious psyche, manage to coerce the Director into bending to their will, the dream starts to turn into a nightmare and, after the discovery of a shotgunned female corpse on a bed (going by the name ‘Diane Selwyn’ but black-haired like Camilla/’Rita’), the projected fantasy really begins to shut itself down, finally unravelling in a seedy cabaret called Club Silencio, in which the illusory nature of ‘reality’ is revealed on stage to ‘Betty’ and ‘Rita’. After opening a mysterious blue box that appears during this performance with a (within the dream) mysterious blue key ‘Betty’ is gone, erased from her all-surface existence; ‘Rita’s disappearance follows shortly after, with the ever-elusive Aunt Ruth ultimately unable to connect with or protect her beloved niece. The dream has ended, Diane is thrust back into her wretched reality, no longer able to hide from what she has done, or her new base self-image – that of the hideous homeless behind Winkies. Hearing a knock at the door, believing it to be the detectives who are reportedly looking for her, and suddenly attacked psychologically by the evil phantom manifestations of her grandparents, she retreats to her bedroom, grabs a conveniently-place gun from a drawer and shoots herself in the mouth. We appear to witness a final hallucination/vision before death – smoke pulls away from the bed (a retreat from hell?), the somehow less-frightening-than-before face of the ‘bum’ is confronted full-on (wearing an expression almost of pity), to be replaced by images of ‘Betty’ and ‘Rita’ superimposed over the bright lights of Hollywood, smiling gloriously in a brief moment of union and happiness, before we return, finally, to the Club, where the regal-looking, blue-haired lady (Diane’s higher conciousness?) watching all from her box high above the stage, whisperingly pronounces the show well and truly over. The rest is...’Silencio’.
2. It is a film conceived of and designed to be watched more than once
Why do I think this is of such worth and importance? Well, let me ask a different question. Why would you give a book like , for example, ‘The Da Vinci Code’, say, 10 hours of your life (I’m not a particularly rapid reader, but I think that’s probably a fair guestimate of how long it would take, counting all sittings, to read this or a similar book) and then, in many cases, toss it aside saying something like: ‘Diverting, but pure pulp’? Why would you give so many hours of your life to an average, or even a bad, book, or TV series, or whatever, and yet refuse to entertain the concept that a two-hour film might need more than one viewing to fully appreciate, especially one which has been so intricately, purposefully designed – in all its aspects - as most of the works of the more conscientiously ‘artistic’ directors are? Why indeed, is it perfectly legitimate to expect certain works of literature and theatre to be studied repeatedly, endlessly, in order to tease out the hidden depths that may or may not have been intended? The above plot summary merely skims the surface of ‘MD’ – there is for example a rich set of symbolic objects and symbolic use of colour, sound and character that I have barely touched on, but which tell entire layers of story in themselves. While I’m on a bit of a righteous trip, and in a questioning frame of mind, I will frame my answer to the first question with another question. Why on Earth should there not be films out there sufficiently layered and challenging enough, conscientiously written, filmed and performed enough to merit more than one measly two-to-three-hour viewing?
3. It is a remarkable example of “victory snatched from the jaws of defeat”.
It shouldn’t be a masterpiece. It shouldn’t hang together nearly as well as it does (if you’re prepared to give it time and patience and ignore a few ragged edges.) Its production history suggests that it was destined to be viewed as a failure, an artistic misstep.
The film comes in two parts, and it shows – even in the grain and texture of the film stock at one point. The first hour-and-a-half (minus, I believe, the two pre-credits shots) is what remains of a re-edited made-for-TV pilot that was supposed to start a new ‘Twin Peaks’-style project but which the network rejected on the grounds that it was too dark (you have to wonder what they actually expected; it is no darker than some of the later episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’ and a hell of a lot funnier.) So the project, spread around the industry in a hurriedly-edited, botched-job of a print, was shelved. Some time later, presumably still smarting over the whole affair, Lynch was offered a completion fund by the French production company Canal Plus to turn what he had into a feature film, and the pressure was suddenly on to think of an ending. What could have been one of the greatest missed opportunities in televison history now had the potential to become something else. This was surely a double-edged sword, as if the ending had been tacked on under duress and what came out of it an unmitigated disaster then the project would have been seen and felt to be even more of a failure. However, it seems that perhaps Lynch had had an inlking all along about what the story was all about and what those strange series of scenes added up to because the finished film not only has a completely appropriate ending but the sequence of new scenes illuminate the old while the old scenes reference the new, deceptively simple, end sequence constantly, and the whole thing is tied tightly together in a perfectly watertight drum of dream logic.
It is occasionally stimulating to wonder how those stories would have played out in the proposed TV series. Surrealism aside, the scenes would presumably have existed in a less contentious field of reality, with the characters acting as independent entities. Who would have been next to meet/fall prey to ‘The “Man” Behind Winkies’? What would the bumbling hitman do next? How would the detectives’ – surely the most underused characters/actors in the finished film – investigation have proceeded? Who would ‘Rita’ have been revealed as? I’m pretty sure that director Adam would have enquired after Betty’s identity after they’d spied each other at the audition, and his subsequent involvement with her and ‘Rita’ given him fresh insight and confidence with which to take on the Hollywood big guns afresh. But what is most intriguing is that these specualtions are beside the point. The project now is as it was always intended to be. Whatever your opinion of the relative talents and abilities of writer-director Lynch, what he proved here was that he was more than capable, as he has often asserted, of using deep reflective and meditative states to catch the “big fish” ideas that allow him to feel his way through the completion of an artistic project. In my opinion, and with this specific case upfront in my mind, that makes him something of a creative genius.
4. The film is the most accessible and complete distillation of Lynch’s preoccupations and stylistic traits
Clearly, Lynch divides audiences. There aren’t many who take up the middleground position with his work – although, oddly, many respected critics who generally dislike his work usually really admire one particular film, and it’s rarely the same one, which says something about his peculiar talent. I think few would disagree that he has a great ability to create mood and an often striking visual style that makes for powerful individual scenes, but his detractors often point to his weaknesses in characterisation and the overall coherence of his work. I have to say that I sometimes agree with these complaints, even in works that I have watched repeatedly and admired. A film like ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ is a case in point. It must be a baffling piece of nonsense to anyone not familiar with the entirety of the ‘Twin Peaks’ television series, and is pretty inscrutable to those who are (although, again, repeat viewings bear fruit.) His wilful obscurity and stubbornness can be quite testing. That said, put another way, isn’t it quite reassuring to have a (reasonably) popular artist out there who does insist on having full creative control over his output, who refuses to bow to the test audience or the TV network’s demographic chart? Who won’t alter his vision for riches or popularity? Well, yes, to me it is. Reassuring and pretty rare. I should also point out that, having seen him answer questions in the flesh, I can affirm that he does exude a warmth, a charm, an old-school sense of humour that several of his associates and actors have credited with creating a great on-set atmosphere. Mel Brooks’ famous description of him as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” is pretty accurate, but people often get fixated on the “...from Mars” bit. He seems as nice a guy, in his own weird way, as you would imagine Jimmy Stewart having been. What I’m trying to say is, again, no matter what your opinion of the merits of his work, his ‘heart is in the right place.’
To understand appreciate why Lynch is held in such high regard, there is no better place to start - or finish, for that matter - than ‘Mulholland Drive’. ‘Blue Velvet’ is a cracking film but now looks and feels a bit dated, despite being a trail-blazing independent production of the mid-80s. Pesonally, I’m left a little cold by ‘Wild At Heart’. The film ‘Lost Highway’ feels in retrospect like a dry-run or draft for ‘MD’, the patchy concept showing definite room for improvement, while the next film he made, the wonderfully simple and emotive ‘The Straight Story’, was an effective palate-cleanser. His most-recent feature ‘Inland Empire’ is an extension of the themes in MD. It received a mixed reception amongst critics and fans alike, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to Lynch novices (its abstract plot complexities and identity shifts make MD look like ‘The Straight Story’) although I find it to be a genuinely mature and unblinking look at female neurosis and enlightenment with the added blessing of an awe-inspiringly happy ending.
Although his first big baby, ‘Eraserhead’ (a five-year ordeal of gestation creating a repulsivley beautiful hour-and-a-half work about creation), may be a more important film, and his second, ‘The Elephant Man’, more fondly remembered by those of a certain age and leaning toward a ‘cinema of quality’, MD effectively stirs up all the elements that had been present in Lynch’s work for 30 years and puts them in their proper place, in harmonious relation with each other. The notions of duality and dream identities, so crucial to the bewildering worlds of ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Lost Highway’ are here realised within the appropriate, comprehensible context of Hollywood. The ambiguously nefarious ‘power networks’ of seemingly extra-dimensional forces common to his work are present and correct but here overlaid with at least two explanations for their presence and actions; the trio of the Castigliane gangster brothers, Mr Roque the invalid recluse and the Cowboy, quite apart from subtly mimicking the Lion, Tinman and Scarecrow from Lynch-favourite ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, function both as ciphers for the old-school power networks that did control much of Hollywood’s output in its ‘golden age’ and representations of those parts of Diane’s battered psyche that want to either protect her from self-discovery or to uncover and punish her for her crime (which is I think still open for debate.) The spitting, spluttering electrics and pools of coloured light in the darkness that have featured in almost all of Lynch’s work here reach their restrained apogee, as opposed to their occasional overuse in ‘Twin Peaks: FWWM’ and ‘Lost Highway’ where the production design sometimes feels too gothicaly self-aware for its own good; when such effects do spill over in MD into the unrestrained one feels a legitimacy behind the fireworks (such as in the Club Silencio scene, discussed later.)
This mature, layered, intelligent handling of a director’s signature style and thematic concerns is one reason why, in terms of Lynch output so far, ‘this is the film’. There are many other reasons why it is also the most accessible of all the films Lynch has made on his own unique terms. I have already explained how it is a film that can be fully understood beneath its often baffling surface (and equally enjoyed, with its amazing performances, cinematography and musical score, as an emotionally luxuriant experience on first viewing); I will now comment on a few other areas where the film exudes accessibility; its iconic attachment to Hollywood history and canonic references to work by other great directors; its very contemporary critique of and celebrity and fantasy culture; its often hilarious moments of humour and its genuine sense of tragedy. I will also attempt to argue that it isn’t actually as surreal as you might believe it to be.
5. It recognises and values the influence of the Golden Age of Hollywood and positions itself in a canon of ‘auteur’ cinema by directly referencing several great directors’ works
Despite the fairly pointed criticism of the dreams sold by Hollywood to impressionable people (see Reason 6) there is an ambivalence to the perspective. This is a film at times as in love with Hollywood, and international cinematic culture, as its protagonist, as many of us are to greater or lesser degrees. Lynch is both admirer and critic, often casting ex-Hollywood pin-ups in roles that gently subvert their previous personas yet make full use of both their acting talents and experience of people. Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn from ‘West Side Story’ were used to great effect in ‘Twin Peaks’, for example. In MD, the octagenarian actress Ann Miller, once celebrated for her leggy dancing skills, plays excellently a dual role as Coco the apartment manager and (in ‘reality’) Coco, Adam’s mother. Whereas in the latter role she is all withering sympathy and patronising pats Betty’s hand, in the former role she is a Betty Boop-styled protector of Betty and all the other half-crazed acting hopefuls under her ancient maternal wings in the apartment complex. She represents both the bitter truth of what it takes and means to be a success in Hollywood and its fairytale stylings.
Another character she might signify is a Good Witch from ‘The Wizard Of Oz’. I have already mentioned how three of the characters in the film stand in for the Lion, the Tinman and the Scarecrow. In fact, there are numerous parallels to this most classic of classic Hollywood films, clearly one of Lynch’s obsessions as it was already heavily referenced in ‘Wild At Heart’. Unlike that film, the parallels are less straight and more subversive. Hollywood is an Oz from which there is no escape; for Daine, there literally is “no place like home”. If homelessness is the thing she fears most, then it is no surprise that the Beast behind Winkies (the Wicked Witch) is homeless. Mulholland Drive is a Yellow Brick Road that leads only to crushing disappointment and degradation. The Wizard here is is ‘The Magician’, the MC of Club Silencio who, rather than inadvertently revealing himself to be a fake, revels in the opportunity to show the dreamer that her entire fantasy world is all surface and no substance. The tiny shrieking grandparents are evil munchkins.
Classic though it undoubtedly is, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ had multiple directors and was very much a studio-made film. MD is very clearly an auteured film, and perhaps a self-concious attempt to be the definitlve film from this autuer, albeit a self-concious attempt that has by and large succeeded. It is Lynch’s ‘2001’, his ‘Vertigo’, his ‘Persona’, his ‘Sunset Boulevard’, all directed by favourites of Lynch and all films that are directly referenced in MD. The Kubrickian sequence comes after Diane has awoken and is making a coffee in her kitchen. Turning round, she hallucinates a vision of Camilla, standing over the other side of the room looking radiant. We cut back to a confused-looking Diane, and then cut again to where Camilla was standing; instead it is the bedraggled Diane standing there, looking back at the place she was before, just as astronaut Dave Bowman does at the end of ‘2001’. Hitchcock is a huge influence on many of Lynch films, with the opening sequence of ‘Blue Velvet’ containing a direct steal from ‘Shadow of a Doubt’. Here, the blonde/brunette dynamic is palpably Hitchcockian, with Betty’s makeover of ‘Rita’ at the mirror recalling Scotty’s makeover of Madeline. Bergman’s ‘Persona’, a truly, freakishly, unexplainably frightening film concerning the slowly merging identities of two women, is another touchstone here, with its famously nightmarish split-screen shot of the two women’s faces merging as one being paid homage to with a beautiful image of Betty and ‘Rita’ lying in bed together, their faces at different angles yet subtly suggesting one combined face. And how could ‘Sunset Boulevard’ not be a direct precursor to this movie? Lynch has acknowledged Wilder’s bitter masterpiece as one of his favourites and not only references it directly with a street sign but also lifts the skeleton of his own entire project from the pool of the former film’s storyline, a caustic and cautionary tale of a Hollywood life gone wrong narrated by a dead person. It is also possible to see traces of Altman’s ‘The Player’ in MD, specifically in the sense of the Hollywood insiders gradually closing in on the murderous protagonist.
6. Thematically, it is about something quite specific, and relevant
Yes, it is set in Hollywood, and it references the culture throughout. But it is not really about Hollywood, and its criticism is directed towards the characters as much as the culture. It is about something that is one of the defining themes of our age, and has endured for far too long: our inability, because of our addiction to a fantasy, to see ourseves or our surroundings for what they really are. To my mind this could just as easily concern religion or romantic love as celebrity culture. Or put another way, our penchant for preferring the dream to the reality, no matter what the consequences of this might be. If this seems overstated, abstract, I can assure you it isn’t. Just this week I was talking to a colleague at work about the grim realities of the economic climate for the education sector and her reply was something like: ‘I don’t even want to think about it – I’d rather live in my own dream world’. This type of comment, this scenario, is commonplace.
It is worryingly commonplace in today’s world for people with feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt (ie most people) to put all their hopes in the prospect of fame, in the image of celebrities. This idea that self-worth can be found only upon reaching the gilded palaces of the famous is so prevalent today that the vast majority of our mainstream culture is about, and revels in, the wannabee’s quest for some degree of short-lived, vapid celebrity status. Moreover, these wannabees all feel the same ridiculous sense of entitlement. What is so troubling about Diane Selwyn is that she clearly so believed she was ‘the girl’ (or at least one of them) destined for fame in Hollywood that the shock of finding her “dream place” had turned into an ugly, survivalist, hellhole filled with dirty vagrants, laughing sycophants and a few sneering success stories turned her into a monstrously degraded version of her former self. This, I strongly suspect, is a pretty common story not just in Hollywood – although there may be a greater percentage of young fame-hungry women going awry there – but inmany of the major modern metropolis’s of the world. Of course, it is not only women who act in this way, but Hollywood does have a nasty history of mistreating its wannabee starlets and, all over the world, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, we can find examples of male power networks mistreating their women, many of whom have got “lost in the marketplace”, to use a memorable line from ‘Inland Empire’. Unlike Nikki, that film’s protagonist, Diane is unable to reach a state of enlightenment away from the entrapments of male narrative and her own desire to be placed in them; and not only because, unlike Nikki, she has participated in a heinous crime. Diane is left as empty as the blue box when she finds out her dream projection is “just an illusion”. The only self-knowledge she uncovers is that in death the show, and therefore the pretence, is over.
7. For a film of such heavy subject matter, its often funnier than many Hollywood ‘comedies’...
I think this is the most unusual and unexpected pleasure of repeat viewings – the laugh-out-loud moments aren’t diminished. There is a tone of offbeat, carefully-crafted comedy that alternates almost scene-for-scene with the fear/mystery strand for the first hour or so. Notwithstanding the out-Tarantinoing Tarantino slapstick violence of the bumbling hitman scene (a fat woman who has just been accidentally shot screaming “something bit me bad!” really shouldn’t be as funny as it is!) and the frequent splashes of humour within the fabulous ‘audition’ scene (discussed later), most of the comedy centres round the character of Adam, the director, played to disbelieving, gritted-teeth perfection by Justin Theroux, and his encounters with a series of baffling and often hilarious minor characters. We first meet him at a production meeting where the Castigliane brothers make the first attempt to recast the movie he’s making. He immediately registers as an arrogant but strangely likeable figure, an audience (and, of course, Diane) surrogate who constantly challenges the weird demands being imposed upon him. His staring-out of the bushy-eyebrowed, roaring, expresso-spitting gangters, and even his later pointless smashing of their car, make him as heroic as he is comedic. Subsequent encounters with his wife and Gene the pool guy (Billy Ray Cyrus scoring the biggest laugh of the movie with his softly-spoken, immortal line: “just forget you ever saw it - it’s better that way”) and his PA keep the funny-guy persona afloat. However, though he attempts to keep the wisecracks going during his encounter with The Cowboy it is clear that this character’s steely surface and underlying menace have finally broken this comedian.
8. ...until the tears start to roll
I have a theory as to why MD rubs some men up the wrong way. There are undoubtedly other reasons, but could the main one be that it is a film that wants to make you cry? Along with the desertion of conventional narrative structure this is one of the two cardinal sins a dramatic work can commit for many a rational man. MD commits both of course, and in fact they are tied together, because instead of opting for traditional, linear, narrative resolution the story passes through several moments of emotional catharsis through a combination of sound, colour, visual effects, performance and score. These moments are heightened with the specific intention of making us feel something; hardly something new dramatically! And yet, it sometimes seems that any movie that ‘tugs at the heartstrings’ (to use a deliberately loaded expression) is to be viewed with suspicion by men who consider such things to be the stuff of melodrama and soap opera. Well, I know I am not alone amongst men in enjoying this kind of emotional catharsis, and though I have cried at films of a transparently lesser status the visceral effect that this particular tragedy has on me feels far more akin to the experience of watching a classic example of this ancient art. And just as I tend to laugh at the same moments every time, I cry at all the same points too, especially the two points in which the main musical theme swells to accompany first the women’s trip up the secret path to Mulholland Drive and later the penultimate shot. As hauntingly wonderful as the music is, there is a coming together of all the visual and dramatic elements within the film at these junctures which the score heightens to the point of perfection. Now, you might call my reaction Pavlovian, but I call it the mark of great art.
9. Its surrealism, like the trumpet, is muted
A brief point, but another indicator of the films accessibility for me. A film like ‘Eraserhead’ virtually redefined the artistic movement of surrealism for a new age but a lot of what makes more recent work from Lynch so illuminating is that it makes use of what is fairly conventional but, by placing it in a different context, makes it jarring, forcing us to question what we find accepatable in life or art. For example, a scene towards the beginning of MD shows ‘Rita’ hiding from an unknown couple she sees walking down the street. The man is laughing in a weird, hiccupy manner and raises his finger occassionally to no effect. The first time I saw it I thought: typical Lynchian strangeness. On subsequent viewings it became apparent that I see this kind of thing every Friday night in London – the couple are obviously stupidly, but happily, drunk. The dialogue similarly contains numerous non-sequiturs and odd phrasings of the kind we don’t usually hear at the cinema – but exactly the kind of thing we regularly hear in life. Stylistically, the first shot, with its Yves Klein-y purple background and superimposed whirling dancers, might jar – “How bizarre”, my sister said, possibly admiringly, when we watched the film together – but it’s nothing we haven’t seen on daytime, or primetime Saturday night, television shows.
THREE KEY SCENES
Despite the astonishing, unlikely cohesion that this project demonstrates, it is also a film, as Lynch is very much a director of, individual scenes. I will now explore three of the most memorable scenes in the film – and in my opinion of cinema this century – with reference to the dominant emotional tone that each scene radiates.
10. (i) Winkies (Fear)
This unforgettable scene manages to be frightening even on repeated viewings, built as it is on the premise that what you most fear happening may be about to happen. Framed with shots of ‘Rita’ under the table, sleeping, it has an even more overtly dream-like atmosphere than much of the first hour of the film. It starts with the sound of a police siren, and well it might. This is the first warning that sometimes we should not go where our curiousity leads us. The strangely-undulating camera movements around the wide-eyed man (‘Herb’ in the screenplay) and his psychiatrist/friend sitting at the table in Winkies heighten the atmosphere of rising dread, as do the ominous bass noises and glissando strings on the soundtrack. The man’s recounting of his dream of the malevelont controlling force he could see through the wall of the diner (a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream well before ‘Inception’ did the big-bucks version) is full of memorable lines, the most horribly telling of which is “I hope I never see that face again outside of a dream.” The other man is a rock of professional rationality, but we can see from Herb’s facial expressions that he is unable to control his escalating fear. The horribly slow movement from the door of the diner to the wall “in back of this place”, including a camera pan past a scrawled arrow pointedly pointing the other way – unfortunately ignored – is intercut with several point-of-view shots, each one closer to the point of no return than the last. When the burnt, grinning face finally does its peek-a-boo from behind the wall, the soundtrack seems to have had the plug pulled from it; the noise disappears to a sub-woofer rumble and Herb goes down clutching his heart. The viewer is likely to empathise. The revelation of this scene, which could have come across as terribly corny, is that fear comes from the simplest, fairy-tale premises and, when treated as respectfully as this film treats them, fairy-tale premises are as apt to terrify adults as children. In terms of the subtext of Diane’s subconscious drama, the scene is not merely a vicarious revenge on the one potential witness to her deal with the hitman but acts as a warning to her dream self not to go looking for revelations of who she is, of how she sees herself at the deepest level, because the consequences will be dire. Sadly it is a warning she is unable to adhere to.
11. (ii) The Audition (self-belief)
This scene is announced with the first appearance of the main theme, the final chord of the four-chord progression lingering over the first shot. With hindsight, this tells us that it is one of the four points of emotional catharsis, and it turns out that this scene-within-a-scene-within-the-dream will be the high watermark of Diane’s attempts to recast herself as ‘Betty’, the hugely-talented actress destined for the big time. However, the music here is muted compared to its later appearances, suggesting the emotion is unearned. The first shot introduces us to the avuncular producer Wally, ushering Betty into the room, but the second, Kubrickian, wide-angle shot of the entire room introduces us to a number of characters (who are then introduced verbally), a few of which make quite an impression for characters only to appear in a single scene of a movie. Besides the aptly named Wally and the equally aptly-named Woody, the old reptilian lothario (“Just tell me where it hurts, baby” indeed!) there are two characters who seem to be there solely to echo other charaters in the film. The red-haired casting agent Linnie James is as close to Aunt Ruth as Betty ever gets in the film and her assistant Niki, with her all-black look, is a female dead-ringer for Adam. The “lovely Martha” appears to have absolutley no function in the scene whatsoever other than to provide a black-haired woman present on the other side of Wally in the wide-shot to remind us of the missing ‘Rita’. Indeed, we are later told that both Diane and Camilla were at that audition, at least the actual one that the dream version is based on. (Read Shaw’s essay for some in-depth stuff on the connection between the black, blonde and red-haired characters in the film and indeed the entire complex colour scheme in general.)
The facinating thing about the scene is that it begins and ends with a tone of light comedy, centring around the befuddled, too-soft-for-Hollywood Wally and the ridiculously pretentious director, Bob Brooker (a piece of self-parody on Lynch’s part?), his usless aphorisms a high-point of the screenplay. But at its centre is the power shift between the slimy Woody Katz and Betty, which occurs specifically at the electrifying moment that she chooses to place his previously-wandering, temporarily-wavering, hand on her hip, so that the scene enacted can escalate to a level of intensity he had clearly not expected. Although he comes across as pretty repellent (and even more so if you consider the possibility that Diane suffered abuse from an older member of her family) he’s not without a sly charm and his initial sleaze just makes his bewilderment over – and capitulation to – Betty’s superior acting talent all the more satisfying. This is Naomi Watts as Betty taking full control of the scene and Diane taking full control of her dream for a glorious moment. It won’t get any better than this, but it will get a lot worse.
12. (iii) Silencio (tragic self-awareness)
I didn’t particularly like this scene the first time I saw the film. It seemed that Lynch, having obtained the funding needed to make a film out of the pilot, was desperate to mount one of his trademark scenes of lushly-stylised freakishness. The scene certainly shares characteristics with the ‘In Dreams’ scene from ‘Blue Velvet’ and the ‘Red Room’ scenes from ‘Twin Peaks’. However, this time there is a crucial difference, and it’s not just in its maturity; it lies in the overall emotional tone achieved. Rather than feeling freaked out by the events on-stage at Club Silencio (the seedy theatrical setting slighly minimises the extent to which we are nonplussed by what we see), what I come away from the scene with is a feeling of beautifully-sad, resigned catharsis, and that feeling links the viewer directly to the experience of the dreamer (who is also a viewer.) This is no small part owing to the phenomenal vocal performance of Rebekah Del Rio, a truly gifted singer playing the part of herself as reimagined as La Llorona, the weeping banshee figure of Hispanic folklore. But while she provides emotional core of the scene, the intellectual core is the moment when she falls over, fainting, to the floor...and the singing continues. There was no voice. It was all a recording. And yet...even after the malevolent MC had lifted the veil on the illusion and told us time and time again that nothing was ‘live’ in this place, we the viewer, like Betty and ‘Rita’, were suckered into feeling the moment as it appeared, as it occurred in front of us. The point couldn’t be clearer. It is necessary to utilise more than sensory perception to understand who we are in relation to the world around us. If even a projection, a recording, a film, a dream, can move us as if it were ‘reality’, what does that say about our reality? Being aware of Lynch’s interest in Transcendental Meditation and travelling through stratas of experience to reach a ‘unified field’ is not necessary to feel the profound implications of this scene and what it means for Betty/Diane. Whether one believes it is ever possible to experience a total reality is not the point either. The point of the scene at this stage of the dream narrative is that dream worlds, idealised versions of reality, cannot be maintained indefinitely and will start to collapse as other, repressed elements of one’s existence make themsleves felt. At Club Silencio, Diane receives too many hints of a world outside her hermetically-sealed fantasy to deny it any longer.
Critics may consider the movement toward this scene too jagged, and the idea of the conveniently-invoked, hurriedly-attended location breaking the complex dream-web Diane has woven evidence of lazy screenwriting, and this would be a valid argument. However, I think that the previous scenes demonstrate enough evidence of a rift occuring between Diane’s desire and her repressed reality for the transition to be justified. The combination of the encountering of ‘Diane Selwyn’s dead body, the use of a blonde wig on ‘Rita’ to make her “look like someone else” and the passionate consumnation of the feelings Betty has for her Camilla-clone are episodes that could believably wield an aggregated power to push Diane’s sleeping mind to a state of readiness. The performance at Club Silencio is a revelation of herself to herself by herself. The location itself seems perched somewhere on the cusp of the sleeping and waking mind, between life and death, the individual and the collective unconcious, an extension of the possibly infernal Red Room. However, as I believe is the case in the Twin Peaks saga, there is more to Lynch’s game than a depiction of hell. If the lighting and the smoke make the MC appear devilish, he is ultimately a showman only – the most important figure in the scene is revealed suddenly in a fabulous low-angle shot during the MC’s stage schtick. The blue-haired lady sitting in the balcony might represent many things (including Abraham Lincoln and therefore assassination/death of the American Dream) but as I have mentioned she is a potent symbol for the higher level of Diane’s consciousness. This calm, fully-focussed figure, unregistered by the weeping, trembling women, is the most privileged spectator, and it is her, not the Magician or the Bum, who “controls it all”. If only Diane were able to connect with this ultimate self-image, the journey may not have to end with her self-annihilation.
Nearly done. Moving away from abstract philosophical flutterings, here are three standout elements of technical excellence:
13. The Cinematography – from the LA lights as seen from Mulholland Drive to the solitary corral-light illuminating the Cowboy’s eerily impassive face, this is one of the most striking-looking films I believe I will ever see.
14. The Acting - It is ironic that out of this tragedy of a failed acting career the lead actress, in her first major role, launched a stellar career of her own. The intelligence and feeling in her nuanced dual performance is fabulous and Naomi Watts fully-deserved the slightly wearying-ubiquity she achieved in American cinema for many years afterwards. Laura Elena Harring, less of a presence in Hollywood but as commanding a presence, for my money, in this film, is especially good as the amnesiac ‘Rita’, totally convincing as a woman in terror from forgetting who she is and what she came from.
15. The Soundtrack – It isn’t only a lack of technical vocabulary and descriptive ability that causes me to stop short of close analysis here: Angelo Badalamenti is one of the finest composers in modern cinema – and his best themes aggravatingly simple! – but the range of perfectly-sculpted musical stings, riffs and melodies he sprinkles across MD is masterful and many of them threaten to make me weep just by thinking about them. Perhaps I cry too easily.
16. In the end, it is a work that is open to endless interpretation
It is extremely important to say this, as there are always going to be unanswered questions in any attempt to contain the experience of the moving, ‘live’ film in post-mortem, and as much as I think I’ve ‘got’ it, I might have missed the mark completely. As with ‘Lost’, probably the most misunderstood TV show in a generation, a cultural point is being made and proven that some viewers are desperate to have explicitly-stated explanations to invented mysteries that were interesting because of the way they stimulated the spectator’s imagination. Could this mean that some viewers, like Diane Selwyn, cannot trust their own imagination to lead them where they want it to go? Because when it comes down to works of imagination, all we ever have is our own interpretation. That’s fine with me as long as I own my interpretation and believe it to be based on sound principles and analysis. In truth, around a firm-but-abstract core, there are as many interpretations as there are viewers. But hey, that’s life, isn’t it?
