Here are some thoughts on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. I really don’t want you to read them unless you’ve seen the movie. Probably best if you’ve seen Lost Highway and Twin Peaks as well.
* I can’t imagine this is a novel observation, but this movie is basically the Rosetta Stone for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job. From the opening jitterbug sequence and its swing dancers crudely superimposed over a flat neon pink greenscreen background, to an illicit sexual romance in a huge and soulless Los Angeles mansion, to tiny little people emerging out of nowhere, to its overall positioning of uncomfortable material on the precipice between comedy and horror. Tim and Eric have talked about Lynch’s influence in the past, and they’ve cast Ray Wise so it’s not like it’s some big secret, but having now seen this film specifically, I see just how direct that influence is.
* I got into this a bit with Matt Maxwell on Twitter, but this sure seems like an anti-love letter to Los Angeles, doesn’t it? I know that’s a facile reading. I’ve long defended Lynch against detractors who claim things like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are cheap sophomoric “look, suburbia/small-town America is FUCKED UP!” posturing, so I want to make it clear that I don’t think this is a similar case only it’s L.A. that’s eeeeevil this time. Still, in Twin Peaks in particular there is clearly much that both the characters we see as trustworthy moral arbiters, and by implication Lynch and Mark Frost, see as good and worth preserving in their small town. I don’t get that at all in Mulholland Drive The only people who seem happy with Los Angeles in this movie are either naive dupes or amoral assholes, or worse, of course.
* And there are additional cues, if not clues, that there’s something wrong with this place. The elderly couple who escort Betty from the airport and wish her luck are revealed almost right away as…not…right. Their glee over Betty’s arrival comes across like Minnie and Roman Castevet happily welcoming Rosemary into the Bamford. And the man behind the diner^…”There’s a man. In back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it.” Given what happens at the end of the film, he’s like the black beating heart of the city, the font from which the rest of the monstrousness springs. And he’s right there behind the Winkie’s. Say what you will about Glastonbury Grove and the Black Lodge, but they weren’t right behind the Double R.^^
* To use a favorite expression of mine, one thing that really struck me is how my experience with Lynch’s past work–not to mention my own generic preoccupations–had me looking at hoofprints and thinking of zebras. Once you’ve seen Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway, it’s so tempting to see the elderly couple, the man behind the diner, and of course the Cowboy as agents of the supernatural, corrupting and destroying the innocent and surrounded by doppelgangers like a rock thrown into a pond is surrounded by ripples. After all, seeing Lost Highway‘s Mystery Man as a descendent of BOB, the Man from Another Place, the Giant, and Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, if not an actual resident of the Black Lodge appearing in an unofficial Twin Peaks sequel, is just as valid an interpretation of the events of that film as any other. So too, I thought, here.
* But! Once I did a little googling and came across the theory that the final fifth or so of Mulholland Drive is the terrible reality Diane attempted to mentally escape with the fantasy/dream that constitutes the rest of the movie, constructed Wizard of Oz^^^ style as her mind’s remix of the truth, it all clicked. No need for the Lodge. Unless of course imagination is the fifth dimension, Batman R.I.P. style. ^^^^
* No need either for other elaborate theories. One that I quickly came up with and then discarded was that somehow Diane too was suffering from amnesia, and Coco and everyone else were for some reason playing along with her delusion. Another was that Betty was a performance by Diane, concocted to further torment Camilla. She is a great actress, after all.
* A couple days later, the part I can’t get out of my head is how long it takes Adam and Camilla to announce their engagement in front of Diane. The pause between each phrase, the giggling, the meaningful glances…it’s just unbearably awful. What a fucking scene.
* The movie’s great achievement as a narrative, I would say, is in getting you to not only prefer the portion that isn’t “real,” but to make it feel more real to you than the reality. In discussing the film with my wife immediately afterwards, she said that compared to Lost Highway, the characters after the dividing line were far less fleshed out. And this is true, even though when you take a step back and look at it, their behavior was far more “realistic” than that of the Nancy Drew noir characters. But you end up believing the lie more than the truth. I’ve read some people who argue that this trick takes advantage of the simple fact that we’re fondest of those we’re introduced to first. The Psycho trick, in other words. It’s smart filmmaking.
* The Winkie’s dream sequence: As good as I’d heard. And by good I mean I reacted by saying “Ohhhhh, no, that’s no good,” and then rewinding it on behest of my wife to subject ourselves to it again. I remember doing that one time before: with the first subliminal flash of that face in The Exorcist.
* Also as good as I’d heard, better even: the sex scene. Lynch’s sweetest and not coincidentally his hottest. Just another explosion, another sense to inundate and overload.
* Submitted: The ending of this movie would have been the only other acceptable ending for The Blair Witch Project.
* This is horror, to me. This is the horror I want. Shining black and awful and unbearable, like a crack in the world that should never have been opened. Magnificent.
^ By the way, a filthy hirsute homeless man who reappears at the end of the movie to take possession of a sinister magic box that transports the person who opens it to another plane of reality? I can’t be the only person who thought of Hellraiser, can I?
^^ Speaking of which: the coffee at the Double R = “damn good”; the espresso at Ryan Entertainment = “shit.” Case closed!
^^^ “Pay no attention to the man behind the diner!”
^^^^ Lynch’s influence on Grant Morrison’s Batman work and Final Crisis is clearer to me than ever as well. And not just in the general “it’s creepy, it’s weird, it doesn’t make sense” way — the specifics, the preoccupation with shifting identities and doppelgangers, the conception of evil as a corrupting hole in the world.