To set the scene?Lincoln Plaza Cinema on a perfect New York City Indian summer day. However, instead of enjoying the sun, I am below ground, along with what seems to be every elderly person from the Upper West Side. We have all gathered to watch David Lynch’s new film, Mulholland Drive.Why these ladies and gentlemen, who undoubtedly recall with great whimsy the advent of the talkie, would want to spend a beautiful day watching a David Lynch movie still escapes me. Maybe they want to be hip. Maybe they want to be with it. One thing is for sure?they Macarena’ed their asses right out of the theater when things got weird; and yes, things did get weird. So weird that the man two rows in front of me giggled like a school girl throughout the entire film?not because it was funny, but rather, I assume, because he did not know how else to react to what he was watching. I was not too far behind. My forehead still hurts from being furrowed up in confusion for two hours.
To get the summary out of the way?Rita (Laura Herring), a sultry brunette, is involved in a car crash that robs her of her memory. She runs across Betty (Naomi Watts), a cute blonde newly arrived from Canada with designs on Hollywood stardom. They set out to uncover Rita’s past. Simple enough, isn’t it? Not really. The film also includes sub-plots involving mysterious producers, cowboys and crippled dwarfs.
Mulholland Drivebegins with a collage of ‘40s era swing dancers. Big Band music blasts away while guys and dolls throw themselves in the air. Right from the get-go, Lynch forces his audience to don a set of nostalgia-tinged spectacles. We associate this music and movement of the mid-20th century with the generic L.A. crime story involving mysterious women and cases of amnesia. We have seen it all before?or so Lynch would have us believe. Lulling us into a sense of familiarity, sporadically punctuated by random digressions, Mulhollandworks very hard to destroy that comfort.
Knowing anything about Lynch, one would be well-advised to enter one of his films without any expectations of what is going to transpire. Blue Velvet, in which Dennis Hopper portrays one of the craziest crazies around, was full of surrealistic touches alongside banal depictions of Middle America. Strange is his forte, and indeed, one of the most uncharacteristic directorial turns of the last few years was The Straight Story,a rather “straight” story about a Midwest farmer’s journey on a tractor.
Part satire, part mystery, part surreal romp, Mulholland Drivenever exactly gets its bearings on where it wants to go, jumping from one thing to another, back and forth between stories with no direct links. Los Angeles, with all the connotations that accompany the name, is the connection. It is a place where dreams are created and broken, where careers flourish and flounder. Los Angeles is, to many people, unreal?not even a genuine city, but rather an endless expanse of ever-increasing sprawl.
This is the fertile soul in which Lynch sets his story. The thing is, and this is where most people will have problems with the film, the story is nowhere close to being the director’s priority. Near the end, Mulholland Drive loses any sense of narrative cohesion. Characters disappear or become other people, and story lines converge and vanish.
As indecipherable as it may be on first viewing, everything fits in with what seems to be the film’s preoccupation with dreams, illusions and role-playing. Excited about her first trip to Hollywood, Betty says, “now I’m in this dream place.” Obviously referring to the L.A. dream factory, it also indicates the extent to which the story itself is dream-like, or even a dream itself. It moves in and out of reality, to those slightly-off areas beyond the horizon and back.
Betty uses Rita’s appearance to play sleuth, much like Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet. This make-believe “pretending to be someone else,” as she puts it, has much the same consequences as it did for Jeffery in Velvet?a privileged view into the dark side of human nature and a sexual initiation of sorts.
It is this steamy yet utterly romantic encounter between Betty and Rita, as well as a Spanish language version of a Roy Orbison song, which kicks Mulholland Driveinto nightmare overdrive. Opening a mysterious blue box, we are sucked in and spit out somewhere completely different. True to rumors, the last twenty minutes of the film are quite a departure from the relative calm that has preceded. We are never really sure, though, what we are supposed to see. “It’s all an illusion,” says a man, just like in the movies. Yet, if it is all just picture flickering before a light, then what significance does Lynch ascribe to any movie?
One must commend Lynch simply for continuing to be provocative in a way that no one else can. He blatantly plays on the legacy of Freud with his dreams and exploding sexual repression. Unlike Freud, though, Lynch climaxes. Perhaps it is his form of therapy, working out his neuroses on screen for us to freak out over them. How many directors do the same? How many writers? We have all heard that artists of all varieties sort out their problems in their works, but it has never been simultaneously as frustrating and fascinating as Lynch makes it.
Maybe that is why the elderly people in the theater walked out. They have enough problems to deal with. Why should they waste their money on someone else’s? The rest of us, however?the young, the hearty and the experimental?should go check this out. Be assured, though, you will leave this film befuddled and at a loss for words other than, “What the hell was that?” Yet no matter how pissed off you get after watching Mulholland Drive,it will have been a thrilling, unreal experience.
