Dali, Picasso and David Lynch

Rating: 10/10 (22 August 2002)

It is right that these three names should be mentioned together? I think so. Indeed, I think it is not quite praise enough for Lynch, who could very well be the greatest Surrealist artist ever. Dali understood dreams, but Lynch MAKES them. "Eraserhead" was a nightmare projected into reality; "Wild at Heart" was the fitful dream of a bad hangover. "Mulholland Dr." is the most accomplished and precise of Lynch's creations, fusing his dark Surrealism with a kind of cinemtic Cubism. Like Picasso's bull, he shatters his film into jagged pieces and then reassembles them; forcing us to examine his narriative from all angles simultaneously.
We see Naomi Watts first as young naive Betty, overplaying the chirpy blonde to the point of absurdity, (All characters in Lynch's films overplay their roles to the point of absurdity, just as characters in dreams do) who finds an amnesiac in her apartment, played by the almost unbearably sexy Laura Harring. The amnesiac, who takes the name Rita from a Rita Hayworth poster, had been about to be murdered when joyriders crashed into her car on Muholland Drive, and now Betty is caught in the web of those who want her dead. So far, so Hitchcock.
We learn that "Rita" once had a roommate, called Diane Selwyn, and when they break into her house, they find a dead body (hers?) there. The two amateur detectives bond, and eventually fall in love, engaging in one of the sexiest love scenes to hit the screen in decades. It is after this that Lynch takes the hammer to his mirror. A mysterious blue box is found, to which Rita apparently has the key. The key is turned...
Suddenly, Betty isn't Betty anymore; she's Diane Selwyn, and events are spiralling towards the tragic conclusion that may (or may not) open this film.
What does it all mean? By the actors switching roles, is Lynch demonstrating the love that both Diane and Betty feel for "Rita"? Or are these two characters actually one and the same, and one is dreaming the other? Who can tell?
There is much, much more to this film; a film director who gets caught up in a cult-like organisation that runs his movie, a dwarf in a wheelchair, a premonition of doom in a diner. Some may have meaning, or it may not. I will need to see it again.