Mulholland Drive (2001)

I'm afraid of David Lynch movies.

Probably because they so closely resemble my nightmares. In fact, I even have this recurring dream where I'm trapped in a David Lynch film. In my dream, I'm eating waffles at this retro diner with Quentin Tarantino and Virginia Woolf. As I butter my waffles, Tarantino rants about Elizabeth Taylor movies while Virginia does this stream of consciousness thing about maple syrup and suicide. While I wonder if slitting Tarantino's throat with the butter knife would make him shut up, I look over my shoulder to see David Lynch, eerily moving closer towards us with a giant movie camera. I think Roy Orbison is even playing somewhere in the backround.

I really hate that dream.

If Virginia Woolf (mother of stream-of-consciousness narratives) and Douglas Sirk (father of big budget, emotionally-oversaturated 1950s romances) had a child, I'm certain that child would be David Lynch. I'm also certain that if screenwriters mated The Twilight Zone with Peyton Place, the cinematic offspring from that coupling would be Mulholland Drive.

Lynch got his start in television, and originally intended Mulholland Drive to be a pilot episode. That probably explains why the film feels so "small screen." The lighting, camera techniques, and filming angles all make it register like a TV soap opera. However, Mulholland Drive is also a pastiche of 1940s film noir and 1950s "malt shop" culture, resulting in a mix of darkness and levity you won't find in Days of Our Lives.

Describing Mulholland Drive is difficult, since nobody seems to know what it's about except Lynch, and he's not telling. Basically, it’s a story about a young, idealistic woman named Betty (Naomi Watts) who moves to Hollywood to become an actress. There, she meets Rita (Laura Elena Harring), an amnesiac with no memory, a purse filled with money, and several hitmen after her. While Betty helps Rita uncover the secrets of her past, we see a simultaneously developing story about Adam (Justin Theroux), a struggling director whose production is being sabotaged by a strange, sinister group of characters who pull the executive strings in Hollywood. At the same time, the film incorporates seemingly unconnected “vignettes” or short stories such as the infamous “diner scene" (which made it into Bravo's "100 Scariest Scenes of All Time").

As the film develops, Betty and Rita fall in love. However, their developing romance and the mystery of Rita’s identity suddenly disappears and Betty becomes Dianne Selwyn, a failing actress who has been jilted by her lover Camilla Rhodes, a big movie star now engaged to Adam, a successful director. Furious at being rejected, Dianne hires a hitman to kill Camilla. However, once the deed is done, she is haunted visions of a maniacal elderly couple (most likely projections of her own guilt) who drive her to suicide.

I read several reviews of the film, and I tended to agree with the ones that argued that though the film is complex, it does tell a unified and comprehensible narrative. To me, the Betty-Rita scenario is a fantasy. It’s Dianne’s vision of a happier life, a life built on images of Hollywood glamour and mystery. She casts herself as Betty, the idealistic young actress on the verge of stardom and Camilla as Rita, a damsel-in-distress she can heroically rescue. In this re-imagining, her experiences promise to achieve glamour, mystery, excitement, and above all, a happy ending.

So, despite its unconventional storytelling and bizarre moments, Mulholland Drive is a fairly straightforward film about the illusory nature of life and movies. It reminded me of Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard, another “poisonous little valentine to Hollywood.” Like Wilder, Lynch concerns himself with the “putrefaction” of human beings living under the mythic burden of Hollywood. In Mulholland Drive, he establishes this underlying tension that seems to reference some darkness or perversity. This force is never allowed to fully manifest itself in the film. It never becomes, in other words, a horror movie. The force is simply there, capable of being glimpsed at times in the most bizarre moments of the film. As a result, Mulholland Drive reads like a sublimated Gothic fantasy, one in which Freudian drives lurk beneath a pastiche of 1940s Hollywood glamour and 1950s modernism.

The result is hyperreal, to say the least.

Dianne imagines herself as "Betty," a character who can rescue her fantasy projection of Camilla.

The dark, mysterious evil in Mulholland Drive never fully manifests itself

Laura Harring's amnesiac character takes the alias "Rita" after glimpsing a movie poster of actress Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946). Many critics believe that Gilda is a film about a woman who comes between the homosexual relationship between two men. This is analogous to Dianne's relationship with Camilla which is "violated" by Adam in Mulholland Drive.

Conclusion: I give Mulholland Drive three out of four stars. Content-wise, I would certainly not recommend this movie. But from a cinematic or philosophical perspective, it's a fascinating commentary on loneliness and despair in a Hollywood culture.