Dreamboat

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2011)

Star ratings are irrelevant at the best of times, never more so than with a film that can only really be enjoyed by subscribing to its writer-director's modus operandi. After that it's a process of unravelling. On a surface level Mulholland Drive, looking like a Sunset Strip murder melodrama, seems shallow and schlocky. Which is, of course, half the point.
A film set in an ostentatious city of extremes, the action shifts from mystery, through horror and farce, to tragedy with unshowy elegance. Lynch's techniques might be bamboozling, but this can be seen as a simple, sad tale of a starstruck loner, Diane (Naomi Watts), spurned by love, and now in love with an impossible dream. What emerges from Lynch's seductive, oneiric aesthetic is a powerful, angry attack on the poisonous hierarchy of celebrity. This is about the obliteration of the individual; the destruction of one woman's sense of self.
Diane, as her imagined alter-ego Betty, conjures a dreamworld in which she arrives, starry-eyed, in the City of Angels, and finds a fallen angel: "Rita" (Laura Harring), a beauty in the classic Hayworth mould, who has lost her memory after a car accident. In her fantasy, Diane/Betty not only lives a life of intrigue and wealth, but also retains her integrity - both in terms of her acting ability and in the grace she shows toward her secret roommate. In her fantasy, Betty is as strong as the jealousy that sucks the life from Diane. Those she hates - specifically, Rita's director and lover, Adam (Justin Theroux) - are condemned to squalor and emasculation. Betty satisfies Rita sexually. Betty makes Rita whole, and Betty is loved for it.
There's dread in droves. A blind woman comes to the door, but she cannot wake Betty. There is a "monster" lurking behind Winkie's Diner, which could be the embodiment of Betty's fear. Fairy tale motifs abound: keys to open curiosities, and dangerous red in abundance. But poor Betty is blinded by the stars.
Lynch dallies once more with the Moebius strip narrative. Is this what hell looks like - to relive our life on the fragments of memory, shattered like a skull by a self-inflicted bullet? Or is Lynch simply shuffling the narrative pack, portraying these dreadful events as an abstract artist envisions the horror of death, in a way that movies will never quite manage? As the camera explores the catacombs behind the façade of the boulevard like a prowling creature, Lynch's sense of space and light has never been better. We are guests in the grey area between waking and sleep, only to find it's been painted all gaudy. Scenes - such as when Adam is summoned to a ranch to take counsel with a sage cowboy - are seemingly conjured by Betty in the way one recalls a conversation in a dream: rationalised, making purposeful the philosophical, retrospectively plotting a narrative, writing our own film. Perhaps that's the delight of Mulholland Drive: in filling the gaps, we are allowed to make the film our own.