Flak Magazine: Review of Mulholland Drive, 10.19.01

The knotted stretch of L.A. road that gives David Lynch's Mulholland Drive its title has plenty of baggage all by itself. But when dealing with Lynch, the baggage inside the baggage (wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma) is fair game, which gives us occasion to look at the namesake of the road itself.

The idea of L.A.-as-paradise is totally out of sync with the fact that it's in the middle of the Mojave Desert; it was William Mulholland, as Chief Engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who built the aqueducts that turned a parched ghost town into an oasis straight out of a cartoon. And what city deserves that origin more than Hollywood, which similarly promises to take fantasies and makes them more real than they could otherwise ever be?

But you can't tell Mulholland's story without its third-act climax, in which one of his dams collapses, crushing 500 people with the 12 billion gallons of water it held. That fall is as essentially Hollywood as the ascent; from heaven to hell on a road paved with broken dreams.

That's the story that Lynch tells, to devastating effect, in Mulholland Drive; it's one of the greatest movies about Hollywood ever made. It can be broken into two chunks: the part that ABC rejected as a pilot, which is narratively straightforward but apparently too strange for TV, and the footage Lynch later shot to make the movie feature-length. It's this additional material that really gives the movie its majesty; the way it segues from, comments on and, in some ways, reinterprets the action of the intended pilot is such genius that you can hardly imagine it unfolding any other way.

Betty (Naomi Watts), freshly arrived from a small town in Canada, goes to her aunt's abandoned Hollywood apartment to turn it into the base of operations from which to orchestrate her break into acting; she's surprised to enter the bathroom and find Rita (Laura Harring), an amnesiac who has just stumbled away from a potentially fatal (in more ways than one) car accident. Betty resolves to help Rita regain her memory while she tries to prepare adequately for her big audition. Meanwhile, Adam Kersher (Justin Theroux) is a director avec a film in pre-production but sans a leading lady, and the mysterious cabal that controls the studio, if not all of Hollywood (and, incidentally, is after Rita), insists that he cast a particular unknown actress in the part.

Movie reviewers are falling over themselves trying to find new ways to describe how incomprehensible and eternally impenetrable Mulholland Drive is; this is itself a mystery. Perhaps they were distracted by the film's bizarre, undeniable beauty from the many well-lit signposts Lynch includes along the way; there are so many, in fact, that you may feel Lynch almost gives too much closure. The film has an internal logic that is reasonably easy to grasp — reasonably easy considering that this is the man who made Eraserhead, or Lost Highway, which, Lynch just revealed to Salon's Andy Klein, is about O.J. Simpson — and, if it lacks a certain rigorous causality, it definitely has a solid enough motific structure that nothing really seems like it's totally out of the blue. Meaning that when shots or actors or objects from early in the film start to repeat themselves at the end of the film with slight differences, you can faintly glimpse the connective tissue stretching from one to the other.

Lynch works so hard to give you that faint, and often not-so-faint, glimpse. His famous surreal abandon has given way to, well, surreal structure, not to mention incredibly intuitive storytelling. He actually tells the story with the camera — as opposed to the popular substitute of telling the story in front of the camera — allowing images and dialogue to pile up without ever leaving you feeling adrift in a sea of abstraction. The anchors are the performances, which, to a person, crackle. Watts, in particular, is stunning; over the course of the movie, Lynch demands greater and greater depth from her, and her great trick is fooling you into thinking she doesn't have it in her.

Adding to the movie's density of images are almost casual references to other art: Lynch turns his actresses' sleeping faces into a stunning Picassoid form; that great Hitchcockian signifier, the blond wig, puts in an appearance. But the coup de grace is Lynch's realization of "The Treachery of Images," Rene Magritte's simple painting of a pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" — "This is not a pipe" (because it's a painting of a pipe). His takes place when Betty and Rita visit a performance space called Silencio, where music plays while the emcee emphatically reminds the onlookers "No hay banda" — "There is no band." It's a lugubrious scene that manages to surprise you with Rebekah del Rio's performance (of Roy Orbison's "Crying," in Spanish) even though you know that you know what's coming; perhaps the best example of the fact that Lynch wants his audience to "get" the movie is that he spends so much time letting this scene unfold, letting the audience soak in it. Because it's here that the dam breaks. There is no band, there is no oasis in the desert — now, says Lynch, let me show you what there is.

The rest of the movie is spent in the toxic haze exhausted from the smokestacks of the Dream Factory. Lynch is savage in his handling of the idea of Hollywood as a land of infinite opportunity to which young, passionate types can flock to find success and fulfillment; as his twisty, amusing mystery gives way into a tidal wave of pathos and rage, his indictment becomes very clear. The treachery of image-centered culture, of our deep-seated, though often-denied, belief that our lives really would be better if they were like the people on TV (and whether that refers to the actors or their characters hardly matters) is, to Lynch, very treacherous indeed, and with that brush he paints disparaging pictures of ambition, friendship, romantic love, even intimacy, as byproducts of our unhealthy fixation of Hollywood dreams. He combats these constructs with his own treacherous images; often his very compositions are frightening, and the dread they conspire to make can be suffocating — he neither pulls his punches nor suggests a light at the end of the multiplex. There is no band, no dam, no sun-dappled paradise. His Hollywood is a town haunted by the ghost of the wasteland it displaced, of the desert it's supposed to be.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)