love-letter
to Los Angeles, one part failed TV pilot, and one part meditation on the uses
of narrative--and for the word "meditation" you can probably also
use the phrase "chainsaw attack."I really, really liked this David Lynch film but am at a loss as where to start
on it; it's a David Lynch movie that is one part love-letter
to Los Angeles, one part failed TV pilot, and one part meditation on the uses
of narrative--and for the word "meditation" you can probably also
use the phrase "chainsaw attack."
The story (as opposed to the movie) starts with a mysterious brunette (Laura Harring) in a limo saved from being murdered by a freak accident. She stumbles off Mulholland Drive into the darkness of L.A. and ends up hiding in the apartment of a woman leaving on a trip. Then we're at the airport where aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) arrives, wide-eyed and glowy, ready to pursue her dreams. She's staying at her aunt's apartment while the aunt is away on a movie shoot--and here she encounters the mysterious brunette, now calling herself Rita, who has lost all memory of who she was and what happened to her. Naive nice girl Betty decides to help her solve the mystery of who she is. "It'll be like the movies!" She squeals.
Meanwhile, this reasonably straightforward storyline is interspersed with a few random L.A.-based anecdotes, one of which congeals into another storyline--that of young director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) who refuses to cast the female lead his mysterious moneymen want and soon finds his life in a peril that seems almost as absurd and unreal as it does dangerous (one of my favorite scenes in the movie has Kesher meeting a mysterious man named "The Cowboy" at a corral at midnight. As is typical with Lynch, he manages to make The Cowboy seem like nothing less than the embodiment of Death itself by taking a rather sweet-looking guy with a soft tenor and dressing him in white linen and giving him lines like "If you do the right thing, you'll only see once more. But if you do the wrong thing, you'll see me twice.").
Although very digressive, it's all more or less straightforward weirdness, Blue Velvety, I guess, before things take a left turn (at the Isle of Sappho) into Lost Highwayville by utterly derailing and reinventing the narrative. And here is where I actually started really liking things a lot. Unlike in Lost Highway, I felt that Lynch was trying to be very clear as to the reasons of his narrative-derailment, giving the audience a little manifesto (when Betty and Rita attend a performance at a club called Silenzio, after the name is spoken in Rita's sleep), before taking his storyline apart and reconstructing it. In fact, Lynch does such a masterful job of re-assembly, it actually looks like at several points that the new storyline, with Betty and Rita now having new names and a completely new relationship to each other, will tie in with the old before Lynch gleefully takes the chainsaw to that as well.
Perhaps
one way to understand it is to point out that everyone calls the film "Mulholland
Drive" but the name on the poster is "Mulholland Dr." Lynch likes
mystery and ambiguity of the incompleteness, and proceeds to pimp-slap anyone
who tries to perform the story equivalent of adding the 'I-V-E' on the end.
More than any other movie that I can see of his, Lynch seems to be explicitly
pointing out that his derailment of narrative is a conscious choice, serving
conscious ends, and is not simply being coy or flakey. (Similarly, I felt his
scene where Betty auditions for a part with Chad Everett quite specifically
addresses other criticisms of Lynch--despite what some critics may say, he knows
good acting when he sees it, and the performances that he gets from his performers
are very specifically the performances that he wants). Walking out of Mulholland
Dr., I felt like Lynch had managed to constructive a non-narrative conclusion
that not only satisfyingly wrapped up the movie for me, it also managed to satisfyingly
wrap up Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway as well. Combined with
Lynch playing with his own private archetype of good blonde/bad brunette, Mulholland
Dr. feels to me almost like a mini-manifesto from Mr. Lynch. Oh, and it's also
got some of the best acting I think I've seen in a Lynch movie--Naomi Watts,
in particular, is utterly awesome, and I think has something very close to a
huge, huge career in front of her.
Mulholland Dr. isn't for everyone--in fact, I would say, based on the reactions of people in the audience and most friends and acquaintances who saw the movie, that it may be for nearly no one. So take this with a grain of salt and consider the source--I admit that I didn't see a lot of movies in 2001 but Mulholland Dr. felt like the movie of the year to me.
All written material on these pages is © 2002 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.