Everything
you wanted to know about "Mulholland Drive"
The scary cowboy! The mysterious box! All that sex! We answer all your
questions about David Lynch's latest outrage -- the weirdest movie of
the year.
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By Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein
Oct. 23, 2001 | "Mulholland
Drive," the
latest feature from director David Lynch, is exhilarating -- two
hours and 25 minutes of macabre thrills, highly charged erotica and
indelible
images. But it's also confusing. Bits and pieces of plot dribble out;
characters appear and disappear; the film takes an incomprehensible
turn
two-thirds of the way through; and there seem to be three or four
disparate
story lines that have virtually nothing to do with one another.
In
this way, the film is similar to Lynch's "Lost
Highway,"
his cinematic scud missile of 1997. In that film, the 40-something Bill
Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without
explanation, turns
into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and
the
movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling
development
in a film whose plot was regularly described as a Möbius strip by
reviewers.
"Mulholland
Drive" is a movie along those lines, though its filmic palette is
broader,
its setting (Hollywood and the film industry) more portentous, and its
themes
plainer. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal
rather
than opaque and frustrating.
Indeed,
it may be the
most conventional and coherent of Lynch's "hard" movies
("Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks,"
"Fire Walk With Me," "Wild at Heart," "Lost
Highway"). All the themes that cycle through his work -- strange
figures
pulling the strings behind the scenes, random acts of extreme violence,
bizarre
character fixations and the feeling that the surreal is an active part
of our
everyday life -- are present here, but he's tied them to a narrative
structure
that, in the end, resolves itself. For aficionados, there are red
herrings that
will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is
finally
coming out and telling us what he's all about.
Still,
of recent
American movies, only "Memento" is remotely as
challenging, and it's still almost impenetrable on first viewing. What
follows
includes a synopsis of the plot and then questions and answers about
what in
the world is going on in "Mulholland Drive's" strange universe. So
stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the film.
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Here's
the basic plot:
The film opens with garish, distorted footage of people jitterbugging;
it's a
hellish version of a Gap ad. Then we see washed-out superimposed
footage of a
young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face.
Then
there's a few
seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack.
Then
the movie proper
starts, with a few parallel stories: In one, a gorgeous woman is in the
back of
a limo, climbing the winding curves of Mulholland Drive above Los
Angeles. The
driver stops unexpectedly and points a pistol at her. But before he can
fire
the limo is rammed by one of a pair of drag-racing cars. The voluptuous
woman
gets out in a daze and stumbles down the hills into Hollywood and ends
up
sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation.
Then
we see a diner,
with an odd, nervous, nerdy-looking young guy talking to a more
composed
middle-aged man. The younger one says he's had a dream about the diner
and a
monster outside. They go outside and see the monster! The young guy
collapses.
Someone
is after the
woman who wandered off from the car wreck. We see a strange man pick up
a phone
and hear that they haven't found her yet. He calls a number and passes
along
the message; we see a dirty yellow wall phone picked up and accept the
message.
Then we see that phone hung up, picked up and dialed. A phone
rings on a
coffee table next to an ashtray, but no one answers.
We
are introduced to
another character, Betty, as she gets off a plane, chatting gaily with
an elderly
couple she met on the flight. Betty is a bushy-tailed, almost painfully
chipper
young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an
actress. The
older couple effusively wish her luck.
In
yet another narrative stream, a young director, Adam, is being forced
by some
evil Hollywood studio types to cast a certain ingénue in his
film -- a blond
named Camilla. Arrogantly, he refuses; a strange man in a spooky room
orders
that the film be shut down. Adam leaves for home in despair and finds
his wife
in bed with the pool man, who beats him up.
Meanwhile,
a scruffy blond-haired guy is talking to a long-haired guy in a shabby
office,
who mentions something about an accident. The blond guy pulls out a gun
and
shoots the other, apparently to get a mysterious black book that has
some sort
of connection to the attempted killing of Rita. But a shot goes awry
and hits a
woman in the next office. The hit guy tries to strangle her, then
shoots her.
Then he shoots a janitor who wanders by. Then he shoots the janitor's
vacuum
cleaner and starts a fire, which sets off alarms and sprinklers.
Betty
is staying in the
vacant apartment of her aunt, in a building run by an older woman who
calls
herself Coco. Betty stumbles on the bruised woman hiding out in the
shower!
She's under the impression, at first, that she's a friend of her
aunt's; but it
eventually is revealed that the strange guest is suffering from
amnesia. She
christens herself Rita, after seeing Rita Hayworth's name on a movie
poster;
the pair find $50,000 and a mysterious blue key in Rita's pocketbook.
This
suits the Nancy Drew-like inclinations of the out-of-towner perfectly,
and they
set out to figure out the secret of Rita's life.
The
director is
thoroughly menaced by some dark forces, including a very scary guy in a
cowboy
hat in a deserted corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon, high above
Hollywood.
The
cowboy, calm but
dangerous, tells the director again to hire Camilla, the
ingénue. "If you
do what you're told, you'll see me one more time," the cowboy says
calmly.
"If you don't do what you're told, you'll see me two more times."
Betty,
meanwhile, is
preparing for her first audition. She and Rita practice her lines;
she's clumsy
and conventional. But at the actual audition she turns into a sensual
bombshell
-- and blows away the producer and everyone watching!
Then
a casting agent
walks Betty over to the director's movie set. It seems to be some sort
of '50s
period piece. We see a woman sing Connie Stevens' "16 Reasons." Then
Camilla, the ingénue the bad guys are shoving down Adam's
throat, sings Linda
Scott's "I've Told Every Little Star." "This is the girl,"
Adam says.
Betty
and Adam's eyes
meet. But she runs home to Rita.
The
two women follow
clues to the apartment of another young woman, Diane. They speak to
Diane's
neighbor, then break into her apartment and find her dead and decayed
in her
bed!
Shaken,
the two return
home and dress Rita in a blond wig as a disguise. Betty invites Rita to
share
her bed that night. Rita makes a pass and the pair find comfort in each
other's
arms.
"Have
you even done
this before?" coos Betty.
"I
don't
know," replies Rita, "-- have you?"
Betty
says, "I want
to, with you. I'm in love with you."
Rita
has a dream about a
stage show in a nightclub. She drags them to the club, which is called
Silencio. There, musicians and singers pretend to perform, but the
music is all
canned. Says the emcee: "This is all a tape recording. It is an
illusion."
Up
in the balcony, the
pair begin crying. Betty shakes and weeps in some hyperemotional
response to
the music. Without explanation, she finds a glistening blue box in her
purse.
They
go home. Rita turns
to the closet. When she turns around, Betty has disappeared. Rita uses
the key
to open the box. She's apparently sucked into it; we zoom into it,
presumably
from her point of view, and it drops to the floor.
The
movie suddenly
changes. We're back at the dead Diane's apartment. We hear knocks at
her door;
we even see the mysterious cowboy again! "Hey, pretty girl, time to
wake
up," he says.
Her
neighbor, whom we
met before, finally wakes her up. Diane is a haggard, dirty-blond with
a
nervous twitch and a beaten-down look. She notices a blue key on her
coffee
table.
She's
involved with a
taunting but cold brunet -- the amnesia victim, Rita! The brunet's real
name,
we learn, is Camilla -- which is the same name as the ingénue
the studio bad
guys are pushing. But that woman was blond and much shorter -- an
entirely
different woman.
The
two women have sex
on the couch, but Camilla suddenly goes cold. Camilla says, "We
shouldn't
do this any more."
Diane,
horrified, says,
"Don't say that," and tries to force her way with her.
This Camilla is suddenly the object of
the charms of the young film
director, now happily separated from his wife. We see him putting the
moves on
her on his movie set. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which
she does,
glowering.
Later
we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy.
The
phone rings; the
phone she picks up is the one that isn't answered at the beginning of
the
movie. Diane is taken in a limo to the party -- the same limo, it
seems, we saw
Rita in at the beginning of the film. It's on the same ominous trip up
Mulholland Drive, too.
But
she's not about to
be shot. Instead, she's greeted at a party by Rita, who is now Camilla.
The
host is the director, and the weird Coco is now the director's mother!
She
questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. We learn that
Diane was
a teen jitterbugging champion in Canada who came to Hollywood after her
aunt
died and left her some money. Diane says she's acted a bit, and met
Camilla at
an audition for a big part in a movie called "The Sylvia North
Story," directed by Paul Bruckner. But she lost the part to Camilla.
Diane's
fantasy is a number of things. It's obviously a dream of a world in
which her
relationship with Camilla was different -- a place where Camilla loves
her and
is dependent on her. But it's also a requiem for her lost career, and
arguably
an elegy to a lost Hollywood as well. But Lynch seems rather ambivalent
about
the lost Hollywood, which by analogy undermines Diane's dream vision,
too.
Lynch
may be telling us
that this is the dream we all share when we watch Hollywood movies, and
reminding us at the same time that it is a dream -- that it is
wishful,
and says a lot about the dreamer. The movie's most problematic conceit
is
Diane's hallucination of the mad powers behind the scenes in Hollywood.
Are
those imaginings the incoherent ones of a cockeyed youngster turned
sour by
failure? Or the unvarnished truth of someone who'd seen it happen, up
close and
personal?
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Indeed,
Diane herself is
someone who deals with personal rejection by hiring an assassin. Lynch
does a
great job intertwining the dicier sides of Diane's character with a
wider
critique of Hollywood as a business and the complex relationship
between
Hollywood as dream factory and its audience. It's possible Lynch sees
consumers
of popular Hollywood fare as unable to work out their grievances in
their real
lives, so they resort to fantasies of revenge.
What's the time period
of the movie?
It's
apparently the
present, but the dream part of the film is an eras-spanning
romanticized
netherworld of ivied Hollywood apartment buildings, aging stars and
picture-perfect period re-creations on busy sound stages. (In "Blue
Velvet," too, Lynch pulled off the trick of creating a modern setting
that
seemed somehow to have previous decades still hanging heavily in the
air.) The
women ride around in cabs a lot, an anachronistic touch. But the
thuggish hit
men and crack-addled hookers wandering around are up to the minute.
Overall
it's typical of the fine line Lynch walks between the fantastic and the
real,
all set against a malevolently filmed skyline, harsh parking lots and
the
endless expanse of light that is L.A. from the hills at night.
Speaking
of which,
despite a few night scenes, this is one of those odd noirs in which
terror
lives in broad daylight.
OK, so what about the
box?
We
don't know about the
box.
What about the monster?
The
monster, who hides
behind the diner where Diane contracted the killing, seems to be the
demon
Diane metaphorically begins dealing with when she decides to have her
girlfriend knocked off. In the end we see he's just a homeless man, a
reminder
of the grimy Hollywood Diane came to know after her jitterbug-queen
optimism
got beaten out of her. And, OK -- he's also the keeper of the box, the
symbol
of Camilla's death and perhaps reality contained (sort of like a
movie). Once
it's unlocked, Diane has to return to the physical world and accept
that she's
done an inhuman thing.
Readers
see a lot more
in the box: Several found an amusing -- and hard to argue with --
sexual
connotation. (Maybe that's why the hitman laughs when Diane asks what
the key
opens.) Others make a case that it's a television. The multiplicity of
meanings
fits in well with the film's texture.
The blue key is supposed
to mean Camilla's dead; but we see her alive after that.
After
the fairly
straightforward narrative of the film's first two-thirds, the last part
of the
movie is a staccato sequence of flashbacks. Diane sees the key, and
understands
that the deed is done. (She probably understands that she's going to
pay a
price for it, too; her neighbor even tells her that "Those detectives
were
here again.") She starts reflecting on how she came to be in this
position, from Camilla's coolness to her flirtations with Adam to the
unforgivable humiliations at the party. Diane sees that she's been
reduced to
an object of pity and contempt by even someone like Coco. That takes
her into
the downward spiral that produces the hallucinogenic first part of the
movie
and then her decision to shoot herself.
Let's talk about the 50
grand. Diane gives it to the hit man; why is Rita carrying it?
This
is a good example
of Lynch's dream logic. Diane fetishizes it, and it turns up in an odd
place in
the dream. Same with the mysterious blue key. The hit man says he'll
leave a
normal blue key in her apartment when the deed is done. This
transmogrifies in
her fantasy into that futuristic one. Both are also necessary to
Diane's dream
mélange of film clichés, particularly noir film
clichés (and the director's
deconstruction of the genre as well: "A dame appears out of nowhere
with
50 grand in her purse and a mysterious key.")
Watch
the movie carefully and you see that many characters and props in the
last
third of the film are picked up in Diane's mind and repurposed for the
dream:
The hit man's black book; her grouchy neighbor; the waitress at the
diner; the
director's mom; the director who didn't give her the movie part; the
woman
Camilla kisses at the party; the cowboy; even her aunt.
What
mélange of film clichés?
Diane
seems to have
imbued herself with the worlds of film, TV, even pop-culture camp, in
her time
in L.A. Much of what she and Rita attempt are procedures right out of a
Sam
Spade noir handbook by way of Nancy Drew -- peeking into windows,
talking to
neighbors, making anonymous phone calls and so forth. When the two are
in their
bed together, there's a double-profile shot that's an homage to
Bergman's
"Persona." Betty helps Rita turn herself into a blond, a rough
doppelganger of Betty, à la "Vertigo." The sequences in which
the
director is bullied into using Camilla in his film have a tangential
similarity
to the conversations leading up to the infamous horse's head scene in
"The
Godfather." Readers note that "The Wizard
of Oz" is in there too, as well as a strange pattern of parallels to
"Pulp Fiction."
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There
are also vague
echoes of TV soap operas, pornography and a lot of other things, not to
mention
the presence of Chad Everett (the guy Diane does the audition with),
'40s
hoofer Ann Miller (Coco), Lee Grant (the aunt's weird neighbor), Billy
Ray
Cyrus (the pool guy), Robert Forster (a cop), and others.
The
references all seem
to be what the theorists call "blank," just memories ricocheting
around in poor Diane's head at a really bad time.
Fine, fine. Isn't the
cowboy just sort of a twist on the menacing Robert Blake character in
"Lost Highway," the reindeer man in "Wild at Heart" etc.,
etc.?
It
certainly seems like
it. The goofy Roy Rogers getup is also another echo of a prelapsarian
Hollywood
when the studio system ruled and studio heads of virtually limitless
power
really did pull the strings.
The director did what he
was told. Why did we see the cowboy twice?
Well,
the cowboy appears
once to Diane as a transition from her dream back to reality,
apparently part
of her fantasies before she kills herself. In the "real" last third
of the film, we see the cowboy passing out of the party at the
director's
house. To us, caught up in the backward dream logic of Diane's fantasy,
this
would have been the one last time the director would see him, since he
agreed
to put Camilla in the movie. But in reality he was just someone she
once saw
out of the corner of her eye who was then incorporated into the
paranoid
fantasy of her dream.
What about that hooker
the hit man questions and then ushers into his van? And what about
those diner
waitresses?
They
seem to be Lynch's
nods to the milieu he's filming in and the diverse women Hollywood
chews up in
various ways. Diane imagines herself as Betty in the dream after seeing
a
waitress named Betty when she's talking to the hit man. In the dream,
Betty
meets a waitress named Diane.
Betty loses a part in
"The Sylvia North Story" to Camilla. Who's Sylvia North?
Beats
us. But note that
the director of that movie is Paul Bruckner -- the milquetoasty guy at
her
audition.
That weird old couple?
They
appear in the
opening jitterbug sequence as well. They may be the judges of the
contest she
won, or her parents. In the end, they seem to be signs of her innocent
past
come back to terrorize her.
The film's dedicated to
Jennifer Syme. Who's that?
Syme
was an actress who
appeared in "Lost Highway." She died in a car accident. The tragic
death was noted in the tabloids because she used to date Keanu Reeves.
What about the Silencio
Club?
In
the dream logic of
Diane's imaginings, it's part of the glamour of Hollywood, and the
out-of-body
existence of many actors, and perhaps the ultimate emptiness of the
reality
that films purport to give us. The unexpected focus on sound, as
opposed to image,
which is what the rest of the film seems to be about, is typical for
Lynch as
well: His soundscapes, here as in his other difficult films, are
extraordinary,
and he regularly conflates sound and image. Remember that in "Blue
Velvet," which also dealt with the reality beneath the surface image,
young Jeffrey, the Kyle MacLachlan character, is introduced to that
netherworld
via a severed ear.
Lynch's
longtime
composer, Angelo Badalamenti, plays the espresso-drinking movie exec at
the
beginning of the film, incidentally.
Also,
speaking of
"Blue Velvet," Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments.
Betty is from Deep River, Ontario.
What
is the point of that scene with Chad Everett, Diane's audition?
This
strikes us as
possibly the heart of the movie. It's the linchpin of Diane's idealized
image
of herself. Yet beyond that, the care with which the sequence is set up
and the
scene's immense punch seems to suggest that Lynch believes, perhaps
passionately, that there is such a thing as acting, even great acting.
It may
be his tribute specifically to the miracle of character imaginings like
Diane's
and, by extension, to the creation of self in our subconscious and the
many
selves we don't know. Actors make it up out of nothing more than sheer
imagination
and persuade the audience to believe it. Lynch has been doing the same
thing
explicitly over his entire career.
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Again,
Naomi Watts, the
actress, should be given credit for balancing the many levels of
control needed
to convincingly act the part of a ground-down starlet imagining herself
as a
chipper and idealistic young thing who then can convincingly deliver a
unexpectedly searing audition performance -- and then have the levels
of the
conceptions make emotional sense to viewers at the end of the film.
Brava!
The hit man thing is
confusing. Who is the long-haired guy he murders? And what about the
prostitute
he ushers into the van? Is that Diane, too?
The
guy he shot so
perfunctorily made some remark about a car accident. The implication
seems to
be that he was in one of the joyriding cars that hit the limo, and that
he
ended up with some sort of black book that the guys who were about to
kill Rita
possessed. In the logic of Diane's dream, the hit man needed that as a
lead to
where she was. We know that it's not going to help him find Rita, but
he
doesn't know that.
The
scene is also
another movie nod, this time to the absurdist modern black noir; here
it allows
Lynch, at his bleakest, to film a senseless carnage that out-Tarantinos
Tarantino. It's also part of the confusing background noise Lynch likes
to put
into his movies. It is a deeply felt contention of his that not
everything
makes sense. Less charitably, you can say it's a loose end from the TV
series
that never got made.
What TV series?
"Mulholland
Drive" was supposed to be the pilot for an ABC TV series that was going
to
both make ABC the network of the moment and put Lynch back into a "Twin
Peaks"-like limelight. Fat chance. The network approved the script, but
balked when execs saw the two-hour-plus result. Lynch apparently tried
to slice
off the last 40 minutes, but the network didn't like that either. He
eventually
found a French film company, Studio Canal, to put up some money. He
reassembled
the cast, filmed some more and created the feature version out now.
So what is Lynch trying
to say about Hollywood?
You
can't help noticing
that no one comes off very well in this fetid world. In interviews Lynch has been putting
the screws to ABC. While he points out that the network had approved
the script
before he filmed it, it's hard to believe any sane person would expect
broadcast television to air a movie anything remotely like this. And
we're
somewhat suspicious when a director like Lynch -- who's been given tens
of
millions of dollars to make extraordinarily dark, sometimes positively
inhuman
("Wild at Heart," for example) movies for more than 20 years --
whines about Hollywood. He's been nominated for a best director Oscar
twice.
What does he have to complain about?
All
that said, the movie
is certainly no polemic. Lynch seems pretty detached from this. The
character
of Adam the director seems a mocking version of himself. Lynch's
nuances and
implicit respect for the magic of the art make the film a complex
portrait of
the industry.
And the artistic
rationale for the extended sequences of lesbian sex would be ...
He's
playing explicitly
with how Hollywood uses women predominantly as sex objects -- except
he's
turning the formula on its head, making the women's world a closed one,
at
least in Diane's fantasy of it. But of course, in the end she's doing
the same
thing a Hollywood movie normally does to a Camilla -- imagining that
she's an
empty object that she can possess.
In
the end,
"Mulholland Drive" is Lynch's most sympathetic film, particularly to
women. Even if Betty's dream is an extended apologia for a terrible
crime, the
density of her character, the expansiveness of her dreams and desires,
and the
catch-all giddiness of her imagination all make her something close the
one the
thing she always wanted to be: the ultimate movie heroine.
And
she's just part of
the film's dense milieu. The network of aging actresses and incoming
starlets
ineffably captures the implacable Hollywood mill. Lynch seems to accept
the
manifold processes by which women come in to self-invent themselves: by
sheer
talent, the way Betty does; desperately, as Diane does; by hook or by
crook, as
Rita does, plucking a new identity off a movie poster; or sexually, the
way
Camilla does. All, he seems at pains to point out, are ultimately in
the
business of dream fulfillment, which is why we as consumers go to the
films as
well. Right?
About the writer
Bill Wyman is the editor of Salon
Arts & Entertainment.
Max
Garrone is an editor for Salon News.
Andy Klein is a Los Angeles film
critic.
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