Mulholland Drive
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More movie reviewsDavid Lynch’s Mulholland Drive takes its name from a road that snakes its way out of Los Angeles, up into the Santa Monica Mountains. Despite the fact that it runs through some of the most storied real estate in all the world, at night it’s submerged in darkness, and there’s precious little—other than the pale light of the moon and an odd guard rail here and there—to keep you from plunging off the side of some just-until-then invisible mountain.
It’s this slithering through darkness, a nearly perfect metaphor for Hollywood movie making (and not a bad one for watching them), that was the inspiration, The difference between the roadway and Lynch’s film is that Mulholland Drive has no regard for keeping its wheels on the pavement. His films are about what happens when the tires leave the asphalt.
Originally conceived as a TV series ala Lynch’s classic “Twin Peaks” series, the pilot episode Lynch delivered to the American television network ABC was more than they could handle. When they refused to air it, Lynch starting shopping the pilot around as a potential feature film. With additional funds provided by international backers, Lynch re-editing and shot additional footage, and, thus, Mulholland Drive.
Like one of Lynch’s earlier films, the misunderstood and under appreciated Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive is a brilliant meditation on the nature of private and public identity—part satire of Hollywood filmmaking, part film noir, part aesthetic commentary, part postmodern soap opera, all woven together in a /movies/nightmarish dream state. It’s about stardom, it’s about Being, and it’s about being in a movie. It’s about trying to figure out which one is the most real.
Mulholland Drive begins as a conventional Hollywood film noir—a conspiracy of sinister coincidences. A mysterious escapes from limo stocked with hit men by way of a coincidental, fatal-to-everyone-else collision with a drunk driver. She walks away from the accident alive, but . . .amnesiac (?). Another coincidence—she finds her way into the apartment belonging to a woman at that moment departing on a business trip. A third coincidence—she discovered there by another women, the business traveler’s niece, just in from Canada to try her hand at an acting career. The two women develop a fast affinity for one another, and set out to try to recover the amnesiac’s woman’s identity.
Along the way they discover a rotting corpse, and that’s when things start to get weird. The identities of characters blur, fragment, and split, falling in and out of a complex chronological order. There’s a parallel plot that mirrors the amnesiac woman’s search for her identity that involves the making of a film. Eventually the two intersect, but rather than shedding light on one another, the two stories complicate one another at every turn.
At times, two or more characters seem to be, in actuality, the internal monologue of a single personality . . .a personality that could actually be that of yet another character in the movie. Or maybe not. Lynch avoids sureties in his films. Things are implied but never made explicit. Characters refer back to one another in strange ways, and back yet another to another in an endless regression. They’re characters in a movie, who appear as themselves, but also as characters in a movie that’s being made in this movie. Everyone is masked, and it might just be that the mask is more real the masked.
What does it all mean? I don’t have the foggiest, but here’s a thought: in his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut has a character, a American-Nazi double agent whose own self is hopelessly fragmented, observe that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." This observation is the theme of Vonnegut’s book (and notice he says “we,” not “I”). Perhaps it’s also part of the moral of David Lynch’s Hollywood, but I don’t pretend to be sure of that.
--Matt Parks
