Mulholland Drive. David Lynch (director, screenwriter), Alain Sarde (producer), Pierre Edelman (producer), Mary Sweeney (producer, editor), Neal Edelstein (producer), Michael Polaire (producer), Tony Krantz (producer), Angelo Badalamenti (composer). Performers: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, Mark Pellegrino. DVD Video, English, 2015. [Director-approved two-DVD special edition]. The Criterion Collection, [New York, N.Y.], 2015. #779. Originally produced as a motion picture in 2001.
Summary: Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman's identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project.
Special features: Disc 2: Interviews: David Lynch and Naomi Watts (27 min.); Laura Harring, Johanna Ray, Justin Theroux, and Naomi Watts (36 min.); Angelo Badalamenti (20 min.); Peter Deming and Jack Fisk (22 min.); deleted scene; on-set footage (25 min.); trailer. Includes a booklet featuring an interview with Lynch from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley's 2005 edition of the book "Lynch on Lynch."
Sunset Blvd. meets the Twilight Zone …
I’m still not sure whether I think Mulholland Drive is the best movie I’ve ever seen, or the worst, as I’ve reacted both ways at different times. No surprise, given the polarized opinions of fans, devotees and (anti)devotees. For the moment I’ll split the difference and opine that Mulholland Dr. is a tad overrated, but still pretty darn good. And even if repeated viewings bring me no closer to understanding the true meaning or correct interpretation, I do confess that I rather enjoy the film more each time I see it.
Nonlinear story lines in movies have been around a long time [1], and perhaps the most successful, in my opinion, is Last Year at Marienbad. For me Marienbad had a kind of inner logic and consistency – admittedly elusive and difficult to articulate – that nonetheless place it among the truly great. The other movie Mulholland reminds me of, strangely enough, is the offbeat crypto-noir Dementia (aka Daughter of Horror), which also has a dreamscape tableaux, shifting reality/fantasy, off-kilter narrative, femme fatale in peril, nasty villains, and most of all, atmosphere to burn [2].
But what is MD about? Whatever else it may be, MD for me is at heart a meditation on the dark side of Hollywood, served up full-on phantasmagoric. In a word, MD makes The Big Sleep look like a straightforward crime story and Sunset Blvd. a Hallmark Hall of Fame weepie (coincidentally, both Big Sleep and Sunset Blvd. explore the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles culture and the movie business, but using a different cinematic language).
Getting back to MD, the first more or less two-thirds of the film seduces us into believing the story is a conventional mystery, albeit with quirky touches, but a mystery that will ultimately give us the payoff (read: solution) at the end. But it’s the last forty-five minutes where things really get weird and play with our expectations big-time. Was it just a dream after all? Parts of it a dream? Or the hallucinations of a mentally ill young woman? And what’s the significance of the cowboy? It’s as though the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai (a film not dissimilar to MD) has transmogrified into the most gloriously excessive cinematic roller coaster, with huge swaths of color and (mostly) beautiful faces set amidst a feverish LA/Hollywood backdrop.
MD for me is best appreciated as pure style: the acting, camerawork, script, production design, and especially the look of the film are brilliantly done. Make no mistake, MD is beautiful to watch, not the least beauteous being our two leading ladies, who have never looked better, or performed better. And yes, the steamy lesbian scene, the one we wait nearly two hours to get to, is a doozy, guaranteed to get one, shall we say, hot under the collar. The acting throughout is good to excellent, and sometimes just plain eccentric. I’ve already sung the praises of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring. Justin Theroux is fine as a pompous auteur director who’s harassed by shady characters [3], and it’s a joy to see the great Ann Miller in her last film.
It occurs to me that my comments above (and below) reference lots of movies and their similarities and dissimilarities to Mulholland Dr, and maybe that’s the point, and one way to interpret the film, not only as a pastiche of L.A. but of the movie business and just plain movies, especially old movies (is it any accident that the mystery woman takes the name of ‘Rita,’ after seeing a poster of film noir’s definitive femme fatale, Gilda?). For gosh sakes, Laura Harring even looks like Rita Hayworth [4].
Then there’s my own, rather novel take, in which the first two-thirds
of the movie (Act 1, if you will) is the reality and the remaining third
(Act 2) is the dream sequence (I’ve noticed that few commentators take
this approach). There’s a certain logic here: Act 2 is presented more
like a dream, or feverish hallucination, depending on your point of
view. But this interpretation does have its complications: Act 1 ends
abruptly, to say the least, with lots of loose ends left dangling. Case
in point: if Act 1 is reality, then who is the dead woman in apartment
17, and why didn’t Betty and Rita do anything about it, like reporting
it to the authorities? And there’s the butch tenant who lives in
apartment 12. Who is she? Is she the murderer? And what's the
significance of Club Silencio? Even with these inconsistencies, seeing
Act 1 as the reality is more reassuring and satisfying, certainly
emotionally so and also, if debatably, aesthetically. But then again, maybe this
movie isn’t about satisfying and reassuring. So there it is.
My
alternate interpretation is that both Acts 1 and 2 are reality, and Act
2 simply updates the story by a year or two. Adam Kesher is at the top
of his game and Rita and Betty have fallen out as a couple. Rita is now a
rising star in the Hollywood constellation, and just happens to be Kesher's future wife,
while Betty's early success in acting has vanished and she now lives a life
of semi-poverty and gradual mental disintegration. Betty and Rita have new names - Diane and Camilla
respectively - and Ann Miller appears inexplicably as Kesher's mother.
Eventually Betty arranges for a contract killer to murder Rita and it's implied
that this indeed happens. Perhaps grief stricken, Betty has a complete
mental collapse and takes her own life. Then again I wonder, is MD ultimately about mental illness and the collective mental illness the film culture creates?
Whatever the final verdit on the meaning of Mulholland Drive,
I can’t resist seeing the film as ending on a positive note, as the
ghost-like images of Rita and Betty are superimposed above the L.A.
skyline, implying that our two, presumably deceased, heroines, are
finally together, in a kind of Hollywood Heaven.
Highly recommended then, with the usual not-for-all-tastes caveat [5].
2 Most of these tropes also harken back to the Val Lewton thrillers of the 1940s: bumpy narrative, ambiguous characters, unresolved plot threads, Sapphic undercurrent, mysterious walks at night.* This makes me wonder: is MD really a horror film masquerading as a mystery?
* Admittedly in the Lewton films the presentation and representation of these tropes is, by necessity (read: censor mandated), less extreme.
3 Some commentators see a Fellini-like quality in the Theroux character, not altogether inappropriate, since on a superficial level, MD is a very Felliniesque movie. But for me Adam Kesher is more of an Orson Welles, right down to the scene where his project is taken away from him by the Big Money people.
4 As the story progresses the Rita/Camilla character, both in her actions and looks, takes on a distinctly more sinister, femme fatale edge, almost to the point of predatory and vampiric.
5 Considering its relatively youthful vintage – not yet a quarter century – Mulholland Dr. is one of the most written about movies of all time. Hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of posts, articles, reviews, think pieces and such have appeared over time. Ergo the film has been dissected, critiqued, sanctified, pilloried, explained and appreciated from myriad points of view: feminist, (anti)feminist, queer, Freudian, Jungian, socio-economic, racialist, misogynist, surrealist and purely cinematic interpretations have surged forth. The most convincing approach, for my money, is the L.A./Hollywood dark side backdrop,** served up full on neo-noir and told through the lives of the two (or is it four?) women played so well by Mses. Harring and Watts.
** By extension one might take the dark Hollywood critique as a metaphor for the basic dishonesty of the American Dream. The patriarchal, capitalistic, commodified, heteronormal model that’s American culture sells us an illusory bill of goods (advertising industry, anyone?), not that different from the Hollywood Dream sold by the forces that make the movies.
Interesting here the connection to film noir. The noir pedigree – doomed protagonists, duplicitous femmes fatales, decaying cities, corrupt rich, downbeat endings – that David Lynch draws upon in many of his films and especially Mulholland Dr. might well be seen as the original template for the cinematic critique of the American Dream.
