Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller
USA, 2001
Originally conceived as a TV series before ABC was scared away by the pilot, the resulting film is split up into two distinct parts. During the first, Lynch ambles through a supernatural Hollywood, his goals unclear to the audience. As in television, there’s a myriad of characters and cameos, but Lynch makes the mistake of straying for too long from the lead actresses – Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring – in favor of the indulgent satire of Adam Kesher, a bratty director played by Justin Theroux. The street Mulholland Drive seems modeled after the Sunset Boulevard of the Billy Wilder movie; it’s full of ghosts and shadows and murders. Ann Miller, fresh off an E! True Hollywood Story appearance, is like a glorious apparition, a dazzling woman still stuck in the image she made for herself in the MGM musicals. I find her on-screen persona from the ‘40s and ‘50s to be uniquely snotty and threatening, and she fits perfectly as Lynch’s modern-day Gloria Swanson. Her costume is black and weedy and about ready to choke her neck. She’s in on the joke and pervades it with an eerie humor.
The dynamic female duo at the center of Mulholland Drive is Persona’s Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman all over again; the mysterious amnesiac (Harring) who names herself Rita (after Hayworth in Gilda) is quiet and timid while Betty (Watts), the care-free, careless blonde, is talkative and takes matters into her own hands. In one of the first few scenes, Rita is held at gunpoint by her driver just as another car comes and slams into her limo. Harring hobbles out of the car the way Lucille Ball would, and makes her way down a hill to the intoxicating lights of the city, and into an empty bungalow to take a shower. Betty, an aspiring actress who has come to stay in her aunt’s house for the summer, finds Rita naked and vows to help her find her lost identity. The film’s first act is full of false notes; Betty is supposed to be so stupid that she doesn’t even sense danger when she finds a few thousand dollars stuffed in Rita’s purse. But what’s annoying about this initially is not that it lacks realism (Mulholland Drive is, quite obviously, an exercise in surrealism and dream logic), but that it comes across as Lynch’s tasteless contempt for his characters. He builds these stick figures and gets a few laughs and, indeed, the movie does start to feel like that tired old Hollywood derision, that redundant unmasking of Hollywood glitz and glamour.
But I’m so glad that David Lynch is not an idiot. It takes him over an hour to reveal Betty and Rita as deceptive, cunning, and two-faced, but when he gets there, the contrast is wild and freaky and astoundingly entertaining. When Betty goes on an audition, she morphs into another person and unleashes a porn star spirit. Lynch is no idiot but he’s such a pervert; he can’t resist coming in for a close-up, capturing all of Betty’s sexy scripted come-ons, uttered in whispers as she and her fellow actor slobber all over each other. It’s a really great scene, completely focused on the actors and the humorous animal sensuality they so deftly create. The most talked-about scenes are the ones in which Betty and Rita have lesbian relations. Lynch straddles a thin line between pornography and art; it’s easy for him to justify his sexual fantasies with the integrity of his filmmaking. This female objectification is a little disturbing, but I suppose filmmaking is all about creating fantasies. The best thing about these scenes is that they conjure up memories of Andersson and Ullman in Persona. The erotic charge between the two actresses in the Bergman movie is taken to the next level in Mulholland Drive; alter-egos Betty and Rita have sex, and their psychology gets warped because they constitute two halves of a whole, two halves of one person. Their romance helps the film spiral into its climactic emotional intensity.
The bridge between the film’s two parts is a magnificent sequence in a gloomy, dilapidated nightclub. Betty and Rita sit in the audience as performers crack jokes and the host announces that they are lip-synching to a pre-recorded track. When a Spanish singer (Rebekah Del Rio) steps out of the curtains and belts out a Roy Orbison tune, the effect is not only overwhelming to the two heroines but to Lynch’s audience as well. The soaring vocals and the aching song work us into an emotional frenzy (perhaps filling the dark hole left by the terrorist attacks of September 11). But Lynch’s creativity is cruel; just as we are forgetting what the MC told us, the singer conks out, with the vocal track continuing on, losing its magic. The illusion has been hammered to pieces; but we saw the woman’s muscles moving, and we saw the sweat and power she put into her performance! The MC’s announcement now seems like a precaution, warning us not to be vulnerable, not to be moved by the song. Lynch is telling us that we shouldn’t judge his movie so quickly. We shouldn’t take that first hour of stick-figure satire as the entire movie, as all it has to offer.
This entrancing sequence embodies the film’s schizophrenia. From there Mulholland Drive breaks away from its curious strut, and even though the rest of the movie has been called “incoherent” and “moronic” and is obviously a hurried wrap-up taken from numerous episodes of the sunken TV series, the most annoying comment I’ve read on the film has been from Peter Travers’ rave, in which he calls the “lapses in clarity… a small price to pay for breathtaking images…” The teasing, riveting finale is being treated like a trade-off, like a minor flaw, when it is anything but; it makes complete emotional sense and it’s not only the most exciting part of the movie, it’s one of the most exciting pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen this year. Not even the exhilarating Memento can match this for the pure, knee-jerk reactions we get from the editing; it may not be as nervy as Persona’s but, in using that film as constant inspiration, it comes close to replicating its power.
In the second half Betty and Rita switch personalities and change names: now Rita is empowered and Betty is helpless and needy. Naomi Watts really sinks her teeth into the challenge but all the fidgety, anxious acting seems to disappear into the fabric of the film. Lynch has designed the sequences so well that the multitudinous emotions become one feeling, one atmosphere – a restlessness and hunger that need to be satiated. Watts tries to calm herself by masturbating in one scene, but the only thing that can stop the pain, the voices in her head, is suicide. She ends the film by shooting herself, but it cannot lull the film or audience, just as Persona’s ending left us with our feelings unresolved. Mulholland Drive only fractures in a hundred different directions, all the anger and disease and ugliness flooding out of the screen, into the theater, like the filthy unconscious of Hollywood.
There is a certain kind of moviegoer that will want to dissect the film’s final act. They will want to study the bizarre symbolism and how the characters and events tie into one another. Salon.com has already taken the initiative. But, for me, the film doesn’t beg to be understood on literal terms. It reproduces the feeling of being creeped out by a nightmare you can’t even remember. The Hollywood in Mulholland Drive belongs to the mind of David Lynch, and it’s wonderful to have all the emotions handed down to you without having to pry open the film and dig yourself. It’s not necessarily a thinking film; you must forgive the tired old Hollywood derision, but it’s actually the kind of movie Hollywood could make if it wasn’t such a coward, and the kind of movie that’s best left in the hands of a talented pervert like David Lynch.
By Andrew Chan [DECEMBER 11, 2001]