Hollywood Babylon
David Lynch loves sequences. Like a painter, he constructs
tableaus, situations, free-floating moments. Watching a David Lynch movie requires
a surrender to the power of nonsensical events like, oh, backwards-talking dancing
midgets. Perhaps more than any modern director, Lynch plugs into the idea
of cinema in its original undiluted form: a collection of images and sounds that
evokes pure emotional response.
Mulholland Drive arrives at a propitious
time. Audiences have grown accustomed to spoon-fed narratives, the certainty of
A-to-B conclusions, spin-control moviemaking. Like a precise jolt of caffeine,
Mulholland Drive aims for the head even as it assaults the nervous system.
More than any of his other works, the film maintains a consistent atmosphere of
dread. The audience is invited, nay required to slip into this reverie.
In the process, we get a "greatest hits" potporri of every motif Lynch
has pitched in the last two decades: the fixation on blood red and midnight blue;
the rumbling ambient soundtrack (Angelo Badalamenti, voluptuous as always); the
seamless intercourse between cherry-pie Americana and darker impulses; identity
switches that gleefully run straight narrative off the rails; the implication
that something nameless and supernatural is at work. And that's not even mentioning
the myriad references to Hitchcock, Bunuel, and Bergman.
Some
will charge that Lynch is merely recycling himself, has nothing new to say; how
easily they forget that Hitchcock, another director who had to endure scoffing
critics in his day, remade The Thirty-Nine Steps at least twice in his
career (Saboteur, North by Northwest). As any chef knows, it's not
the ingredients, it's what you do with them. Mulholland Drive's pleasurable
trick is that like a silky femme fatale, it lures you under a security blanket
of familiarity before ripping it (and the rug) away from us. All the genre elements
are lovingly fitted into place: a backdrop of scheming Hollywood moguls and shadowy
conspiracies; a car crash that jumpstarts the action; a slinky brunette amnesiac
(Laura Elena Harring) who lifts her name "Rita" from a Gilda
poster; a bemused young director (Justin Theroux) whose film is being shanghaied
by those very same studio thugs; a mysterious black book with "the history
of the world in phone numbers"; a blue key that may or may not open a blue
box; and a blonde, perky ingenue named Betty (Naomi Watts) whose personality is
cut straight from the cardboard corners of a 50s cereal box. Everyone loves a
good mystery, and for most of the film's length, Lynch takes advantage of the
audience's curiosity, the primal desire to find the answers behind these disparate
threads.
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For those who just dig answers, not to worry: the central
question of Rita's identity is solved, along with many, if not all, of the other
conundrums. Twisty and withholding the narrative may be, but pay no heed to those
who claim that there is no there there. Like the man behind the curtain,
Lynch leaves enough signposts to render explanations possible, if by no means
conclusive. But pity those who strain their utmost to string all the pieces together,
because as a simple mystery story, Mulholland Drive is a failure. Characters
make token appearances and disappear forever; plot threads trail into nothing.
Actually, there is a real-world solution. Mulholland Drive was originally
produced as a TV pilot that was rejected by ABC and then resurrected as a feature-length
movie. It's easy to pinpoint what was and is not the pilot -- the camerwork gets
all buggy and mobile, for one thing. Name actors like Robert Forster and Dan Hedaya
show up for glowering cameos, then disappear completely. If the show was picked
up, there's no doubt that they (and some of the other subplots) would have reappeared,
then been elaborated on. But, ah, there we go again -- looking for explanations.
The reason we stick with the film is the sequences -- and what a collection
Lynch has fashioned this time around. Take, for example, a pivotal audition scene
in which heretofore bubbly, Nancy-Drewish Betty (Watts gives hands-down the performance
of the year) inexplicably and wonderfully knocks a lecherous co-star (and us)
flat with a panting, sensuous take. Where does this virtuoso display of acting
come from? How does this tie into the plot machinations? In the immortal words
of the beer commercial, why ask why?
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Similarly, why try to explain the blue box that sends
Betty and her friend/lover Rita into an alternate reality (or is it?) in which
Betty is a failed movie actress named Diane and Rita is her callous lover Camilla?
Or the nameless creature behind a Denny's-like diner, waiting to torment the man
who saw him in his nightmare? Or the haunting midnight showdown between director
Adam (Theroux) and an underworld figure known as "the Cowboy" (showstopping
Monty Montgomery), who threatens the former's livelihood in the politest down-home
tones imaginable? Not to mention an assassination which goes awry when a hitman's
stray bullet hits the butt of an overweight woman next door? Or an after-hours
night club in which a singer lip-synchs a heartrending Spanish version of Roy
Orbison's "Crying" before collapsing in mid-song? And oh yes, that's
Michael J. Anderson as the oversized dwarf in the wheelchair, natch.
But
even sifting through specific passages misses the point. Like Hitchcock, Lynch
uses genre convention as his way at getting at unsettling emotional states, but
while Hitchcock dallies in sexual perversity, Lynch sallies forth into dream-state
hallucinations and more inchoate yearnings. The closest analogue in Hitch's ouevre
would be Vertigo, which also switches gears in mid-stream to devastating
effect. Like that movie, Mulholland Drive expertly fashions a hypnotic
alternate world in which every individual sequence adds to the aura of dread and
portent, minus much of the overplayed "weirdness for weirdness' sake"
that mars many of Lynch's other productions. The Hollywood milieu supports and
focuses his style; the town's dreamlike qualities are a perfect vehicle for his
finicky obsessions, and like the rest of us, he's seduced by old school glamour.
Even a stunning lesbian love scene is played in near-darkness, preferring to linger
on breathless declarations of love rather than rote shots of tits and ass. Anchoring
it all is Watts, her character deepening as she rises above the noise of the other
subplots, and then taking over the film entirely as she metamorphosizes into a
raw bundle of frustration, jealousy, and crushing hopelessness -- the archetypal
Hollywood victim as dreamer.
Like a particularly moving piece of classical music composition, there is no why
or whither in Mulholland Drive. There is only the cumulative effect,
and as we follow Watts from day to night, from cereal box homilies to forlorn
masturbation, we remember why we love film noirs so much: they lead us by the
hand from the mundane to open-ended, darker places. Too sincere to simply be a
mind fuck, too twisted to pose as a "prestige" film, too operatic to
masquerade as art house cool, Mulholland Drive, for all its seeming impenetrability,
is as crystal-clear as head (and heart) trips get.
