Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Part 3

Rating: Null/10 (11 May 2009)

"There is no band. It is all a tape recording." – Mulholland Drive
Baudrillard writes of the three historical orders of appearance, where images and signs change their relationships to reality in western culture. He calls these the 1st, 2nd and 3rd order simulacrums.
The 1st order simulacra took place between the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution. This was the counterfeit period, where signs reflected and then perverted a basic reality, art essentially imitating life. The 2nd order simulacra took place during the Industrial age. This was a period of mass reproduction. Signs were mass-produced and began to signify themselves as symbols of money and power. They marked the absence of a basic reality and gradually began to bear less relation to their origins. The 3rd order simulacra is our current phase. Signs now bear no relationship to any reality. Reality has disintegrated, signs now having no meaning whatsoever due to a liquidation of referentials.
Films like "The Truman Show", "Dark City" and "The Matrix" remain locked at the level of the first order of simulacra, naively believing that there exists a "real world" behind the simulation. In contrast, films like "Existenz", "Eyes Wide Shut", "A History of Violence" and "Mulholland Drive" are acutely aware that we no longer live in the age of spectacle. Spectacle subjected us to images, now we ourselves become participatory images.
Most view "Mulholland Drive" as being cleanly divided into two halves: the first half being a young actress's fantasy, the second half being the dark reality of both Hollywood and herself. But look closely and "Mulholland Drive's" fantasy is always positioned on the same level as its reality. What Lynch is intuitively recognising is that reality is already hyper-real, always somebody else's dreams and desires. There is now no meaningful distinction between the two; between The City of Dreams and our desires, fantasy and cyberspace states.
In this regard, "Mulholland Drive" shares much with Kubrick's "Eyes Wide shut", both films being fairly accurate depictions of Lacanian Desire (ie Desire=Lack=Real, and it is only in the dream that we come close to a real awakening), the difference being that Kubrick uses the "logic" of "interrupted dreams" (constant interruptions, telephone calls, narrative short-circuiting etc), whilst "Mulholland Drive" is entirely constructed in the "language of dreams". Lynch's film is a free-floating anxiety dream, with constant temporal collapses and radically changing identities, whilst Kubrick's is more architectural and formal.
Both films also utilize fractured narratives, fantasy logic and generate an extreme sense of mystery, confusion and horror (ironically, in attentive viewers), which provokes an investigative impulse, their audiences forced to apply a rational or analytic approach for purposes of coherently re-integrating the puzzling narratives, whether in order to re-assert control over the anxiety that the films provoke, or worse, to finally safely dismiss it all as exclusively a "dream".
But the comparisons don't end there. Both films also have a sequence which serves to "demystify" the audience and dreamer. In Kubrick's film, Sydney Pollack, over a pool table, attempts to bring Tom Cruise "up to date" with reality, telling him that it was "all a performance" and "staged just for him". Likewise, The Real of Lynch's film is not Naomi Watt's supposedly waking world, but the shadowy "movie house" of Club Silencio. It is in Club Silencio that Lynch has a magician demonstrate that his "singers" are all lip syncing to a "pre recorded soundtrack", a "performance deliberately staged" for their audience. The representation is always accepted as real, even when the audience has been demystified.
And there is another "Mulholland" theme that has significant resonance with "Eyes": the forever elusive patriarchal powers in a capitalist society. A line repeated throughout the film by powerful people is "THIS IS THE GIRL!", its significance changing with each utterance. Like Kubrick, Lynch paints a deeply disturbing portrait of women in the hands of and at the mercy of, unscrupulous patriarchy (as well as its also dis-empowering effects on men).
So both directors position their stories - Kubrick's part-dream-fable of repressed marital infidelity and Lynch's dream-fable of doomed lesbian love - within a representation of society as a closed hierarchical, authoritarian system in which the ultimate source of power remains forever hidden behind a series of ominous representatives.
But it is Club Silencio that makes "Mulholland Drive" interesting. Writing of the Club, Kpunk says "There is nothing less misleading in cinema's history of illusion than Lynch's scene in Club Silencio. What we are seeing and hearing - the film itself - is a recording and nothing but. On the most banal level, this is the Real which the magic of cinema must conceal. Yet the scene haunts for reasons other than this. It challenges us to recognize that our own lives, the roles we perform (as people, as actors), are themselves recordings, scripted by forces outside the self and whose "substance" turns out to be itself nothing more than a mass of influences."
In the end, "Mulholland Drive" is not only a story about a few characters' lost sense of Self but about the fractured identity of Hollywood. Memories of Hollywood (and our culturally overloaded postmodern world) are stored in a massive array of film footage, newspapers, images, memories, books, revivals, reconstructions and remakes. The language of "Mulholland Drive" thrives on this meta-language. This postmodern pastiche of signs and references turns the film itself into a simulated narrative of sorts. We are able to immerse ourselves in the film precisely because of our brains, the simulacrum existing in our minds as much as it does in Hollywood, the place were such minds meet and melt. And the only escape from the tyranny of eternal performance - from the white noise of sights and sounds - comes in fulfilment of "Mulholland Drive's" final utterance: Silencio .
9/10 – After the abrasive "Wild at Heart", Lynch reestablished himself as a master director with both "Straight Story" and "Mulholland Drive".