The Screening Room

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Date of first viewing: Monday, October 22, 2001

Location: Embarcadero Cinema with Michael

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING: If you want any surprises at all, do not read this review before seeing the film. I mean it. I'm not only going to talk about what happens, but how to interpret it. (Of course, I could be wrong. But I'll never admit it.) Plus, unless you've seen the movie, a lot of this probably won't make sense anyway.

Michael and I saw David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" last night, and I have just finished reading nearly all the reviews from the Internet Movie DataBase. They are filled with words and phrases like, "incomprehensible," "utter confusion," "inchoate," "maddening," "irrational," "indecipherable," "impenetrable," and my personal favorite, "devoid of all logic whatsoever." Edward Guthmann, from the San Francisco Chronicle, asks, "Is the second half Betty's nightmare, or is the first half Diane's wish-fulfilling dream? Is neither one real?" And then, "Can it ever be explained? Probably not." Most critics, if they attempt any explanation at all, seem to go for the dream idea. Stephanie Zackarek at Salon.com seems to hint that she gets it but isn't telling. Roger Ebert, however, states emphatically that "'Mulholland Drive' isn't like 'Memento,' where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery." He's...well...he's just wrong.

I'm not saying that I have the definitive explanation, (even though I think I do) but
I just don't think the film is as complex as everyone is making it out to be. If you've seen any David Lynch movies in the past, you know his favorite themes: Good vs. Evil and especially Evil Disguised As Good. The first Lynch movie I saw was "Blue Velvet," roughly 15 years ago. Last night, I came away from "Mulholland Drive" with déjà vu. Here's "Blue Velvet" all over again, complete with melodramatic, campy acting,
hit-you-over-the-head Good vs. Evil plotline, and even Roy Orbison tune played at Key
Moment, ("Blue Velvet's" "In Dreams" vs. "Mulholland Drive's" Spanish version of "Crying") transplanted to 2001 Los Angeles. With that in mind, it is not hard to find the angels and demons upon whose shoulders the plot twists.

The bridge between the first part, which seems fairly linear, and the second, which is driving moviegoers crazy, is the seemingly benign little old couple who are seated
with Betty on the plane when she arrives in L.A. at the beginning of the film and who
crawl out of the demon's paper bag and drive her to suicide near the film's end. Take the last half hour of the film, put it before the first two hours, and you have an almost clear-cut story of Diane Selwyn, a hardened and bitter Hollywood actress, continually frustrated in her career and love life, finally making a deal with the Devil. When she pays the hit man to murder her unfaithful lover Camilla, she doesn't realize she's getting way more than she proverbially bargained for. This point is driven home by the hit man's sinister laughter when she asks him what the blue key opens. The laughter is a warning not to delve too deep or ask too many questions, or she'll find out more than she wants to. Of course, since this warning comes near the end of the film, we, the audience, have no sense of foreboding and go right along with her in her Nancy Drewish attempt to discover the mystery of Rita in the first part. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once the little old couple has driven Diane to suicide, they escort her into her new "perfect" Hollywood life as Betty -- an alternate life in which she has everything she wants. Life is beautiful and pure. She, not Camilla, is the actress everyone wants. Camilla, having stumbled away from an auto accident, has amnesia, and is therefore a blank slate for Betty's fantasies. (When Betty asks her, during their [by now widely publicized] sex scene, whether or not she has done this before, Rita can only answer, "I don't know.") The young director who had an affair with Camilla now has a cheating wife and mafia guys (also working for the Devil it seems) breathing down his neck. His mother, who was unkind to Diane at the director's party, is now Betty's nurturing landlady. Betty lives in a beautiful apartment. She has all the money she could want (in Rita's purse. Wink wink.) All she has to do is live her new life, not delve too deeply, and her beautiful illusion will last. Innocent and naive, she is as devoid of memories of her former life as Rita, who we later learn is actually Camilla. But, like Pandora's or Eve's, Betty's shiny world begins to fall apart the more she tries to help Rita discover her identity. There are warnings: Betty's aunt wanting to call the police, her psychic neighbor, Louise Bonner, warning her to stay away from Rita, the men waiting in the car outside Diane's apartment. But Betty ignores all the warnings about Rita, who is finally her undoing.

It is Rita who leads her to El Club Silencio, where "No hay banda!" There is no band. The sound is illusion. The singer, Rebekah del Rio, collapses during her performance of "Llorando," (Roy Orbison's "Crying") and yet the sound of her voice continues. The two women cry together in their aforementioned melodramatic style, in some way knowing that their time together is short, and Betty starts to shake as if she is coming loose from her world. She is. Suddenly she discovers the blue box in her purse - the box to which Rita has the blue key (I'm not even going to get into THAT symbolism) and which Rita will innocently open, shattering Betty's beautiful illusion forever. Only after the box is opened do we, the audience, get to see Betty's former life as Diane, and what led up to the first 2 hours of the movie.

"Mulholland Drive" is full of threads, many of which are underdeveloped -- probably as a result of Lynch's having to cut the script down from a TV series to a 2-1/2 hour movie. But I don't think there are any true red herrings. What happened to the detectives from the scene of Rita's accident in the beginning of the movie? Would they have played a bigger role? Who are the mafia-type guys who insist on the young director choosing their new "Camilla Rhodes" -- a blonde woman who looks nothing like the original Camilla -- or the Cowboy, or the monster behind the dumpster at Winkies? Are they agents of the Devil? What about the hit man whom Diane paid and who shows up in Betty's world to retrieve the Black Book? And is Mr. Roque, (played by the actor who also played the dwarf in the Twin Peaks dream sequence) the man who holds the director's purse strings, the Hollywood Devil himself? The movie would suggest it.

I suppose you could also look at the first part of the film as a long Wizard of Oz-type dream in which all of the people from Diane's real life show up altered, changed in her favor. I suppose Diane could have dreamed about the man in Winkie's who relates his dream to his friend (or therapist?) before discovering the evil out back and falling over dead. She does look up and see him as she's making the deal with the hit man. But there are just too many other scenes in which she is not present: the men in the diner, the director in the meeting with the mafia guys, Camilla/Rita's accident, her aunt going back for her keys, the director finding his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus and pouring pink paint on her jewelry, the director's meeting with the Cowboy, the director speaking to the landlord of his small apartment and his telephone conversation with his assistant, the mafia guy's meeting with the man in the chair, and on and on. But the scene that argues the most strongly against the dream theory is that of the two old people cackling hysterically in the taxicab after they have left Betty at the airport. Their laughter is a clue for the audience that all is not as sunny as it seems. It is not, however, a clue for Betty, who continues on as happy as a blind clam. Therefore, it clearly could not be part of her dream.

I could probably make more connections between the first and second parts if I saw this movie a second time. But I'm not sure I want to. Granted, the film is lush, visually and musically, and the acting of Naomi Watts, the actress who plays Betty/Diane, is incredible to watch. She transforms herself so thoroughly, it's hard to believe that it's the same person playing both Betty and Diane. And there are certain scenes, like the old people cackling as they run out of the paper bag, that tickled me because they seem like the weird kind of thing I would think up. But the film is at least a half an hour too long. Some of the acting seems uselessly stilted, in that weird David Lynch sort of way. And overall, the point that the film seems to be making -- there is evil in the world, specifically Hollywood, especially under seemingly benign surfaces -- is not at all original. Especially for Lynch. Maybe the real point is that underneath his textured, twisting, and often confusing plots, David Lynch's ideas are actually pretty shallow.

For a really interesting film about memory loss and identity, (besides Memento, which is more fun than thought-provoking) check out Hal Hartley's "Amateur." Click here for Michael's (very short) review of "Amateur." Aw heck, click here to go to Michael's homepage, from whence you can check out all his dang movie reviews. He's way more prolific than I.

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