“Silencio…”
Time for another David Lynch outing—one sometimes touted as his quintessential piece. I don’t necessarily agree, but what I do agree with is that it’s all kinds of memorable—without further ado, here’s my take on Mulholland Drive.
The film’s creation is almost a fascinating thing to discuss as the end product itself—conceived as a TV show, with its ideas then kludged together to form something that’s almost like a series of vignettes. Considering the disparate style we end up with, it’s probably not the best to go in expecting a perfectly tight production—but if that’s what you want from Lynch, you’re probably going the wrong way anyway.
Our main plot—more or less—concerns a woman called Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who ends up stumbling as an amnesiac into an apartment following a car accident. She soon ends up trying to learn the truth of her identity with a budding actress living there called Betty (Naomi Watts), who initially is played with all the bubbliness of a lead stumbling out of a 1950s sitcom. Between all this, we also have the somewhat loosely connected escapades of a young film director Kesher (Justin Theroux) ending up on the wrong side of the literal Mafia running his corner of Hollywood, with incompetent hitmen and occasional fever-dreaming cops in the mix too.
My favorite moments are probably those shots of the city streets at night, such as the opening, capturing that slightly surreal air you get of urban illumination blurring together in the night—it’s something I’ve also liked in things like Taxi Driver. Lynch being Lynch, there’s a dreamlike feel to them too—one that really goes into overdrive later in the film. In fact, a lot of the seemingly disconnected minor moments and characters all come together—in only a certain way, mind you, so you’ll still be rewarded for paying some attention.
Things are fairly standard for a lot of the runtime—you have a theme of what seems to be Lynch taking a bleakly satirical look at the upper echelons of the film industry, with that deadpan comedy extending into botched assassinations and Kesher literally grappling with his love life. Rita and Betty trying to uncover the mystery behind the car accident, and what that leads to, provides the main hook—but once they stumble into a surrealist theater, that’s when all bets come off.
It’s that moment that completely turns things, sort of like that one scene in Blue Velvet. From there, convention and sense is discarded—what the resolution has to be, with its jilted lovers and shall we say very overt sexual overtones, is going to have to be down to your judgement. Identities become something malleable, dementia ensues—nonsensical some might find it, but for the memorability of its imagery, I sure find it fun. Some might call Lynch pseudointellectual (though for a real example of that, I could think of a couple of Warhol films myself), but I’m fine with ambiguity and some indulgence provided there’s something to actually watch—and whatever you make of Mulholland Drive, you certainly won’t be forgetting it.
For me, I still prefer Blue Velvet, which rides that line between convention and surrealism much finer, even if it was by the smoother circumstance in which it was made. But as I’ve said before, if you have to release the id, do it all the way, and I’ll still respect that at least regardless of result—and with what he was given, Lynch did that for sure at least. Give it a watch, and take the plunge…
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