Mulholland Drive's Artistic Agenda Is Completely at Odds with the Current Public Mood?ro;”Go See It; Resfest this Weekend at the New School
Directed by David Lynch
A young, sexy woman (Laura Elena Harring) is being held hostage inside a limousine by her gangster lover's henchmen and being driven up into the Hollywood hills. Then a car full of joyriding idiot teenagers rams into the limo. The only survivor is the gangster's girlfriend, who loses her memory in the crash. She drifts away from the wreckage and very slowly stumbles back down into the city. With that foggy, dislocated look on her face, it seems she's trying to remember her way back home and failing. Or maybe she's just sleepwalking.
That's the first brief section of Mulholland Drive, the latest from writer-director David Lynch, whose work often makes you feel like you're sleepwalking through another person's dream. Any summary of the film's "story" makes it sound like an awful lot happens, and on paper, I guess it does. But you pretty much have to put quotes around the word "story," because that's what Lynch does throughout Mulholland Drive.
As the film's two-plus-hours unreel, we meet the usual assortment of Lynch types?deadpan oddballs, self-aware basket cases and cryptic human embodiments of evil. There's the gangster's moll, who finds her way into a rented Hollywood bungalow, spies a poster for Gilda hanging on the wall and decides to call herself "Rita," after Rita Hayworth. At the same time, an improbably clean-scrubbed, perky, naive ingenue named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) gets off a plane at LAX in a pink cardigan, yammering with a spry elderly couple she met on the flight. (By the end of the movie, this couple will appear in Betty's dreams as cackling, evil gnomes.) Betty has come to Hollywood to make it as an actress; she just happens to have rented the bungalow where the amnesiac Rita decided to hole up?a bungalow owned by her aunt, Ann Miller. The two become best buddies, and Betty perkily agrees to help her investigate the mystery of who she is and who, if anyone, is trying to kill her.
Meanwhile, seemingly related storylines lurch forward, stop, disappear for a while and reappear completely transformed. A film director (Justin Theroux), whose film is backed by the same gangsters Rita is running from, learns that if his main gangster backer doesn't get to pick the film's female lead, the director won't be able to make the picture, and might even get whacked. The main threat to the director is a creepy cowboy?sort of a dreamtime stalker figure, like Robert Blake's character in Lost Highway or Bob in Twin Peaks. He meets the director during a moonlit visit to a ranch, and warns him that if he has to visit the director a second time, adios. This fairytale trope is never satisfyingly resolved?perhaps because it's scarier if we can't be sure why Lynch showed it to us in the first place.
Broadway and classic Hollywood survivor Ann Miller is introduced playing a certain character, then denies being that character. Robert Forster shows up early in the movie as a cop investigating the accident, then pretty much disappears. The young women's spunky friendship gives way to an affair?or does it? By the final third, we're encouraged to wonder if the Rita-Betty lesbian romance was happening all along, and nobody told us. Subsequent scenes suggest a longstanding relationship between Betty and the young director, and place both women on the set of the film he's directing. We wonder if the first part of the movie didn't really happen. Perhaps it depicted the jealous, irrational fantasies of Betty?a young woman who came to Hollywood full of hopeful dreams, then was transformed by showbiz into a kind of prostitute, a hollow vessel into which fictional characters (and manipulative lovers' fluids) could be poured.
It's too easy to say that the movie is a vicious, autobiographical satire about what Hollywood does to artists (and to Americans generally). Lynch's obsessions have always run deeper than that. It's also too easy to say that Mullholland Drive feels elliptical, confusing and incomplete because it's a shelved pilot for an ABC series, finished with reshoot money from French investors. Remember this: Lynch's 1992 Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me was essentially a glorified pilot-after-the-fact; it's about the same length as Mullholland Drive, it eases along at a similarly droning pace and it cuts scenes short (or extends them) for inexplicable reasons.
Therefore, we must consider the possibility that Mullholland Drive is what it is not because it's the first chapter in an aborted drama series, but because it's the movie Lynch wanted to make all along (even though he didn't realize it before the reshoots). Every movie Lynch made before Twin Peaks was weird indeed. Yet every one of those films respected the linear narrative?sticking, for the most part, to a central storyline, but interrupting it with dream sequences or bits of surreal, disturbing imagery. Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune and Blue Velvet all followed this template.
Twin Peaks went further. It was a watershed work in Lynch's development, and the beginning of the end of his accessibility as a pop artist?a mix of soap opera, glossy 50s melodrama, drive-in horror film and Greek tragedy that sent up tv gimmicks even as it reveled in them. His followup, 1990's Wild at Heart, was a loud, trashy bit of self-parody that was hailed in France as genius, but did not perform to the media's box office expectations because nonhipsters found it too random, ugly and violent.
With the 1992 theatrical film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch started picking away at the narrative foundation of commercial movies, seeming to start one film, then abandoning it for another, then settling on another, which was interrupted by what felt like bits of other movies. The ending, a horrifyingly graphic account of Laura's final moments, climaxing with a touchingly literal, childish portrait of her soul's ascent to the afterlife, was the most daring finale in a major American movie since?well, Blue Velvet. His next major film, 1997's Lost Highway, took the experimentation further, drawing on La Jetee, Seconds and other mind-scrambling movies that treat narrative as a Mobius strip. Structurally, 1999's The Straight Story was the most conservative Lynch film to date?but Mullholland Drive suggests it was not a change in direction, but a momentary pitstop.
No wonder mass audiences avoid Lynch these days; American moviegoers have never been fond of movies that undermine the foundations of the stories they consume. (If anybody could do a worthy film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, it's Lynch.) Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive feel like panels in a triptych, or maybe descending levels on a footpath to narrative hell. Every 15 minutes or so, you feel as though Mullholland Drive has become a different film featuring the same actors. This raises several scary possibilities: (1) Nothing that occurred before the latest change in the narrative means anything, because narrative is just an abstract concept, like mathematics?a concept that helps us understand the world, but is so fragile that it can be manipulated to prove any point, and destroy any sense of order it helped create. (2) Perhaps waking life is a dream, and the dreamer can't wake up.
All of which means Mullholland Drive is more poorly timed than any Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis action flick. Its artistic agenda is completely at odds with the current public mood, which urges Americans to embrace traditions, institutions and comforting bits of received wisdom. Please see it.
Framed
In the Rough: Diamond Men, an indie character drama from writer-director Dan Cohen, got lost in the chaos of the last few weeks, and it's so likable that I regret not writing about it sooner. Outwardly a May-September buddy flick about a 60ish diamond salesman named Eddie Miller (Robert Forster) and his somewhat callow twentysomething protege Bobby Walker (Donnie Wahlberg of Band of Brothers), the film actually digs a lot deeper into friendship, mentoring and manhood than its synopsis might suggest. It's very good, but Forster is great. Criminally underused in Mulholland Drive, and insufficiently recognized by the press for his heartbreaking performance in Lakeboat earlier this year, this tender-voiced actor is establishing himself not just as one of America's best character men, but as one of its most valuable players, period.
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Pixel Vision: Resfest, the latest in the ongoing series of video/film festivals, runs Oct. 10-14 at Tishman Auditorium. Many independent moviemakers in the area have doubtless kept the event marked on their calendars for some time, since it prides itself on giving useful technical and industry advice in plain language. But Resfest isn't just for digital wonks; the issues raised in short film compilations and on the scheduled panels have potentially important ramifications for the future of stories told in pictures. Other stuff is just plain cool: in the presentation "From Psycho to Bullitt: Film Titles of the 60s," David Peters, cofounder of designfilms.org, will examine striking title sequences from that era, including work by the great Saul Bass.
Resfest, Oct. 11-14 at the Tishman Auditorium at the New School, 66 W. 12th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.); call 777-8056 x2 or visit www. resfest.com for ticket and schedule information.