Tom Casey Reviews Mulholland Drive

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2005)

David Lynch is difficult because he makes demands on his audience. He takes meticulous care to fabricate an atmosphere that is, culturally speaking, a collation. The clothes, music, and behavioral idiom is out of pace, yet we see ourselves. Stranger than anything we could have imagined, his world is finally recognizable as our own. If genius is the ability to make connections, David Lynch is a genius of film who connects inner experience to the objects and individuals from without that mold and influence it. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a film preoccupied with identity. On its surface, it is the story of a young woman who won a dance contest and a chance to have a Hollywood audition. Though by no means clear until much later in the film, she has mediocre talent and falls prey to destructive seductions that turn her dream into a nightmare and destroy her. But what Lynch has done with this Hollywood cliché is magical. It's all in the telling: his trick is to hide his story by cryptically putting it right in front of you. Time after time, the viewer's conventional expectations lead to wrong conclusions, raising the level of confusion and suspense. Like BLUE VELVET, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a mystery, told from an emotional rather than a rational language of meaning. This is important to realize; it's why Lynch is unintelligible to so many. Without Freudian understanding, the depth of his insight and the richness of his art cannot be comprehended consciously. The meticulous clues that he puts before yousometimes literally in your facewill be misread or overlooked. BLUE VELVET, an Oedipal allegory, takes a tour through the mindscapes of sex and guilt in a young man processing the shock of his father's heart attack. MULHOLLAND DRIVE similarly works from the inside out, but its canvass is much larger, challenging the validity of American optimism. By using the metaphor of dreams, he explores the conflict between the ideal of Hollywood as a dream machine, and the corrosive realities of life. Dreams can be beautiful and turn terrifying. Dreams always express a wish, often reversing facts of the waking world. More importantly, as Freud insisted, the dream is the dreamer. Hollywood creates the dreams of our culture, projecting the sex and violence of our collective Id. Id is very much the springboard for David Lynch. For most of the entire film, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a dream being dreamt by a young aspiring actress named Betty. This is not explicit, though in typical fashion Lynch has put it subtly in front of us: in the opening scene the camera plays on a pillow and we hear the sound of a person sleeping out of range. In a subsequent scene Betty says, "This is the place of dreams." Then the camera follows a limousine traveling at night on Mulholland Drive. It soon becomes a hearse of sorts, and that subliminal impression, once planted, remains. Throughout the film/Betty's dream, the characters and their actions must often be inverted to understand their interplay as continuous to the fabric of the story. By this calculus it is Betty, not Rita, who is searching for her identity, and the story of Betty's triumphant audition is her wish that she had not, in reality, failed. When Adam, the director, meets her eyes and seems to fall in love with her, we should suspect the truth is his indifference. When Rita begins to sense that she is responsible for a murder, Freud's delineation of dreamwork points to Betty. In dreams, manifest content masks latent meaning; there are layers and layers. Dreams are constructed from images of waking life: we later discover the sources of Betty's dream material: the dark angular man in the diner, the waitress's name tag, a blue key, are reproduced in Betty's dream with a significance they did not have when she casually encountered them. But we don't know that to begin with. We do know that walls, doors, windows, boxes, and bed are the symbols of Betty's entrapment, culminating in a vision of Silencio, the place of truth and "crying" where Death is the keeper of dreams. Cartoon gangsters shorn of their menace through slapstick, should be viewed with foreboding, for everything is its opposite. Here too, the Cowboy's mythic strength is denatured, stripped of his status as icon; he is not a benign protector, rather he seems more a genderless demon who awakens Betty/Diane to what we shortly learn is Diane's horrible reality. The lesbian affair between Betty and Rita is in fact a destructive union riven with ungovernable passions. In one of the last scenes Diane masturbates furiously, missing her orgasm repeatedly as a final frustration before the barrier to guilt gives way and parental homunculi creep under the doorway, exploding into the room as an Id-fueled horror of accusation. Proust wrote that there is no access to something original because, by virtue of its originality, it defies analysis, it can only stand apart with a life of its own as a reference to subsequent works that may evolve under its influence. "In short, this art which is so complicated is in fact the only living art. It alone expresses for others and renders visible to ourselves that life of ours that cannot effectually observe itself and of which the observable manifestations need to be translated and, often, to be read backwards and laboriously deciphered." David Lynch is such an artist, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE is such a film. Any attempt to force his meaning will fail; he will not be understood too quickly, and perhaps never in the same way by different viewers. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare, all we can hope for in time is to be wrong about him in a new way.