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Of all the American filmmakers who've arrived on the scene after the mid-nineteen-seventies, David Lynch is the one whose work has been the most consistently surprising and exciting over the years. Some of his movies are household names in independent film - Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me are as familiar to competent cineastes as The Beatles, Coca-Cola, or NBC are to the average American. On the other end of the spectrum are his commercial successes: the first season of Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man, and to some degree The Straight Story, and if Dune was a flop (it has since found a niche audience, as has the initially coldly received Fire Walk With Me), it at least proved what a trooper he was: he made one of the most expensive pictures ever, watched it bomb, and two years later made one of the key American films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet. My favorite is still his 1997 post-Twin-Peaks-backlash neo-s.f.-noir-mindfuck Lost Highway, and although I enjoy most of the items in his catalog, I feel safe in saying that Mulholland Dr. is his most purely entertaining film to date, featuring his most assured amalgam of bizarre comedy and haunting otherworldliness. It also happens to be one of his best-looking movies - cinematographer Peter Deming's thrilling tonal compositions are, in and of themselves, a series of quietly accumulating joys, and production designer Jack Fisk, who has worked with Lynch as far back as 1966, plays no small part in achieving the director's unique and stunning vision of Los Angeles and the realm of dreams.
Lynch may be implying that there is no distinction between the two, between L.A. and our dream states. ("City of dreams" becomes more than L.A.'s recognized metropolitan moniker, it becomes a metaphorical subtext.) Mulholland Dr. is a surreal ode to Hollywood in all its primal vulgarity and unrelenting naïveté - polar and dialectical opposites are vividly sketched and colored, as we expect from the man behind Blue Velvet, and his use of emblems and archetypes accentuates, rather than simplifies, the chaos underneath. They are Lynch's icons, but also American pop culture's, Hitchcock's, Wilder's, Bergman's, Polanski's, Mankiewicz's, Rivette's, and so on. The film is much more than a mere pastiche of facile references and homages, however - Lynch is there, with us, in every scene and shot, part magician, part tour guide, and part proud father.
His patent iconography shows up right away: in one of the first scenes, the actress Naomi Watts (as Betty) projects such blind hopefulness and blissful ignorance upon touching down at LAX that her angelic, smiling mouth seems to know it's already in a movie. There is, of course, trouble waiting around the corner, which brings us to a textually isolated (or is it?) scene in which a nameless young man talks about his recurring nightmare to a friend at a franchise diner. The dream involves a dark-looking man-creature who hides behind the restaurant, so his friend goes with him to confront his fears. Unfortunately, his fears (in the form of the man-creature, looking like Darth Maul posing as a bag lady) confront him, first, and instead of jumping and saying "Woh!" and running away, the young man jumps, says "Woh!" and dies on the spot.
The film proper contains two parallel plot threads, one involving a car crash victim who can't remember her name and befriends Betty (she says her name is Rita, from a poster of Gilda in the apartment), and enlists the neophyte actress in seeking her lost identity. The other strand follows maverick movie director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) as he struggles to maintain control over his latest studio hack job - when he refuses to accept "suggestions" from the money-men as to who should be cast as the lead actress (expect "This is the girl" to be the it mantra of FY 2002), his life turns to shit, shit including his wife kicking him out of the house after he catches her in bed with the pool boy. (In line with Lynch's tradition of casting musicians in major or minor supporting parts, the pool boy is none other than country musician Billy Ray Cyrus). Like any film about filmmaking or the Dream Factory, Mulholland Dr. undoubtedly contains autobiographical references - that Kesher is a somewhat likable underdog character is probably no coincidence, and when Kesher sells out to The Man (or, in this case, The Cowboy), it's also no coincidence that, soon after, things start to take a turn for the strange and the terrifying.
I'm referring to the film's last reels, its nightmarish, hallucinatory third act, which is being talked about in somewhat the same manner as the famous/notorious third act of Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or at least the bizarre ending of Luis Buñuel's Simon of the Desert, or the entirety of Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating - the last leg of Dr. is so outlandish that it's draining every movie critic's supply of synonyms for "strange" and "mindfuck," and yet is formed organically from the material before it. In the audience we feel like we're watching the pilot episode of a long television series (which we are, if you study the history of this project), and then the season finale, skipping over all the reversals and reworkings from mid-season. The bender is likely to infuriate as many audience members as it will delight - where you stand will have a great deal to do with your open-mindedness and understanding of dream narratives.
In other words, if you expect the cinema to be used only to tell stories within literary or theatrical conventions, and if you dislike what you can't explain on a rational level, I can't promise you'll leave the theater happy. Ever the happy defeatist, New Yorker critic Anthony Lane pays Lynch a compliment before slapping him down: "He is becoming a mirror-image Hitchcock; both men are fetishists, but, whereas Hitch, cleaving to the path of the plot, litters his favored trinkets like clues along the way, Lynch is increasingly willing to stretch and wrench his narratives for the sole purpose of accommodating his objects of desire..." Lynch quotes Hitchcock less often than De Palma but more often than Trier (Zentropa) and Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley), but unlike those directors, he builds on the foundations laid by Hitchcock in his 1950s and early '60s movies, rather than stealing from them. It may be that Lane confused simplicity with simple-mindedness - in the same article, he all but accuses Lynch of being a pervert, which is probably untrue but is certainly irrelevant. Lynch's "objects of desire" aren't unfamiliar to us (two topless women in their mid-twenties, how ribald!), nor are his objects of fear, loathing, and abnormality. That's the basis of Lynch moviemaking - the familiar is made strange, and vice verse - and he keeps us on our toes. To accuse Lynch of cinematic self-gratification would be a criminal denial of his irreproachable conviction and technical skill. It would be like dismissing Persona if it contained a steamy love scene.
Which brings us to the steamy love scene between Betty and Rita (their relationship echoes Persona and Céline and Julie) - to which it's impossible not to respond in some way, be it repulsion or arousal. The scene contains nudity, whereas strong movie eroticism is for the most part linked to suggestion (nudity usually spoils the tease). This is why some of the sexiest movies were made, paradoxically, in the 1950s, precisely the era that the PC-drunk media and overprotective government would for different reasons like movies to return to. The joke is, American movies from that time frame, and before, are looked back on as "safe" because they contained minimal violence, no curse words, and no nudity, while they were actually "dangerous" in that they used the Hays Code restrictions as a means to subversion (it was seen as a challenge, a gatekeeper to outwit), precisely the way Lynch uses the cover of darkness - the most lucid darkness imaginable, incidentally; it's like black glass - for a love scene that would've seemed quite a bit more scandalous under thirty or so halogen lamps. The simple truth is, movies will only be dangerous as long as powerful old men in our government yearn for the purity of years long since past, and anyway, taboos make tantalizing barriers to cross.
Lynch's surrealism and dream realism is bold and progressive where Hitch used those sequences and techniques sparingly (but consistently) - he doesn't quite owe a debt to the Vertigo director so much as he answers a challenge, pushing movies past borders and arbitrary rules. Lynch plays the audience like a piano, too - the love scene between Betty and Rita carries an undiluted erotic charge that's welcome in these days of prudish studio think-tanks and directors all too willing to accommodate a PG-13 rating. It's also no coincidence that Kesher's movie is a thick chunk of '50s nostalgia - the banality of which both underscores Mulholland's unconventionality and illustrates Hollywood's reactionary tendencies, tendencies that predicate cultural self-loathing and mediocrity, tendencies that critics like Lane are all too willing to support. Lynch's movies, and Mulholland is no exception, push for audience responses in unorthodox and unpredictable ways, often challenging viewers to access the parts of their brains that they're not accustomed to using during waking hours. We should be so lucky.
Jaime N. Christley
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