The boulevard of broken dreams as Emerald City, with Lynch pulling the levers behind the scrims

Rating: 9/10 (1 September 2003)

Moviegoers from around the world respond to the names of streets they've never walked or driven down: Hollywood and Vine, Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive - staple locales in films since their beginning. The first clue in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (and it's a grab-bag of clues, many if not most of them pointing to ambiguous answers) lies in its title. He uses the abbreviation 'Dr.' to summon up not so much an address as another movie that also used the short form as its title, another fable about Hollywood dreams, dashed or unfulfilled: Sunset Blvd.
Several strands of plot are superimposed one upon another, often but not reliably interlocking. The dominant ones concern Laura Elena Harring as 'Rita' (a name she steals from a framed poster for Gilda), who has lost her memory after a car crash during what seems to have been a contract hit on her life, and Naomi Watts as 'Betty,' a wide-eyed kid from small-town Canada come to California to try her luck in The Industry. (Quotation marks around their names indicate that these identities are at best tentative.)
A third major plot line belongs to Justin Theroux, a young, hot-shot director who's casting a movie - a piece of nostalgic '50s kitsch (though the jitterbuggers under Mulholland Dr.'s titles suggest the late '40s). His own inclinations are thwarted by what seem to be backers from organized crime, though behind them operates an even more sinister presence, right at the vanishing point where conspiracy thrillers cross over into sci-fi. When Theroux balks, he ends up having a very bad day (all his money electronically vanishes, and he finds his wife in bed with pool-guy Billy Ray Cyrus -- maybe the last time he's been sighted, except in Branson, Missouri).
When Watts arrives at the posh garden apartment her traveling aunt lets her borrow, she finds Harring cowering inside. They become friends (and eventually more) who try to solve the mystery of Harring's lost identity. That's not as easy as it sounds, for Lynch is playing a high-stakes truth-and-illusion game, where facts are as slippery and mutable as dreams, or in this case nightmares. (It's a movie that demands, but may not deserve, as much exegesis as Vladimir Nabokov's dazzling conundrum Pale Fire - it lacks that novel's essential rigor.)
Watts improbably aces a convenient screen-test and seems about to shoot to the top of the A-list - possibly starring in Theroux's movie. Harring's memory, meanwhile, starts functioning; she thinks she may be 'Diana Selwyn,' living in another courtyard bungalow several notches down the scale of affluence from the one where she's currently snuggling with Watts. Then one night she wakes up babbling in Spanish and decides it's time to find out what a mysterious key in her possession might unlock. The pair dashes off, in the middle of the night, to an underground cabaret in an unseemly part of town.
Here Mulholland Dr. strips its gears, reversing abruptly from floodlit glamor and Nancy-Drewish mysteries into the grim reality of dashed hopes and broken dreams, of addiction and despair. What has gone before appears to have been a masochistic, wish-fulfilling reverie - actually, a masturbatory fantasy - on the part of Watts (no longer Betty, she's now the missing Selwyn, jilted by her rising actress/lover Camilla Rhodes - Harring). Other characters shift identities as well: Concierge of the upscale garden-court Ann Miller, replete with spit-curls and garbed in Chinoiserie, turns into the mother of Theroux, who's engaged, to Watts' chagrin, to Harring. And so it goes....
David Lynch is a master technician of the movie medium, a shatteringly original talent who leaves little persuasive evidence that he knows entirely what he's doing. These contradictions came to the fore in Twin Peaks, a pinnacle of 'event television.' The two-hour premiere proved unsettling but always engrossing, directed with glacial perfection. But as the series progressed, it grew more and more incoherent - laughable. Lynch never found a way out (the series just ended).
Mulholland Dr., too, started as a television project; when that fell through, and was recut into a feature film, he may have been forced to cook up something that could pass for a resolution. Whether he could have come up with a better one with the time that a TV series would have bought him is open to debate. But the one we have is an infuriating tangle of loose ends. (An early scene about a trigger-happy lowlife, for but one instance, seems only to pay homage to Quentin Tarantino and goes nowhere.)
Part of the problem lies in Lynch's oneiric approach to the medium: More than any American director, he works along the shifting perspectives of dreams, the loony logic of the unconscious. Yet one man's dreams may be nightmares for the rest of us. Too many themes dredged from Lynch's id recur, uneasily, in movies from Eraserhead on: The heavily draped, windowless rooms; the ogres and grotesques and vermin-like tiny people; the cartoonish characters, like The Cowboy, who all but carry bullhorns blaring 'symbol;' the bizarre theater performances; the queasy descents into black holes that open out into whole new universes. He reverts to these signature tropes when he isn't sure where to go next.
And yet, If we're even half-willing, Lynch can really work us over, boring into our skulls and slithering under our skins like nobody else. He shows a wizardly grasp of the doubleness (duplicity?) of things - the horror just under the humdrum, the macabre that's the flip side of the mundane. Nothing is so freighted with the unspeakable as sex (and in his sadistic eroticism Lynch is neck-and-neck with Brian De Palma, whose contemporaneous Femme Fatale was another violent and voluptuous exercise in multiple realities). Mulholland Dr. can be as forbidding yet enticing a fantasy world as the Emerald City, even though we realize that it's an elaborate con-game - that the old humbug Lynch is pushing our buttons, knowingly, gleefully.