Theatre of Cruelty

Rating: Null/10 (9 January 2003)

Freudian in its dreamscape and implications, Derridean in its play and ambiguity, and postmodernist in its resistance to closure, "Mulholland Drive" traverses a Jungian-inflected topography where identity is specious, narrative jettisons realism, and desire drives on Hegelian protocols.And yet my academy speak is just another futile attempt to "close in" on a film that share affinities with Freud's Mystic Pad, the apparatus on which writing and erasing occur simaltaneously.
In "Modest Proposal," satirist par excellence Johnothan Swift defines satire as a glass in which the spectator sees everybody's face except his own. I would read MD along Swiftian lines, for everyone in this movie is both agent and victim, doer and duped. Viewer included. "Mulholland Drive" will leave many thinking, possibly enraged. However, anxiety, Heiddeger reminds us, is the first step of understanding.
MD is highly recommended, if only as a testament to the prevailing influence Bunuel and Hitchcock have passed down to their anxiety-ridden successors. In MD, Lynch proffers--if I can borrow Bloom's formulation of an artwork that has successfully contested with its precursors--an achieved anxiety.

**For those further interested, I refer my reader to J. Hoberman's cogent review of the film in The Village Voice Oct 3, 2001.
Daniel A. Jacome