Twisting highway littered with the corpses of shattered dreams

     

      When I heard about David Lynch's passing a few days ago, I was shocked, but I also felt immensely guilty: I hadn't seen a single one of  the man's films in the time he was alive. Anyone who has even dipped their toes into the world of art cinema would have heard of Lynch; hell he's probably mainstream in America thanks to Twin Peaks. I had planned to see Mulholland Drive way before his passing, but I wanted to see Sunset Boulevard first and before that, I wanted to see the works of Keaton and other silent dramas and so on and so forth.... Basically, I never got around to it. However, news of his passing on Friday triggered a drastic change of heart. For my third post, I was actually planning to do a comparison between the 1948 and 2003 versions of Spring in a Small Town to commemorate Chinese New Year, but in the end I said, "screw all that, I'm watching MD today. " Not a bad trade, considering I'm only trading (at least) one masterpiece for another.

    I had heard a lot about Mulholland Drive, as I'm sure many people watching it after its release did, so I walked into it with a certain level of trepidation, particularly because of its reputation as being undecipherable, so I will do my best to describe the plot to you. The film follows a detective story involving 2 characters, Betty (Naomi Watts)  and a mysterious brunette (Laura Harring).  The mysterious brunette who gets into an accident atop the titular mulholland drive, and loses her memories. Betty is a optimistic young blonde who dreams of making it big in Hollywood. The brunette sneaks into Betty's apartment and names herself after Rita Hayworth, but instead of throwing her out, Betty strikes up a fast friendship with Rita and drags her along to rediscover Rita's identity. In a diner, the discover that someone called Diane appears to be a person Rita knew so, they search for this Diane only to find her corpse decomposing in her apartment. 

       Later that night, Rita and Diane have some sex and go to a place called Club Silencio. Betty achieves what I assume to be enlightenment and disappears into an alternate, more depressing reality using a box she gets from Club Silencio. That's the first 100 minutes, as far as what I could figure out. There is also a subplot involving a director (Justin Theroux) who is told to hire a blonde actress called Camilla Rhodes against his will, and shadowy figures who sit in small rooms. His career and his home life goes to shit until he agrees to meet with a cowboy living atop one of LA's many sun scorched mountains, who in effect threatens the director until the he agrees to hire said actress. 

     All that might seem pretty normal, but I must confess that what I have mentioned thus far are only what I understood. There are many...things that I can't fit neatly into this narrative. For example, the shot of dog poop, the significance of the cowboy, the expresso scene, a jump scare involving 2 characters who never show up again, 2 police officers who also don't show up again, a blundering hitman who is after a black book that also doesn't show up after.... The frustration and fascination with the film then, I suspect, is not that it is completely opaque, rather its that many plot threads and scenes simply don't add up to a cohesive whole. We begin with a film noir style aesthetic and storyline,  but that storyline is soon abandoned for a more surreal final half hour. In that respect it actually reminded me of watching Antonioni's Blow Up. 

     I have seen movies that take place in dreams before, but even their most surreal sequences still have a level of thematic relevance. In Mulholland Drive however, plot threads and scenes play and end arbitrarily...kind of like a dream I guess. It's easy therefore, to dismiss Mulholland Drive as self indulgent nonsense, as the person watching it with me did, but I hesitate to do so, because so many of these sequences are so well crafted, that it's impossible to do so, regardless of whether they connect. Take the diner scene for example. Its a classic jump scare scene, the type I happen to hate. But even I was drawn in because of the way Lynch constructs it, from the "floating" camera that immediately draws your attention and puts you in a state of unease, or the sound design (Angelo Badalamenti) that builds from radio silence to a low bass drone that gets louder and louder, to the way the man describes what happens in his dreams in minute detail and said dream playing out like he said it would. It reminds me of those time I had strange, unsettling dreams that collect in the dark recesses of my memory and give me deja vu when something similar happens in real life. As the 2 men make their way out of the diner, the environment is shown with this hazy, mirage-like look, eerily similar to a dream. The camera slowly creeps forward, first peering around a telephone box, building our anticipation as the camera peers around the concrete wall in front. It doesn't stop there; as the man collapses from shock, the droning starts to overwhelm and s shot of the wall is drawn out after the creature disappears.

       Lynch is a master at toying with his audience, and he clearly demonstrates this in the club Silencio sequence, where we are straight up told in the beginning that the performance happening on screen is an illusion, yet by the end of the sequence we are completely drawn in. He understands that the power of movies lie not in their ability to capture reality, but in capturing the many dimensions in human emotion. The power of the film is not solely found in its direction though, because Watts delivers one of the greatest on screen performances I have ever seen. In fact, I was initially unimpressed by Betty's wooden delivery of admittedly cringeworthy lines, but later she is allowed to shine in her audition, where in a stark contrast to her rehearsal, she elevates a weak script to something absolutely riveting. The fact that this could also be seen as a middle finger to my initial dismissal of the her performance was not lost on me. That's not all though, because the final 46 minutes is when the shit really hits the fan.

      After Betty and Rita disappear into a new reality, we find out that Betty and Diane may be the same person, and Rita becomes Camilla Rhodes. Diane is gaunter, darker version Betty. she is pale and gaunt; instead of a smile she wears a scowl. Naomi Watts is so unrecognisable as Diane that I was questioning myself throughout the entire final third. The character she plays is a complete 180 from Betty, jaded, angry and deeply jealous of her former lover, Camilla Rhodes. In this world, Diane is a failed actress, and is left behind by Camilla. Camilla/Rita is confident and assertive who stars in lead roles thanks to a relationship with the director, and (I suspect) having more talent. It is here I begin to think that maybe the first 100 minutes was a fantasy constructed by Diane (leaving aside a few holes), as identities start to fracture before our very eyes and no one is truly who they appear to be. Anyway, Camilla does not attempt to placate Diane, and instead aggravates her by forcing Diane to watch as she gets up close and personal with the director. When the lovely new couple announces their engagement at the director's house atop mulholland drive, Diane decides that its the final straw and hires a hitman to kill Camilla. The hit is a success, but Diane is terrorised by hallucinations, and kills herself. The final shot of the film shows a ghostly image of Diane and Camilla superimposed on the LA night sky.

     The generally accepted theory is that the first 100 minutes is a dream, and the final 46 minutes is reality. I have some reservations this theory. On one hand, it's not too different from my alternate realities theory and using this, a lot of the pieces start falling into place. The first 100 minutes is bright and colourful, while the last third has a more muted and greyish palette, which also lends credibility to this theory. However, it doesn't account for everything and I've always had the sneaking suspicion that saying "its all a dream!" is just a way to dodge the task of engaging with the film more deeply. Furthermore, the last 46 minutes isn't entirely reality either, with abrupt time skips and an exaggerated POV. Rather, I feel it is more akin to someone in the nebulous space between REM sleep and consciousness, where fragments  from subjective reality and dreams combine...blah blah blah. I seriously cannot stand people who treat all movies as a "puzzle" to be "solved". Honestly, they are some of the most insufferable people on the planet. They engage in a farcical cycle where they deliberately seek out "mindfuck" movies and scrutinise every plot point. Soon, these people will then boast about how the film is actually so simple and (with a smirk on their face) announce that they have figured it all out, when they have actually missed the point. Lynch would probably agree that what matters more is the experience and the emotions that the film brings out. Having said that, most people would tend to focus on trying to make sense of the plot instead of simply surrendering to the film, which probably undermines its emotional resonance on a first watch.

     I usually write a post about a film I viewed one day after, but I sat on this one for several days, and every time I think back or rewatch a clip of the film on youtube, my appreciation of it deepens. I admit that watching the Mulholland Drive only once is nowhere near sufficient to write authoritatively about it, and it is very likely I will take away something different on a subsequent watch. For now though, I have reached a conclusion: Whether the film is a dream/fantasy/alternate reality, it doesn't really matter.  More importantly, it's a tragedy about how we too often have to confront the fact that there is a large gap between our aspirations, and what we end up as. That may not be our fault alone. Sometimes, our eyes are unwittingly opened to the corruption and rot lying just beneath the world we idealise, and we either conform, or are driven to despair. 

      This leads me to the haunting final scene, where Rita sits in her apartment at night, alone. The encouraging old couple she met at the start of the film crawl out of a paper bag. She starts hearing voices and knocking sounds; the camera cuts to an extreme close up of her eyes as she breathes haggardly. The voices become screams, a ghostly roar intensifies and lights flash like lightning. The old couple grows in size and chases Diane as she staggers back into her bedroom. She collapses on her bed as she grabs a gun and kills herself. The moment she does so, the overwhelming noise and flashing light extinguishes in a puff of smoke. The most common reading of this scene is that her conscience is punishing her for the act of murder, but I disagree. Instead, I submit this: When you realise that you have failed to achieve your dreams, the only thing that can feel worse, is knowing you have disappointed all those who cheered for you along the way.

★★★★ (out of five)